PBS says Mario is the world’s greatest surrealist art

_{[Header and thumbnail by amandaisacat]}

It’s weird to see something that you and your colleagues have known for your for your entire adult lives get announced by a mainsteam media outlet like it’s a hot news, but there you go. PBS just told us that the Super Mario Bros. games are the most influential and well accepted pieces of surrealist art in the world.

As Donald Rumsfeld would say, the fact that the Mario is the most popular surrealist icon in the world is a “known known.” It is a thing we know that we know. We do all know that we know that, right? Was there ever any question that the Mario series is just as surreal as anything any painter or film maker ever came up with, or that it has influenced millions of people to both accept surrealism as a style, and to create surrealist art themselves. 

I hope this is just the start of PBS’s look at how videogames fit into maintream culture. The shout out to the Katamari series towards the end has me hoping that this episode is just a warm up, and the really eye-opening insights are yet to come. I like the style of the video, and the presenter is a pretty amicable fella. I just hope they give us something a little less obvious next time. 

I really don’t hope they go with the old “Pac-Man is a metaphor for man’s continual consumption of the world around him in a vain attempt to fend of his inevitable death” routine. Not to sound snobby, but most of us probably figured that out around the same time we stopped (exclusively) pooping in diapers.