How One Weird Little Guy Connects Yoshi’s Island to Donkey Kong

You know what I like? Weird little guys.

I don’t know exactly how to explain them more than the phrase “weird little guys” already does. They show up in all sorts of video games, but also genre fiction and cartoons and Renaissance paintings. You’ll see them in the background or tucked into a corner, and more often than not, they don’t actually do much aside from be weird little guys.

Toad is one, even though he gets more to do than most. Yoda is one, even though he turns out to be a powerful little guy. Nibbler from Futurama is one, even though I guess he’s also a powerful little guy. Maybe the best example I can think of is the old man who shows up right at the end of Zelda II. He’s not named. He’s not mentioned anywhere else in the game. He’s just there to give you the Triforce once you beat Shadow Link, and he never shows up again. “Who’s that weird little guy?” you might ask. No one knows. In fact, by calling him a weird little guy, you’ve already explained him as much as he ever will be explained.

In putting together the previous post about hallucinogenic mushrooms, I ended up on the Super Mario Wiki page for the Yoshi’s Island level “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.” It’s the seventh stage of the first world, and before it gets all trippy, it abounds with some weird little guys.

Meet the Melon Bug.

Never heard of him? I don’t blame you. A few weeks ago, I might have touted the Melon Bug as being among the least likely to appear as a playable character in the new Mario Kart, but recent events have me questioning how unlikely his re-appearance would be.

The “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” level is famous for the enemies that cause Yoshi to stagger around like a drunkard, so I’m not surprised that I had zero memory of the Melon Bugs showing up first. In addition to being overshadowed immediately within the same level, the Melon Bugs are also at a disadvantage because they don’t really do anything interesting. They jump up and down, and when Yoshi gets close enough they curl up into a ball, roly poly-style. If Yoshi eats one, he can either spit it out, at which point it will roll forward and kill any enemies it touches, or swallow it and turn it into an egg like he can to basically any other enemy. But the Melon Bugs aren’t technically enemies. They can’t hurt you. In that way, they function more like the Huffin Puffin, whose chicks Yoshi can use like eggs. But Huffin Puffin at least gets to show up in more than one game, even scoring a themed vehicle in Mario Kart Tour. The Melon Bug’s video game career begins and ends with Yoshi’s Island, aside from the remake for Game Boy Advance.

A valid question at this point: “Okay, but so what?”

What’s interesting about this weird little guy is that he’s actually a holdover from something that’s not even necessarily an early version of Yoshi’s Island but instead an unreleased game that’s nonetheless yoked to the development of Yoshi’s Island: Super Donkey. You may recall hearing about Super Donkey during the infamous July 2020 “gigaleak” of private Nintendo data to the messageboard 4chan, which made public three gigabytes’ worth of documents relating to unreleased Nintendo games or pre-release versions of games that eventually did see the light of day. One of these was a project termed Super Donkey, and while it seems like a lot of things, it also appears to be something that was absorbed in one form or another into Yoshi’s Island. According to the Cutting Room Floor website, these ROMs were built in 1991 or 1992, so perhaps this was some Nintendo team’s attempt at a follow-up to Super Mario World. (For the purposes of this piece, keep in mind that Donkey Kong Country was released in 1994 and Yoshi’s Island in 1995.)

From what we can see today, Super Donkey seems… well, weird. In most versions, you control a potato-nosed, pilot-looking fellow who sort of looks like Stanley the Bugman from Donkey Kong 3 but who might actually be a gussied up version of the title character from the 1981 Nintendo arcade game Sky Skipper. Based on the way his arms move around without being connected to his torso, however, he might also remind you of Ubisoft’s Rayman, who would debut in 1995 and is as far as I can tell unrelated.

You can see these prototypes in motion below.

The version seen in the second video is especially relevant to this post. At the 0:59 mark, you see the first glimpse of what is clearly a preliminary version of the Melon Bug character, his behavior seems essentially unchanged from what you see in Yoshi’s Island. But in a harmonious coincidence, the second video also shows off a lot of what is clearly a preliminary version of the monkey enemies that I discussed in depth in my post about organ grinders. Based on what we see in these prototypes, it seems like the monkey enemies and the Melon Bugs are the oldest characters appearing in Yoshi’s Island, predating Yoshi, Mario (as a baby or otherwise) and anything else the title might be known for today. It’s perhaps ironic then that the monkey enemies play such a relatively minor role in the overall game, and the Melon Bugs even more so.

More than just this, however, there’s something here that can tell us a little about the creative process at Nintendo and the company’s evolving take on one of its most famous characters. Despite what the title Super Donkey might make you expect, you don’t see anything resembling Donkey Kong in these videos, but some sprites exist — if not for D.K. himself, then perhaps of some affiliated Kong cousin.

This happy-looking ape would seem to be a progenitor for the so-called “Grinder Kong,” which I mention in the organ grinder post as being an apparent cross between D.K. and the generic monkey enemies in Yoshi’s Island. No such enemy actually appears in the final version of the game, but development files for the game do reveal a similar looking ape character, colored differently and sporting a yellow tie instead of a red one.

Obviously, there’s an interesting story to be told about how various Nintendo creatives were fiddling around with a Super NES concept that at one point could have been a Donkey Kong game but over the years eventually became a Yoshi game. However, given where we are with Nintendo history right now, I think a more interesting story is being told about how Nintendo was wrestling with how to reinvent its first marquee character. Mario debuted in a game that had Donkey Kong’s name on the cabinet, and while Mario eventually became the face of Nintendo, Donkey Kong languished. He was held captive in the first sequel, and while he returned as the antagonist in Donkey Kong 3, he was paired not with Mario, who had moved on to bigger and better things, but with Stanley, a weird little guy in his own right but also a piddly, pudding-faced nothing of a video game character.

Meanwhile, it’s D.K. Jr. and not dear old dad who shows up as a playable character in Super Mario Kart and the Virtual Boy tennis game. In fact, the big guy doesn’t get much to do until 1994, which was a very interesting year for all things Donkey Kong. In June, Nintendo put out the Game Boy title colloquially known as Donkey Kong ’94, which was both a remake of and an expansion on the Donkey Kong arcade game — very much a celebration of the vibes of that foundational Nintendo title. But the following November, Nintendo also released the Rare-developed Donkey Kong Country, and it’s this new version of Donkey Kong — 3D-modeled, and looking like a brown Battletoad with fur — that would become the anchor of his own franchise but also, starting with Mario Kart 64, a fixture of the Mario games as well.

Of course, as of the time this post goes live, the Switch 2 is set to hit shelves in mere weeks, and with its new games we’re getting a sort of Donkey Kong 3.0, looking more like a fusion of his classic and Rare-era forms.

We’re not only getting Donkey Kong as a playable character in Mario Kart World, but also we’re getting him as the star of Donkey Kong Bananza, the new platformer kicking off the new system in lieu of a follow-up to Super Mario Odyssey or some altogether new game that has Mario moving in three dimensions. It’s a huge platform for Donkey Kong, but it’s notable that the version of the character being afforded this opportunity is something closer to what Nintendo originally envisioned.

I know some Nintendo fans are miffed about Donkey Kong’s new look. And I get it — I mean, I’ve been staring at the Rare-era version for about thirty years now. It’s familiar, even if I can admit it never seemed fully at home with the look of Mario and crew. But this effort to bring Donkey Kong back into the Nintendo fold has been going on for a long time, at least back to 1991, when the Super Donkey prototype was made. To me, it’s interesting to stumble across an early Super NES-era attempt at doing this at the moment when Nintendo is finally making good on this promise with Donkey Kong 3.0. The new look isn’t Nintendo undoing decades of Donkey Kong Country so much as it is allowing the company to usher its first named character in a way it’s been trying to figure out since the arcade days.

And all this thanks to a weird little guy. Melon Bug, I salute you!

Miscellaneous Notes

The Melon Bug’s Japanese name is ころがりくん (Korogari-kun), from the 転がり (korogari, or “to roll, to turn over”) plus the honorific -kun. Which is to say that there’s nothing explicitly bug-related in Japanese, but for what it’s worth, the creatures we English-speakers call roly-polies are not technically bugs either. Also known as pill bugs or wood lice, they’re actually terrestrial crustaceans, so they’re closer related to shrimp, lobsters and crabs than they are actual insects. And do you know where I learned this science fact? From Blathers in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, of all places.

While the Melon Bug never appeared in another game aside from Yoshi’s Island and its Game Boy Advance remake, he does show up on a Yoshi’s Island-themed puzzle (!!!) and hey, that counts for something!

You can find some wild stuff on the Cutting Room Floor pages for Super Donkey and for Yoshi’s Island. It’s a whole red universe/blue universe thing, where it feels like you’re looking at a split reality’s version of a game you remember. Among them are sprites showing that at least at one point, an adult Mario was considered for a playable role in Super Donkey.

But that’s not all: You can also find Link in these files as well. I wonder if this was a mere graphical test or if at one point this wAs envisioned as a Zelda game too before it ended up starring Yoshi.

There’s a sprite of Yoshi walking around with Baby Mario… with a mustache, and somehow that feels simultaneously right and wrong in a way I can’t explain.

There’s also a sprite of a young-looking wizard dude. I can’t tell if he’s a baby or not, but he does look like a human version of Kamek.

There is a preliminary version of the generic Bandit enemy who looks like a Pikku from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This is especially interesting because the Pikku are the foxfaced characters who show up in the Village of Outcasts in the Dark World and will bump into Link in an effort to steal his items. Apparently it was decided instead to model them after Shy Guys rather than a thief character from another franchise.

There’s also what looks like a boss version of Rocky Wrench driving a car that looks a lot like something Fred Flintstone would drive.

There’s a skeletal Yoshi being ridden by a Shy Guy, which just seems fully wrong.

There’s an early version of what would clearly become Hookbill the Koopa, and while he has a Koopa-style shell, he looks more like a relative of Birdo’s. Weird!

There’s also Lakitu flying a little plane that looks like the Sky Pop from Super Mario Land.

And finally, there’s apparently a dog character that shows up in Super Donkey that may be a prototype for Poochy. What’s interesting about him is that he has the color pattern that you see elsewhere in the finalized version of Yoshi’s Island — on Huffin Puffin’s briefs, for one thing — but what’s especially interesting about him is that he looks quite a bit more like Kibidango, the dog character who shows up in the Super Mario anime and who I wrote about in this post.

All this discussion about Donkey Kong’s redesign has been focused specifically on him and not the other Kong characters. Cranky Kong, for example has shown up in previews for Donkey Kong Bananza looking more or less unchanged. It remains to be seen what, if anything, this means for Diddy and Dixie, who have yet to be glimpsed in either Bananza or Mario Kart World, but the existence of this 2026 wall calendar seems to show them looking more or less unchanged opposite the new D.K.

Apparently the Melon Bug plays a role in an infinite 1-up opportunity in the “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” level.

Yes, I need to do a write-up on the history of Stanley, and I will do that, but Pauline is first, and that one is going to be a lot of fun. There’s also a piece I need to write about Sky Skipper, and in case you thought I was kidding when I said the potato-nosed dork from those Super Donkey videos looks a bit like the title character from this Nintendo game, here he is.

Could he be just Stanley the Bugman? I’m open to the possibility. He certain looks a bit like him in the promotional art for the game.

But then again maybe this is just how Nintendo drew men without facial hair back in the day.

How One Weird Little Guy Connects Yoshi’s Island to Donkey Kong

Miscellaneous Notes

Are Super Mario’s Mushrooms a Reference to Hallucinogenic Drugs?