Bowser vs. Koopa
Last week, I was one of the guests featured on a Patreon-only episode of the Retronauts podcast about the history of Bowser. I bring this up to encourage you all to support Retronauts because they do cool stuff with old video games, but also I’m going to share one of the things we talk about in this episode — as an incentive to chip in, I guess, but it’s also very much the kind of thing I write about on this blog.
Now, here’s a question I’m not sure I thought about before doing this episode: If Nintendo went through the trouble of renaming the princess formerly known as Toadstool so that she went by her original Japanese name internationally, why didn’t they do the same for Bowser? In Japan, he’s always been Koopa, but ever since Super Mario Bros. was localized for English-speaking territories, he’s been Bowser. From a brand standpoint, you’d think Nintendo would want to simplify everything in the way they’d done with Peach.
This is actually pretty complicated, it turns out!
Technically speaking, Bowser’s first name was Boss Creeper (ボス クリーパー or Bosu Kurīpā) because Shigeru Miyamoto envisioned the Super Mario Bros. big bad as the commander of the Shellcreepers, the Koopa Troopa prototypes that show up in 1983’s Mario Bros. This was only a placeholder, however, and when it came to decide on an official name, Miyamoto had three contenders, all of them the names of Korean food dishes rendered in Japanese: yukke ( ユッケ, from the Korean 육회, typically rendered in English as yukhoe), a raw beef dish similar to steak tartare; binbinba (ビビンバ, from the Korean 비빔밥, typically rendered in English as bibimbap), a rice dish often served with beef; and kuppa (クッパ, from the Korean 국밥, typically rendered in English as gukbap), a rice soup. Obviously, the last of these three won out, but if you’re curious how a non-beef dish snuck in there, Miyamoto mistakenly thought this name referred to bulgogi. To this day, I have never read an explanation for why Miyamoto thought the main villain of this game should be named after a Korean beef dish, as opposed to a Japanese beef dish or a beef dish from any other culture. If you know, please tell me.
Korean connection aside, the reason Miyamoto might have focused on beef presumably comes from the fact that per this Iwata Asks, Bowser was visually inspired by the Bull Demon King (牛魔王 or Gyūmaō) in Saiyuki, the 1960 anime adaptation of Journey to the West that was localized in English as Alakazam the Great. In the Retronauts episode, Diamond Feit points out that the Bull Demon King’s Japanese name, Gyūmaō, is very close to the name Bowser is given in Japanese, 大魔王クッパ or Daimaō Kuppa (“Great Demon King Koopa”).
Personally, I see a little bit of Ganon in this guy as well, at least back when Legend of Zelda’s big bad was a hulking pig man and not the thicc shirtless desert god version from Tears of the Kingdom.
Longtime Nintendo artist Yoichi Kotabe gave Bowser the look he has today, taking the “blue hippo” version that Miyamoto drew for the Japanese box art of Super Mario Bros. and redesigning him to better match the in-game sprite for the sequel known in the west as The Lost Levels. But it was in translating the original game for English-speaking audiences that someone at Nintendo decided that the villain originally known as Great Demon King Koopa should instead be named Bowser. I address this specifically in the Retronauts episode, but it is a damn shame that we haven’t gathered as many Nintendo of America employees as possible from this period to ask them everything they can remember about how these sorts of localization decisions were made. As it stands now, we don’t know why anyone thought a fire-breathing turtle-dragon should be given a name that more or less amounted to an English generic for dogs, along the lines of Fido, Spot or Rover. But this is what happened.
(For reasons I’ll explain in the miscellaneous notes section, no, Bowser most likely was not named after Bowzer from Sha Na Na, nor do I think he was named after the bowser tank, which is another theory I’ve seen online here and there. It would make a lot of sense for this slow-moving beast that shoots fire to be named after an army tank, the bowser tank is actually used for water, which is the opposite of what you’d expect from this character.)
Left to right: The earliest known concept art for Bowser, “Boss Creeper” version; Shigeru Miyamoto’s “blue hippo” rendition for the SMB box art; and finally the reworking Yoichi Kotabe did for The Lost Levels, essentially finalizing the character’s design.
All that history gets us to here, the point at which we restate the question at the top of this post: Considering how Nintendo made the effort to get English-speaking players to accept that the Mushroom Kingdom princess was named Peach, not Toadstool, why didn’t they also rebrand Bowser as Koopa?
Again, we don’t have any official Nintendo sources telling us why, but I personally think one of reasons this character persists as Bowser outside Japan is a branding conflict with another name that came about with the localization of Super Mario Bros: Koopa Troopa. The English version of the manual takes Bowser’s Japanese name and makes it a generic term for the whole tribe of turtles that are causing trouble in the Mushroom Kingdom, but the only enemy to actually have this become part of their English name is the Koopa Troopa. I think this one is a stellar turn of phrase and easily the best of what the localization team came up with. (Yes, Buzzy Beetle can suck it.) As a name, Koopa Troopa clearly and quickly conveys what these creatures are — they’re Koopas and they’re troopers — and even more so it’s an example of a specific kind of rhyming reduplication we English speakers are weirdly fond of. (Compare folksy-sounding but persistent phrases such as boogie-woogie, easy-peasy, helter-skelter, hanky panky, hoity-toity, hoochie coochie, hurlyburly, hurdy-gurdy, mumbo jumbo, razzle-dazzle and super duper.) Occasionally these reduplicatives aren’t just nonsense syllables but carry actual meaning — fender bender being a primo example of this, but there’s also walkie talkie and claptrap in this special group. These are just such strong constructions, linguistically speaking, that we tend to hold onto them. Koopa Troopa, being one of these reduplicatives that actually means something instead of just making a cutesy-wootsy rhyme, has endured, and you’ll find it today in just about every instruction manual for every Super Mario game ever.
Of course, people don’t always refer to video game things with the full, correct names as printed in the official materials. They like to shorten things, and everyone apparently agreed that Koopa was the way to go for Koopa Troopa, which is why you don’t generally hear “I stomped on a Troopa” or “I kicked a Troopa shell.” Eventually, the games themselves would reflect this. In Super Mario World, for example, the creepy version of the Koopa Troopa that wears a Mario mask is Mask Koopa, not Mask Troopa. In Super Mario Sunshine, the electrically-powered variation on this enemy was the Electrokoopa, not the Electrotroopa. And in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the magenta Koopa Troopa on wheels is the Rolla Koopa, not the Rolla Troopa.
As a result, the lowest-ranked minions in the evil turtle army ended up taking over the name Koopa in most territories outside Japan, even though that name was supposed to belong to the evil turtle in charge. In Japan, that guy is Koopa. Elsewhere, Koopa is the little guy — the littlest guy, really. That’s quite a shift, and it’s so entrenched as part of Mario lore outside Japan that I’d imagine that Nintendo would have decided that switching around the names of elements so core to these games would have been too hard to do. By comparison, changing the princess’s name was just a lot easier.
So why, then, did American adaptations of the Super Mario games such as the DiC cartoons or the live-action movie call this character Koopa?
Although there is an oral history of the DiC-produced Legend of Zelda cartoon, I’m sorry to report that there is no equivalent document explaining how the Super Mario Bros. Super Show came to be. (This makes me think I should put this on my 2024 to-do list. At last, we’d know who to blame for the existence of Rap Land in the Mario canon!) But yeah, in the original run of this cartoon, the big bad is always referred to as King Koopa and never as Bowser.
With the follow-up series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, DiC allegedly had to make up its own names for Bowser’s kids because none existed when they began work on the cartoon. However, I don’t think it’s a similar case here because The Super Mario Bros. Super Show debuted nearly four years after Super Mario Bros. hit shelves and nearly a year after the release of Super Mario Bros. 2. Given that Bowser sat Super Mario Bros. 2 out, however, I’m guessing the official Nintendo material DiC staffers had access to would have been rather limited — and might have specifically been limited to the page of the Super Mario Bros. instruction manual that introduces him.
Left: Bowser, King of the Koopa, as he appears in the SMB instruction manual. Right: King Koopa as he appears in the cartoon, and based on the coloring and lack of hair, I actually think the artist designing this version of the character only had the manual to go on, otherwise they would have designed him with hair.
I guess Bowser is a funny name for a bad guy in a children’s cartoon, but if I were looking at this page in the instruction manual and trying to dream up a name for a bad guy that makes for the most possible jokes and the funniest possible scripts, I’d probably go with King Koopa too. Those hard K sounds are a comedy standard, and if we’re being honest, Koopa just rhymes with too many things to pass up.
The weird thing about going with this name — inadvertently giving Bowser back his original Japanese name — is that it creates some weird confusion with the name Koopa Troopa, and it’s in these cartoons that you will hear some of the only people ever to shorthand these enemy characters as Troopas. In fact, it happens every episode because the opening theme song promises, “You’ll meet Koopa, his Troopas, the Princess and the others,” but it comes up in dialogue too.
Weirdly, the follow-up cartoon, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, does occasionally acknowledge that this character’s first name is Bowser, so maybe the people who wrote on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show realized that calling this character King Koopa created a weird terminology problem with the Koopa Troop.
The 1993 live-action movie never refers to the character as Bowser — not in the shooting script and not in any of the earlier drafts. He’s Koopa from the very first version of the script, but then again that’s the one where the princess is named Hildy. This adaptation (and the collection of unrealized ones in the scripts that follow it) play fast and loose with the Super Mario lore, so I guess it’s not surprising that they’d break from the official Nintendo literature, but here’s the thing: As mentioned by Bob Mackey in the Retronauts episode, the games didn’t really use the name Bowser until Super Mario World. For instance, the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. 3 identifies the big bad as Bowser, but in-game, in the letter he sends Mario to inform him that he’s kidnapped Peach again, he signs it King of the Koopas. And even later remakes of the game don’t fix this.
So maybe the films were influenced by the cartoon show, or maybe both ended up calling this character King Koopa because that’s what players who didn’t read the instruction manual would have called him, because there was nothing in-game in the NES era to tell them that the big mean turtle was named Bowser.
My edit of the map sprite for Bowser’s “Coney Island disco place” in Super Mario World. In the original Japanese version, the sign reads “Koopa.” In the English localization, it’s been changed to say “Bowser,” and it’s one of the first in-game references that the character has nis name.
So one more time: Why didn’t Nintendo standardize Bowser’s name to Koopa in all territories? Well, they accidentally made doing that extra difficult — way harder than it was to clean up the mess with Peach’s name. So they didn’t do it.
If you look at the English manual for Super Mario Bros., all the characters that aren’t Mario or Luigi got wholly new names not based on anything in the Japanese original. (The Hammer Bros. basically just retained their name, as in Japanese they’re ハンマーブロス or Hanmā Burosu.) The one bit of the original Japanese that the English version retained is the name Koopa, taken from Bowser but now attached to all of the evil turtles. In fact, as pointed out on Legends of Localization, the Japanese version of the game’s backstory makes repeated references to the “the turtle tribe,” whereas the English version identifies this group as “the Koopa, a tribe of turtles famous for their black magic” and on every subsequent reference just calls “the Koopa.” This seems like a smart branding decision, and to an extent it is; it’s just that by naming the lowest-level grunts in the evil turtle army Koopa Troopas, they got everyone calling them Koopas. So to have Bowser take his Japanese name back would most likely mean renaming the Koopa Troopa to avoid confusion and redundancy. But you’re not going to find a better name for the little guys than the one they already have, so that’s that.
This is all a deeper dive into one talking point we arrive at in the Retronauts episode. If you’re not already pledging Retronauts money on Patreon, I’d suggest you look into it because if you made it this far down this post, you probably like smart conversations about niche video game topics.
You can preview the Bowser episode here. Basically everything in this post is focused on Super Mario Bros., but in the episode we cover the different roles he’s played all the way through Super Mario Sunshine. Retronauts also has deep dive episodes about Peach, Toad and Luigi.
Miscellaneous Notes
Is it weird that both the Super Mario games and the Sonic the Hedgehog games both have big bads who are known by two different names outside Japan? Yes, yes it is.
Just as Bowser’s name didn’t get used often in the NES-era Super Mario games, they also didn’t refer to the princess’s name all that often. In fact, in Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Kart, she’s just that — Princess. She signs her letters in Super Mario Bros. 3 as Princess Toadstool, and it’s actually in Super Mario RPG only that Toadstool gets used as if it were her name — and that has been undone in the remake, where she is just Peach. Not only did rebranding her as Peach internationally free her from the unpleasant associations with toadstools, but it also eliminated a weird redundancy that kind of parallels the one with Koopa referring to both the guy in charge and the lowest-level subjects: Toadstool was both the Mushroom Kingdom monarch and the most famous subject, presuming that Toad’s name is short for Toadstool as well. (You can read my piece on Toad here.)
You think Toadstool is a tough name for a pretty girl? Try Princess Slørhat, which is what the Danish adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. 3 called her. (It’s apparently the cortinarius mushroom.) And in Super Mario Bros. 2, she was Princess Paddestoel, which sounds less gross but which is apparently translated into english as Princess Mushrump, mushrump being an old-fashioned word for mushroom. In Norway, the DiC version of Peach was Princess Fluesopp. (It’s apparently the fly agaric or Amantina muscaria, the IRL mushroom that looks most like a Mario mushroom.) And in Sweden, that version of the character was Princess Flugsvamp. I swear I’m not picking on the Scandinavian languages. These names are just… evocative.
It’s pointed out in the episode that Sha Na Na singer Jon “Bowzer” Bauman probably is not the source of Bowser’s name simply because at the point the Mario big bad got this name, the trend of naming Mario characters after music acts hadn’t begun. That would start with Super Mario Bros. 3, and while that might explain many of the Koopalings’ names, it doesn’t explain all of them. In 2015, Kotaku interviewed Dayvv Brooks, the Nintendo of America employee who named Bowser’s seven kids, and while Ludwig von Koopa and Wendy O. Koopa are named after exactly who you’d guess, Larry isn’t named after anyone in particular and certainly not Larry King. “He just looked like a Larry,” Brooks says. However, Morton Koopa Jr. is named after Morton Downey Jr., who actually did record a few songs back in the day, but that’s not what he’s remembered for and that’s not what prompted Brooks to name the Mario character after him.
It’s frequently alleged online that the people helming the DiC series weren’t given names for the Koopalings when they began work on the Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoon. I am pretty sure this is true, but for the life of me, I can’t find what interview this is stated in. (If you know, please tell me.) But yeah, contrary to everything you’d expect from a company wanting to brand its intellectual property in a way that makes them the most possible money, these characters were not named when Super Mario Bros. 3 first hit shelves in Japan. The North American localization of the game hit shelves July 15, 1990, and the associated cartoon debuted September 8, 1990, so given the production timelines of animated shows, it actually does seem plausible DiC would have been forwarded images of these new characters but no names to go with them.
I’m kind of stunned this was allowed to happen, honestly. That’s just bad branding! But yeah, this is why Wendy O. Williams and Morton Downey Jr. get to live on in the form of Bowser’s bratty kids who, as of a 2015 Shigeru Miyamoto interview, were later retconned to no longer be his kids.
But just as there are people out there who will always think of Bowser as King Koopa, I suppose there are also people out there who will always think of Larry, Morton, Wendy, Iggy, Roy, Lemmy and Ludwig as Cheatsy, Big Mouth, Kootie Pie, Hop, Bully, Hip and Kooky. Myself, I have had the Kootie Pie rap song stuck in my head ever since 1991, so that counts for something.