Draft:Cultural impact of the Mario franchise

Since its inception with the Donkey Kong arcade game in 1981, Nintendo's Mario franchise has had a significant impact on popular culture. Spanning several video games, television series and theatrical films as well as many spin-offs and lines of merchandise, the Mario universe, its content and its characters, including Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Bowser have all been engrained into popular culture in many different ways; the quote "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!", spoken by Toad in Super Mario Bros., has become a popular and iconic phrase, being referenced several times in both subsequent Mario media. The main theme from Super Mario Bros. titled the "Ground Theme" is also incredibly popular, becoming one the most recognisable video game songs of all time, becoming the first song from a video game to be selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress. The 2023 film adaptation, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, aside from breaking several box-office records, would become popular on social media via the song "Peaches" performed by Jack Black.

Impact on video games
Donkey Kong, the first video game to feature Mario, is considered one of the first platformers to have an on-going story, and would help cement Nintendo as a household name in the video game industry. Super Mario Bros., which featured horizontal scrolling and smoother methods of controlling Mario, would later become an archetype for the genre.

Fan restorations
In 2021, the fan organization known as Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive restored an unreleased extended cut of the 1993 box office bomb Super Mario Bros. Dubbed the "Morton Jankel Cut", it extends the film's runtime from 104 minutes to 125 minutes.

Web series
Numerous web series featuring Mario characters and other elements have been created and hosted on websites such as Newgrounds and YouTube. One notable example is Super Mario Bros. Z, a sprite animated web series created by Mark Haynes and originally hosted on Newgrounds. The series was formerly animated using Adobe Flash and combined elements from the Mario franchise with that of Sonic the Hedgehog and Dragon Ball Z. Another example is SMG4, a machinima parody series created in 2011 by Luke Lerdwichagul and hosted on YouTube. The series features Mario characters alongside several original characters partaking in parodic and comedic scenarios.

Fan games
Several non-profit fan games have been produced by fans of the Mario series, with notable examples including browser games such as Super Mario Bros. Crossover and Super Mario War, as well as ROM hacks such as Kaizo Mario World.

Video games
While Mario is mainly a video game franchise, many achievements that took place in such games have been made by fans. For instance, in 2008, an annual charity fundraiser known as the Mario Marathon, in which members play through numerous Super Mario games, was created to raise money for Child's Play Charity.

In 2016, a community project known as Team 0% was created to complete every user-created level in the 2015 Wii U game Super Mario Maker and its 2019 Nintendo Switch sequel Super Mario Maker 2. The project reached its first goal when every course in Super Mario Maker was completed on April 5, 2024, two days before the game's servers were permanantly closed alongside Nintendo Network.

Other
Mario Day is a national holiday celebrated annually on March 10. Its name was originally coined by fans in 2014 in which fans would celebrate the day on social media using the hashtag "#Mar10". Nintendo would respond to this the year after when they began to embrace the event by celebrating it themselves, with the first official mentions of Mario Day being in a tweet from the X (formerly Twitter) accounts of both Nintendo of America and Nintendo UK. as well as in a YouTube video titled "Celebrate Mar. 10 - Mario Day!" uploaded onto the official Nintendo of America YouTube channel on March 10, 2016. Nintendo would continue to host events on each Mario Day, such as partnering with the Starlight Children's Foundation to provide new gowns for children to wear, resulting in over 2,000 donations.

An AI phenomenon known as the "Waluigi effect", which is when a large language model such as a chatbot produces an often-hostile output opposite of its designed intent, was named after the Mario series character Waluigi.

In 2024, 46-year-old Lincolnshire man Simon Killen competed in that year's London Marathon cosplaying as Mario and set a world record for being the fast runner dressed as a video game character.