I think in terms of actual volume, Mario as a series has more one-offs and characters who vanished after just a few games total than it has near-perfect attendees.
It's honestly kind of insane how intuitive and smooth Mario 1 feels today compared literally everything else surrounding it. Hell, it's smoother than some platformers made as late as 1990!
People have criticized Speedy Gonzales for being a supposedly unflattering stereotype even though he's the most popular Looney Tunes character in Mexico.
As nice as it is to have a third Strikers game, outside of some top-notch animation the game doesn't really give us that much more than Strikers Charged did, so...
He seems really growly in that commercial, but that could be that almost all the scenes they've shown off so far are of Mario getting slapped around and/or frustrated.
I have scans of these and they've been on my "to translate" list for a while. Sadly they're currently on the backburner because of other projects I have right now. 😞
Everybody compares Mario to Alice in Wonderland but it's really more like Wizard of Oz.
Wonderland is presented as absolutely nonsensical, with everyone in it described as "mad", while Oz is whimsical but not really nonsensical; it's full of weird creatures but it has tangible geography...
Plus, while they're called "Spiny Eggs" in English, the Japanese word "Paipo" is a nonsense word that has nothing to do with eggs in any way. The Spiny Eggs are likely not actually supposed to be eggs in the first place.
Hell, we see Spinies ball themselves up as a defense mechanism in TTYD...