IGNORANCE IS BLISS

what an odd video Ignorance is Bliss is. it feels like a relic of an indistinct time - a perhaps lesser-known member of the larger Newgrounds pantheon. it's the type of thing that doesn't really cross my mind as often as other viral content of the time, and i admittedly have very little frame of reference for if anyone else i know even remembers it, but every so often, i'll think of it. not long before establishing this very website, i found myself once again revisiting it, and as i picked out things to write about, it stood out to me. "does anyone else remember that weird Flash video with the singing Goombas?" is an easy question to ask.

to be upfront with you: the history i unearthed just by tapping at the surface of that question is one of the wildest things i've ever seen tied to Nintendo, and i've never really seen anyone ever talk about it. strap in.

i think the best place to start is the nature of the video i've embedded on this page itself. it's an upscaling of the original Flash files, brought into a full 21:9 aspect ratio and rendered in crisp 4K (compressed down here, for file size purposes). it was uploaded by YouTube user CoolPrinter24 and, as they discuss in the comments, it's actually surprisingly easy to bring old Flash content into modern video quality like this. the hardest part of the process is, ironically, drawing in new assets to fill in the extra screen real estate, much like a classic game being ported upwards. i could have embedded a more 'authentic' upload from 2009, in all its crusty, classic glory, but the enduring power of Flash is something i wanted to talk about. i've never used Flash, and the mathematics involved are way over my head, but long story short: Flash renders things using vector graphics, meaning there's no pixels to deal with, just a formula of how the shapes need to be drawn out. even as a depreciated medium, i think it's incredible to think that as long as the original files are maintained, these videos will ALWAYS be able to upscale. it's almost like an online equivalent to shooting on film v.s. digitally.

what i cannot embed, unfortunately, is the original Newgrounds page that hosted Ignorance is Bliss. the original creator, BigArmyBug, has delisted all their content off of Newgrounds - i don't really intend to pry too deeply, but comments on some of these reuploads indicate perhaps some struggles with mental health, one way or another. i can, however, at the very least, date the original upload all the way back to May 28th, 2006. as i write this, we're closing in on 16 years of this video existing. that's nuts!

so why am i talking about this video a decade and a half later? it's just another little musical Flash animation about Mario, right? little bit grittier than anything Nintendo would approve of, a charming mouse-drawn artstyle, you know, the works. well, there's always been some weird layers to this video that have contributed to it occupying some deep, dark corner of my mind. unlike a lot of animations i remember of the time, the music isn't some kind of remix of anything from a Mario game - it's stylistically very different, but the lyrics are very, VERY specifically about Mario. with references to stuff like "Dinosaur Land", we can even narrow that down to Super Mario World.

and perhaps more confusingly, it's centered in on a very particular character dynamic between Bowser and Peach (referred to as "Princess Toadstool", again, reaffirming that even if the video is from 2006, we're dealing with an early 90s Nintendo of America version of Mario lore) that, while not completely incompatible with the games, feels weirdly barbed. the very name of the song itself lays a lot of it out there - this is a villain song for Bowser, but it's also really centered on the idea that Bowser is very unintelligent, and detests Peach for being a big nerd who loves books. that's weird, isn't it? it's not like the games don't portray Bowser as kind of a brute, or Peach as fairly smart, but it's weird to center so deeply on it.

it is at this point in the article that i will lift the first veil off of your eyes. if this were an iceberg, this would still be pretty close to the top, but it's going to help us understand this a little more going forward. Ignorance is Bliss is not an original composition for this Flash animation - it's a song by a band called Jellyfish, and it does, indeed, date back to 1991, not long after the release of Super Mario World. among those of us who remember this video, i don't think this is a particularly shocking revelation, but a brief glance at some YouTube comments confirms that some people didn't really find this out until revisiting the animation years later. i cannot claim to be an expert on the band Jellyfish, but Wikipedia describes their style as a "blend of 1970s classic rock and XTC-style power pop". i can definitely hear that within this song.

(in case it wasn't clear enough already - this article is written from the perspective that Ignorance is Bliss is, unironically, a pretty good song. not amazing or anything, but like, i do enjoy it.)

so now we can start asking some questions. what was Jellyfish doing writing a song about Super Mario World? did frontman Andy Sturmer just have some really strong headcanons about the cast of Mario? and, while we're at it, let's talk about that spoken word intro. some reuploads of the video get right to the song, but i think that little intro is important, both to set the tone of what we're about to watch, and to help us unravel the weirdness of this song and this video. it's an exchange between Bowser and Peach, which i will now provide, quoted verbatim for us to break down.

(side note: one of the last fun facts that fell into place while researching this article is that this brief bit of dialogue for Peach is voiced by then-amateur voice actress Kira Buckland. you know, Jolyne, from that JoJo's Bizarre Adventure everyone keeps talking about, or 2B, from that game about the robots. small world, isn't it!)

so, even just from this short exchange, we're introduced to some of the main threads we'll be following in this song and animation - Bowser is incredibly proud of his own ignorance and wants to start exporting oil. clearly, i couldn't connect this to any sort of post-1991 event if i tried, but we can imagine, for fun. the song itself is mostly focused on the ideological side of this conflict, but there is a brief line about wanting to turn Dinosaur Land into fossil fuel, and the animation leans hard into these visuals, with fountains of oil springing from the barren ground and Yoshis carrying picket signs as they storm Bowser's castle. but what is the nature of this dialogue? was it added in after the fact to support the animator's own theories, which themselves are rooted in whatever Andy Sturmer wanted to say about his favorite Super Nintendo Entertainment System game?

now, once again, i get to bring you deeper down the Nabbit hole. you probably could have found this out for yourself by looking into Jellyfish and wondering why Ignorance is Bliss seems to be missing from any modern music streaming service, but this feels like the right time to convey this information in the article. Ignorance is Bliss did not spring forth fully formed from the mind of Andy Strumer, inspired by a love for Super Mario World. it is part of a larger project - a compilation album released in 1991, licensed officialy through Nintendo and produced from the works of various MCA Records artists. i introduce you now to Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin'.

so what is White Knuckle Scorin' and why does it exist? as i mentioned before, it is a compilation album. Ignorance is Bliss is the only original piece produced for it - the rest of the tracklist is comprised of various rereleases from the MCA library. it is at this point that the shadow of death looms over our story.

White Knuckle Scorin' was produced in the wake of a helicopter crash - one notable enough to have its own Wikipedia page. this crash killed blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan, but another fatality was MCA Records talent agent, Bobby Brooks. almost all of the artists listed in the tracks of White Knuckle Scorin' worked with Bobby, and the chairman of MCA dedicated the album to him. the compilation was a tribute to Bobby Brooks, and to two of the things he unironically loved most in the world - Nintendo games and promoting literacy in children.

now all the pieces fall into place, don't they? Bowser isn't just defined by being an ignorant brute - he is the antagonist of a narrative designed to encourage kids to learn how to read. when, in the song itself, he says that his spell book leaves him perplexed, he doesn't just mean he doesn't understand magic. Bowser, in the world of White Knuckle Scorin', is all but said to be illiterate. and the dialogue at the start of the animation was not created independently of the song itself - it is a word-for-word adaptation of a comic included with the album, right down to Peach saying "song cue!" to indicate that you, the reader/listener, should begin playing the next track.

and yes, there is a comic that goes along with this album. there is a whole plot. surprisingly, Ignorance is Bliss itself is the first track - all that other material, brought together from a variety of other MCA artists, is strung along into the rest of the story. thankfully, tracking down high-quality scans of this comic did not take forever. my eternal gratitude to VGArtAndTidbits for preserving this definitive piece of Mario canon.

right off the bat, it is evident that Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin': The Adventure represents a very different time in Mario history. Mario and Luigi are, for whatever reason, wearing sunglasses? i think the tone of this comic is that not only is Bowser illiterate, but maybe so are our heroes. their 'Close Personal Friend' (which 100% reads as code for something, even if it was probably because of some weird Nintendo mandate) Peach is the true protagonist of this adventure, at least from an ethical, moral standpoint. i will not sit here and tell you that the comic where the narrator says Peach has "a dynamite bod" is super feminist, but she is at the very least an active participant in the story in a way the games often don't portray.

the character dynamics here represent some kind of weird Mario micro-continuity where, while clearly on the side of 'good', Mario and Luigi are kind of jackasses to Peach. it's been many, MANY years since i watched The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! or any of its various tie-in offspring, but this definitely has the energy of a lot of cartoons at the time, wherein the girl is the smart one, but also, gross, cooties! we get some high quality old-school Yoshi content here, to drive our heroes into the plot's main conflict and tell us "whas'up" with Dinosaur Land.

and would you look at that! we've looped back around to where this story began - the spoken-word intro to Ignorance is Bliss. what once may have seemed to be just an odd, unique bit of Flash animation was actually a sort of ressurection of one of the strangest things Nintendo ever officially approved. indeed, this is our 'song cue' - i encourage you to go open the song up once more and listen to it with this new-found knowledge. the strange tone of the whole thing isn't Andy Strumer's Super Mario World headcanons, or the general edge and grit of newgrounds culture in the 2000s. it is a one-of-a-kind lineage requiring one or two absolutely bizarre dominos falling over.

the story continues like this for a while - a full 10 pages, by my count. i'll have the mercy of not covering the entire comic here, but i implore you to check out the full thread in uncompressed, high quality glory. there's not quite as much to talk about without the completely original musical backing to provide some context, but i can promise you two things. the song title drops in the dialogue never get any better, and Mario drives a 1957 Chevy.

White Knuckle Scorin' represents a much weirder time in Nintendo's history. just two years after its release, theaters would be graced by the live-action Super Mario Bros., and Nintendo's willingness to entrust their golden child to creative forces outside the company has still been healing to this day, in some ways. as i write this, we are supposedly about eight months away from the release of a new motion picture starring Mario, and all we really have on our hands right now is a list of voice actors. how will the soundtrack for Illumination's attempt measure up to the tracklist of White Knuckle Scorin'? what will it tell us about how we see Mario today versus how we saw him 30 years ago? can Jack Black please get to do a cover of Ignorance is Bliss? like, c'mon, the dude's already a musician. please.

as i wrap this up, i want to set aside trying to search for any particular point in what i've just told you. the story of White Knuckle Scorin' is interesting, without a doubt, and you can absolutely sift through it to find some kind of take to have on the whole endeavor. but when i decided to write this article, all i knew was "hey, there's this old Flash animation i remember, and i think i read once that it came off a whole album or something". what made Ignorance is Bliss plant itself in my mind wasn't the twisting, turning history that led to the 2006 video - it was the animation itself.

yeah, maybe it's cheesy of me to go to bat for this thing, but there is something just very charming about it, even with its imperfections. much in the same way that the original album was a product of its time, so is the Flash animation. even if, at the time, i didn't see the pieces of where it lined up into broader Mario canon, i just liked villain songs. lots of people do. and it's fun to imagine Bowser having one, even if the tone's so odd. Jellyfish wrote a good song, and BigArmyBug made a good animation out of it. the fact that those original files aren't just preserved, but capable of being pushed past the compression limits of 2006 and brought to the cutting edge of what computers can render, is a fascinating look into what remastering looks like in our modern digital age. so go forth. enjoy Ignorance is Bliss at the crispest resolutions on the nicest screens you own. embrace the weirdness of it.