A photo of actor Rik Mayall (RIP) as his namesake Rik in UK television show ‘The Young Ones.’
 
Actor Rik Mayall, whom we lost four years ago this past Saturday, will never be forgotten thanks to his lasting gift of making us laugh at his own, beautifully executed expense. During his career, Mayall played wild fictional characters with enviable viciousness especially his highly-quotable namesake Rik on UK series The Young Ones and for most American audiences, his role in the much-loved doleful comedy, Drop Dead Fred. So when Nintendo made a power play in the UK in the early 90s to try to compete with popular rival Sega, they hired Mayall to appear in a series of television commercials. According to the website Nintendo Life, the company hoped using Mayall as a spokesperson would help them appear less “family friendly” to consumers.

Not only the star of the commercials, Mayall helped write dialog for many of the ads along with Black Adder producer John Lloyd. At the time Mayall was one of the biggest celebrities in the UK, and Nintendo lined his pockets generously for his work which Mayall used to buy a house he nicknamed “Nintendo Towers.” Seven or so spots were shot over five-weeks, and more were planned, but Nintendo’s Japanese owners didn’t “get” Mayall at all and ended his contract with the company. Since I’m fully confident our Dangerous Minds readers get Rik Mayall I’ve posted footage of his nutty Nintendo commercials below. Game ON!
 

 
HT: Nintendo Life

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Rik Mayall & Adrian Edmondson of ‘The Young Ones’ beating the shit out of each other on ‘Bottom’
Rik Mayall’s hilariously rude correspondence to fans
The Dangerous Brothers: That time Rik Mayall set fire to Ade Edmondson
Before the punk rock comedy of ‘The Young Ones’ Rik Mayall was investigative reporter ‘Kevin Turvey’
Rik Mayall in ‘Don’t Fear Death,’ one of his final works

 
2015 marks twenty-five years since the debut of both Twin Peaks and the Super NES game console, and evidently, both of those things have some devoted fans at a creative agency called Beutler Ink. In celebration, they’ve produced a Twin Peaks town map in the 8-bit graphics style of Super Mario Bros., which turns thirty this year. Feel old?
 

 

 
Giclée prints in various sizes and the usual array of print-on-demand apparel are available from Society 6. Here’s the whole map. Clicking spawns a readable enlargement.
 

 
Via Welcome to Twin Peaks

 
English-speakers might say “existential despair,” among a number of different terms. Germans refer to Weltschmerz. As is often the case, the French have the perfect term to represent a somewhat intellectualized world-weariness that positively cries out for a pack of Gitanes. The term is ennui, and it’s so useful that we’ve incorporated it into our language. Using a French term gives the depression that extra bit of useless panache.

A game designer named Josh Millard has created the perfect Nintendo-style game to match that mood—it is called Ennuigi, and in it you can “spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.”

Did I mention you can play it? Yes. You can play it.

Here is the complete list of controls:
 

left/right: walk around
up: ruminate
down: smoke

 
That’s right. You can walk left or right, but jumping? Jumping is not consistent with ennui!

 

Ennuigi in mid-rumination
 
Here’s Millard’s fuller description of the game:

This is a shot at a collection of ideas I had a few years ago, about looking critically at the universe of Super Mario Bros. in light of the total lack of explicit narrative in the original game in particular.  Who are these strange men?  What motivates them?  By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place?  What do they feel about where they are and what they’re doing?

And so, this is one lens through which to look at all that, with Luigi, the second brother, the also-ran, as a complicit onlooker, wandering now through some fractured, rotting liminal place in this strange world, reflecting on it all in scattered fragments.

 
The slow, tinny music is a perfect complement to this dreary, Beckettian video game.
 

 
via Internet Magic
 

And he was an Adidas man, to boot
 
So the New York Public Library is archiving a giant cache of Timothy Leary’s possessions, and before you think it’s all ceramics and glass:

The Timothy Leary papers amount to 412 linear feet of letters, manuscripts, research documents, notes, legal and financial records, printed materials, photographs, video and audio tapes, CDs and DVDs, posters and flyers, and artifacts, dating from Leary’s youth in the 1920s until his death in 1997.

What’s even cooler, however, is that they just came across a little-known Nintendo component called a Power Glove. You may remember it from the movie, The Wizard, which I watched at least 5,000 times as a kid.

Power Glove was a fairly esoteric, expensive, and rare precursor to the Wii, so not a lot of people had one. This is probably a good thing, because I understand the technology wasn’t quite developed yet to make it any more than a cumbersome bother to use. Regardless, it’s fun (though not surprising) to know that Leary jumped on the video game gadgetry bandwagon early.
 

Back around 1990, there was nothing in the world cooler than the NES. Michael Jackson tried with the “Dangerous” album. Macaulay Culkin tried to steal some attention. But outside of lingering buzz from Michael Keaton’s Batman, there was NOTHING in the world of the prepubescent male that could usurp the importance of the Nintendo, especially now that Super Mario Bros. 3 (aka God’s Latest and Most Important Transmission to Mankind Since the Angel Gabriel Dictated the Qu’ran to Mohammed in a Cave) was out.

That was why we were suckers enough to watch The Wizard with Fred Savage, collect Nintendo sticker books and eat Nintendo cereal. Hell, I didn’t even HAVE a Nintendo and I still did all that stuff just to compensate!

Then there were the Nintendo comics, published by a young Valiant press, later to become famous for resurrecting the Key superheroes (Magnus, Turok, Solar, etc.) and making them edgy and getting them video game contracts.

Comics Alliance reports on those lost gems:

The Super Mario Brothers aren’t just the stars of this week’s biggest video game release on the Wii, nor were they simply the heroes of one of the most disastrous films of the 1990s - they were also comic book legends.

Well, legends might be pushing it, but brothers Mario and Luigi certainly have some comic book credibility to their name. TRsRockin.com has an extensive rundown of the plumber brothers’ many comic appearances, including a lengthy Valiant Comics run.

There are some definite gems among the Valiant work, including a story titled “Beauty and the Beach” found within the pages of “Super Mario Bros.” #4. Mario, Peach and Toad wash ashore on a mysterious island filled with Toadstools and secretly ruled by King Koopa himself. Things go south when a volcano threatens to erupt, prompting the selfish Koopa to flee the scene while Mario and his pals save the day. It’s really cute, if only for Toad’s hilarious swim trunks.

Ah. Set adrift on memory bliss.

(Comics Alliance: Remembering The Super Mario Bros.’ Surprisingly Cool Comic Books)

Tanooki. The mysterious animal suit you get at the higher levels of Super Mario Bros. 3 aka the greatest video game ever made. It lets you fly. It lets you turn into a statue. It is inscrutably Japanese. And, apparently, it’s REAL. Oh yes. The tanooki is real.

Also known as the Raccoon Dog, the Tanooki is endangered. Check out info here.

Domestic dogs and raccoon dogs are killed in brutal ways for their fur in China. The raccoon dog is a wild member of the dog (Canidae) family with markings resembling those of a raccoon. They are known to be skinned alive for their fur in China, where they are caged and killed in large numbers. Clothing with fur trim from Raccoon dogs has shown up in U.S. stores.

The Humane Society of the United States filed a legal petition with the Federal Trade Commission seeking to enforce the Fur Products Labeling Act against 14 major retailers and designers concerning false advertising and false labeling of fur garments.

(Raccoon Dog: Protect It)

(And… New Super Mario Bros for Wii!!!)