04: WGE MAG
Super Martinet! The man behind the voice of Mario N
intendo’s Super Mario, perhaps the most iconic game character of all time, a plumber from Brooklyn brought to life in the Mushroom Kingdom by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto. But Mario is not just a good- looker, since 1985, the little man has also had plenty to say, voiced by the magnificent talents of Californian actor, Charles Martinet.
In this exclusive interview, WGE:MAG uncovers the early career of the man behind Mario’s voice. We reveal how things might have been rather different for Mario had Shakespeare not intervened, not once, but twice in the career of Martinet and of course shaped the destiny of Nintendo’s Mario.
Charles Martinet began life in San Jose, California and after a couple of Mario-style leaps across the Atlantic to Europe’s cultural dynasties of Barcelona and Paris, it looked as though the softly spoken Californian would be collecting coins as a Berkeley trained lawyer, rather than a sprightly Brooklyn plumber.
But what the courtrooms of San Francisco lost, the world of Nintendo gained, in a twist of fate it was his admiration for the work of one particular political theory professor which actually led to Martinet ending his studies at Berkeley.
“I was going to college and had the intention of becoming a lawyer,” Martinet says, explaining perhaps the most crucial juncture in his career.
“I was at UC Berkeley, in my last two quarters, and I couldn’t get classes with the professor that I loved.
“He was the only professor who asked during a political theory exam ‘What is the nature of man according to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire and what is your opinion, given your knowledge now of the nature of man?’
“I had this incredibly deep voice for a six- year-old, I would often answer the phone and people would think I was the man of the house.”
“I finished all the stuff about Locke and Rousseau as fast as I could and then I thought ‘Now it’s my chance to express myself’. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me to think.
“I simply fell in love with this professor and said every class I am going to take from now on is from this professor. But in the next quarter I couldn’t get a single one of his classes, I had to take everything from this other guy, whose exams only had to do with regurgitating the information in his books.
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