Things are going pretty well for Nintendo lately! The Super Mario Bros. Movie became the highest-grossing video game adaptation to date, and “Peaches” — voice actor Jack Black’s original song to Bowser, written and performed for the film — earned him his first-ever solo single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week. That’s good! Do you know what’s not good? The original Japanese name for Mario and Luigi’s asshole ex-boss, appearing early in the film. So not good at all, the company announced on Friday that it would change it.
In a tweet posted to Nintendo’s official Twitter account (you can tell it’s official thanks to the gold tick), the company announced that the character will be Spike, who originally appeared in the video game in 1984 wreck crew
We will be changing the name of the character “Blackie” appearing in the family’s “Wrecking Crew” computer software to “Spike”, which is the same as the name in Europe and the United States. Also, the name in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” released on April 28, 2023 is also “Spike”. pic.twitter.com/HhTXEOmzxn
– Nintendo Co.,Ltd. (@nintendo) April 20, 2023
“The name of the character ‘Blackie’ appearing in the family’s computer software”wreck crew“will be changed to ‘Spike’, which is the same name as in Europe and the United States,” read Twitter’s auto-generated English translation of the tweet. “Also the name in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Given the tremendous box office success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it makes sense that Nintendo would want to proactively change Spike’s frankly insensitive name before it sparks controversy. “Blackie” is an incredibly unfortunate name – for so many reasons – so it’s a clearly good call from Nintendo to change it. Surely no one is going to complain maliciously that renaming poor old Blackie is somehow an act of “erasing history” or that her childhood was somehow retrospectively “ruined” as a result of that common sense decision, right? To the right!