People have accused Nintendo's composers of copying from popular music, with notable examples being the similarities between Super Mario World's "Overworld theme", and The New Christy Minstrels' "Green Green" or The Legend of Zelda's Fairy Fountain Theme and Tatsuro Yamashita's "Morning Glory".
But one of the most peculiar examples, in our opinion at least, has to be Mario Artist: Paint Studios' copying of Ed Bogas's song "Cartoon Time" (from the 1973 X-rated Ralph Bakshi film Heavy Traffic) for one of its 2D painting themes "Cats".
Mario Artist: Paint Studio, in case you've never heard of it, is a Japan-exclusive creation/exploration game that was released in 1999 for the 64DD — a failed subscription-based add-on for the Nintendo 64. It was developed by the British studio Software Creations, in collaboration with Nintendo, and served as a sequel of sorts to Mario Paint, letting players explore 3D worlds, edit aspects of their environment, and create 2D art.
Due to its UK-based development, it is often at the center of some of the more unusual Mario-related trivia, with data miners finding everything from strange crash messages in its dumped prototype featuring a crudely-edited lollipop man to a lot of less than savoury language lurking in its debug strings. Recently, on Twitter, the popular Mario gimmick account No Context Super Mario brought up the similarity between the Heavy Traffic track and the music from Mario Artist: Paint Studio, and strangely enough, it isn't the only instance where we've seen it mentioned in the past few weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, on July 25th, 2024, the YouTuber ThomasGameDocs uploaded a video called "Nintendo COPIED this song from a movie". In this video, ThomasGameDocs also detailed this bizarre bit of trivia, highlighting how the game's soundtrack was a collaboration between three UK-based composers (Chris Jojo, Martin Goodall, and Suddi Raval), and the Nintendo musician Kazumi Totaka, before surmising that it was probably unlikely "Totaka would have come across this obscure, X-rated animated from the 70s whereas the British developers had more of a chance of seeing it."
In the past, we've interviewed all three UK composers for our article on The Making Of: Mario Artist Paint Studio, so in order to try to get to the bottom of this, we reached out again to see if they could recall anything about this track or how it may have ended up on the soundtrack. But sadly, we didn't manage to get a definitive answer.
Martin Goodall was the first to reply to our message. He told us, "I’m afraid I’ve never heard that piece before, and no idea who wrote it and how it got on the score. It made me laugh though, totally barmy music - wish I had written it! Sorry I can’t be of more help"
Suddi Raval, on the other hand, replied to us saying: "It's completely bonkers. I've never heard it before. Not sure about how that ended up in the game!" (He also said he had never heard of the film before either).
The only person who didn't reply was Chris Jojo, who is probably the individual who would have the most extensive knowledge of how it actually ended up there (if it did come from the UK side), as he was the lead composer on the project at Software Creations.
That being said, there's always the possibility that the track could have been sneaked in when the game was delivered to Nintendo, with all three composers previously suggesting their work had potentially been altered by the game's Japanese publisher before release. We'll keep digging to see what we can find, but we imagine a straight answer will probably be pretty hard to come by.