The people of the Mushroom Kingdom don’t like to make speeches. You will write at length Letters, sure, but when it comes to speaking out loud, most of them limit themselves to the odd soundbyte or solemn joke. Except for Wario.
Nowadays you only hear him saying “WARIO” or “WAAAAA” around the release of WarioWare DIY in 2009things were different. It’s the first Game in which Wario (and his friends) would speak in full sentences
Which leads me to this very niche but very interesting little thing: Gaming reinvented have found that it wasn’t the game itself that made us hear Wario in full voice for the first time, but rather an obscure advertisement for the game that ran before its release, in the UK only and specifically for a UK supermarket (Tesco):
What makes this interesting, at least to me, is this longtime voice actor Charles Martinet’s singing talents are so synonymous with single words or phrases where it can be disturbing to hear him belt out several phrases at once and wonder if it’s really him.
For example, hear a single “WAAAAA” and you can go, yes, that’s Martinet, all right. Hear a full sales pitch where he sounds more like a with each additional word Grand Theft Auto IV
But it is! Gaming reinvented securedby reaching out to the man himself, who remembers it clearly, and replying in an email:
Thanks for this nice reminder! Yes, that was me… What a funny commercial!
For a man who normally gets paid by words and grunts but has to read whole paragraphs at a time here, I bet it was!
