With the popularity of the Super Mario series you'd think that, with all of the licensing Nintendo has done over 30+ years, some items will have gone missing. One of these was a short educational film in Japan called “Super Mario’s Traffic Safety”, also known as “Super Mario no Koutsuu Anzen” in Japanese. Released by Toei Animation in 1989, the video was made as a companion to “Super Mario’s Fire Brigade”; that video has been preserved and can be found online. The traffic safety one, though, has not.
But why? Mario has been popular from the beginning and surely anything mass-produced can be found, even if it has gone out of print. The answer is that these videos were never for sale to the public and were only sold to schools in Japan in 1989. So while there may have been thousands of copies distributed back then, none have turned up online.
However on May 27th I witnessed this video in full first hand. A special screening of anime for children was shown at the Animation and Film Center at Sonic City in Omiya, Japan. Alongside other shorts based on classic and modern characters, “Super Mario Traffic Safety” was shown to a sold out crowd of 500 people, mostly excited kids.
The short was on a well-kept 16mm film reel with very little deterioration. The story focuses on a young boy and his little sister who get separated from their mother because he was playing Super Mario Bros. 3 when he shouldn't have been. The boy almost gets hit by a car, which Mario was driving. Mario tells the boy about the dangers of running out into the street and together they try to find the boy’s sister and mother. Bowser is also in the town and tries to kidnap the lost girl after running into her; when the family finds each other Mario then spots Bowser, who runs away right into traffic. Mario then kicks him out of the way and reviews safety points with the boy and a police officer. With the lesson learned, Mario uses his Tanooki tail to fly away.
While the film is not “lost” any more in the traditional sense of having no existing copies remaining, it still has not been uploaded in full online. The copy that was screened will be shown again in the future, but is not being lent out. It is possible that other film reels and VHS tapes exist somewhere in Japanese schools, or in forgotten boxes somewhere. Until then, take a look at the video below, which explains the plot in greater detail and shows about 2 minutes of footage I was able to sneakily capture during the screening.
If you happen to find a copy, please let me know so it can be digitized and preserved.
If you liked this video be sure to check out Gaijillionaire's Club for all things retro, Nintendo and Japan.
Comments 25
Pretty cool..
Wow. Great find
The whole premise is so amusing to me. Wow.
Sonic City XD
It almost looks like the new Mario game set in that Donk City, or whatever it's called; and they even have Mario at the same height relative to other people too.
So remember kids... if you play Super Mario Bros. 3 when you aren't supposed to you will most likely be run over and kidnapped!
Thank you...great article. Id love to see the whole thing.
Mario is a great character to teach kids things as he is cute but wise looking.
The Rarest Mario franchise EVER !
@ZurapiiYohane There's also one like Snow White I think too.
I was in Japan last month. Saw a very similar mario cartoon about fire safety in a fire department museum. Was a bit strange: it involved a dad getting home drunk and falling asleep on the sofa with a cigarette. Then an earthquake hits and almost sets a fire with the cigarette.
That's so funny. It reminds me of those Dragon Ball educational safety films.
Another excellent work by you!
Nice.
I wonder what the narrator of the video meant about this cartoon being something "the Internet has never seen" (as if the Internet has eyes)?
@Mario500 If you said the world has never seen it you'd understand right? There's a context that suggests the things that make up the world that can see are what the writer is referring to. If you widen the idea of the word internet to include the people that utilize it, as in "the internet community" it makes perfect sense.
@aaronsullivan
"If you said the world has never seen it you'd understand right?"
Yes, but I rather say it in a more discernable way so that other persons could understand it besides myself, such as, "The eyes of the world had never seen".
@Mario500 @aaronsullivan
I meant that it has never been shown on the internet before. That the only way anyone could see the footage was to watch the film in person.
@Gauchorino thanks! this place often shows other films, so who knows what else they've got preserved.
@Gaijillionaire Are you hinting at more material soon to come?
@Gauchorino honestly no. I don't have any information about anything. but the theatre pictured screens films regularly. So there's a possibility of having other interesting works, but I don't know what they are.
@Mario500 Wait... so you did understand but you are worried about other people understanding? What kind of nitpicking are we talking about here? LOL. I think it's clear as day to 99% of english speakers and I'm sorry I spent the time helping you understand something you already understood and likely no one, anywhere, was confused about.
@aaronsullivan
No, I was only answering your question ("If you said the world has never seen it you'd understand right?"). There was nothing to be sorry about.
Fair enough, @Mario500 , I see what you are saying. I misunderstood. Cheers.
@aaronsullivan
Cheers.
Wow, what an amazing find. To be honest, I miss it a bit, those times when something could be lost and then found by someone. Now the Internet has memory of everything and nothing is rare.
Well, on the other hand if not for the Internet, we wouldn't have seen those anyway, so I guess cheers for progress after all. But what a time to be alive. Finding those hidden gems is so thrilling. There's just this small window of opportunity when the Internet exists and old film or VHS have not degraded completely that gives us precious moments like this one. Soon we'll have either everything preserved on the Internet or lost forever.
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