Is Valentina from Super Mario RPG a Jimmy Buffett Reference or Not?
Sometimes you connect two things and think that this link you’ve made *has* to be intentional. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. But also I’ll take any excuse to talk about a woman who wears a parrot on her head for the purposes of fashion.
Long before I had any idea that Super Mario RPG would get a remake, I wrote a post here about the villain Valentina that was mostly focused on how the character design strayed from a sort of bad guy flowchart drawn up by the game’s character designer in the early stages of production. I got a comment on that post from someone pointing out that I was too quick to dismiss Valentina being a reference to the music of Jimmy Buffett. In the original Japanese, her name is Margarita (マルガリータ). This, combined with the fact that she wears a parrot on her head would seem to be an intentional nod, since Buffett’s most famous song is “Margaritaville” and because his fans are called parrotheads. Once this was brought to my attention, I had to agree that this combination of margaritas and parrots seemed very likely an intentional reference, especially considering the Mario series tendency to name characters after pop music.
A gif of Valentina’s 16-bit days, before Nintendo tamed her bouncing bosom.
Like, a margarita? A parrot on the head? Seems like a good fit, right?
Well, maybe not.
Shortly after the release of the Super Mario RPG remake, Jiro Mifune, who had done concept art for the game, started tweeting old sketches showing unused ideas. Most people took notice with a weird alternate proposal that had Mario, Luigi and Wario dressing up like the Three Musketeers in a more standard-seeming RPG setting where the bad guys would be an evil slug kingdom. I, however, was particularly interested with early concept art for Valentina that looks more alien, less Betty Boop, although notably she still has that damn parrot on her head.
In response to this Twitter post, someone asked about where her name comes from. Mifune explained that in his imagination, Valentina is bald underneath the “head bird,” and that this is how her name came about, because “in Japan, skinheads are referred to as margari (丸刈り).” He’s since deleted his entire Twitter account, either because he got a no-no notification from Nintendo or Square or because he was tired of fielding questions from people like me. Fortunately, I screengrabbed the tweet about the origin of this character’s name.
Now, I don’t want to correct a native Japanese speaker, so I’ll let the translator I work with on this site, Fatimah, do it instead: “I wouldn't translate [marugari] as ‘skinhead’ the way he did, since that has a more... not so great connotation. Love that he picked the absolute worst word to try and convey what he means in English.” As Fatimah explains, “buzzcut” might be a better translation, as maru means “round” — as in the old name for the Morph Ball from Metroid, Maru Mari — and gari/kari is “cut.” Marubozu (丸坊主), she points out, is literally “round monk,” because monks have shaved, round heads.
In any case, Mifune goes on to say that the character’s full name is Margari Margarita, and this actually makes sense of the odd track title Valentina’s theme had on the Super Mario RPG soundtrack, which I’d seen rendered in English as “Marjorie Margarita.” Today, I’m guessing that one someone’s best guest as to what the title was actually getting at. I don’t think any of the song titles were officially localized before, but because the remake lets you listen to the soundtrack, they finally were. This character’s theme song got the official English name “Valen-Valentina,” which is not an especially great name, but I suppose it’s better than “Bald-Headed Valentina.”
BTW, the upgraded version of Valentina’s theme, makes it clear that the clucking noise heard throughout the original is supposed to be the haughty woman’s laugh, most likely Valentina herself. In the 16-bit version of this track, it’s hard to tell if it’s a woman laughing or one of the many birds Val keeps as pets.
But wait, there’s more!
Kazuyuki Kurashima, who also designed characters in Super Mario RPG, took to Twitter in June, shortly after the remake was announced, initially to apologize for putting the wrong cocktail in Valentina’s hand. In the original Super NES version, she’s holding what looks more like a martini glass, and this was corrected for the remake with something that looks more like a margarita, lime slice and everything. While that might seem like points in favor of the Jimmy Buffett connection, another person on Twitter responded asking why the parrot Valentina wears on top of her head looks so much like Squawks, one of the animal buddies from Donkey Kong Country. Kurashima’s response was simple: “This is a homage.”
It makes sense that Super Mario RPG would pay homage to Donkey Kong Country, as the latter was the first Nintendo game to feature graphics based on 3D-rendered models. Super Mario RPG wasn’t the next game to use this visual style — it was preceded by Uniracers, the Super NES port of Killer Instinct and the Donkey Kong Country sequel — but it was the first Nintendo game produced in Japan that used 3D-rendered models throughout. Putting Squawks on Valentina’s head is a bit of a nod to the Super NES title that did it first, and besides, as noted in this post, it’s not even the only direct reference to Donkey Kong Country that Super Mario RPG makes.
So does this behind-the-scenes information from the people who made Super Mario RPG mean that the apparent Jimmy Buffett reference isn’t one? Maybe.
The way it’s been explained, it doesn’t seem like this character was supposed to be a reference to the margarita cocktail, at least not initially. In the original sketch posted a few paragraphs earlier, she’s not holding one. Instead, it seems like her name was a joke about her being bald beneath the parrot she’s wearing on her head. The cocktail came later, I’m guessing, and eventually became important enough that in the remake they switched out the drink. It’s also not clear how far into production anyone decided to make the parrot on her head specifically Squawks from Donkey Kong Country, but if that wasn’t the idea from the beginning, I do wonder what the reference is supposed to be. I can’t think of an instance of anyone wearing a parrot on their head outside of Jimmy Buffett fan culture.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, Jimmy Buffett does have some cultural footprint in Japan.
I don’t know if the phenomenon of parrotheads is a known thing there, however. The term goes back to 1985, however, and Buffett performed in Japan as recently as 2016, although specifically for American servicemen stationed at Camp Foster in Okinawa, and you can see some parrots on heads in the audience in photos. The late singer’s empire of Margaritaville-themed restaurants and resorts does not extend to Japan, but it’s entirely possible this guy isn’t the only Japanese national to be taken with the singer’s work.
There is sometimes the occasion that a video game character name seems to reference two different things, though one of those things is intended and the other apparently coincidental. For example, Reznor, the fire-breathing, rhino-looking bosses in Super Mario World would seem like a nod to the heater company by that name, but according to a Super Mario Wiki edit by former Nintendo of America employee Dayvv Brooks, he named them specifically after Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. And despite the fact that Kirby has been a name attached to a vacuum cleaner company going back to the 1930s, that’s not the origin of the name of the Nintendo character. Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto has said in an interview that it’s John Kirby, the lawyer who successfully defended Nintendo in Universal’s 1984 lawsuit alleging that Donkey Kong infringed on the movie studio’s King Kong copyright. In both these situations, I would have bet good money that the false association has some merit, but I’d be wrong in both cases. The Jimmy Buffett thing might be that here.
This is the point in the research process where you’re probably wondering why I just didn’t ask someone. I did! Unlike Jiro Mifune, Kazuyuki Kurashima still maintains his Twitter, so I asked him if he knew whether the association with Jimmy Buffett culture was coincidental or intended. He responded that Valentina/Margarita was named by Super Mario RPG event designer Taro Kudo, “so I don’t know what he really meant.” I asked him if he knew of a way to ask Kudo, and he simply replied, “I’ll ask him next time I see him,” which does seem like something you say to blow off an annoying fan asking annoying questions online, but at the very least Kurashima followed me back, so if I do ever have any further news to report, I’ll post it here.
That’s where this little story ends, at least for now. I realize I may be the only person on the face of the planet who cares whether this connection is legit or not, but regardless, it’s worth thinking about how something that definitely, positively, almost 100 percent looks like a thing may not be, despite evidence to the contrary. There are implications here beyond video games, of course.
Valentina 2023: Less bouncy but every bit the couture icon.
Miscellaneous Notes
This is probably the last post on Super Mario RPG I have for the moment, but I wanted to conclude this post with another story about how despite signs telling you otherwise, something a thing is just not the way you’d imagine it to be. If I told you that the dandelion gets its name from the fact that the fuzzy, yellow flowers resembled a lion’s mane, I think you’d probably believe me. You can see it. In fact, if you asked a ten artists to each draw a cartoon of a dandelion, more than one of them would draw it that way. It seems obvious. This is not the case, however; the word dandelion actually comes from the French dent de lion, literally “lion’s tooth,” because the flower’s jagged leaves look like sharp lion’s teeth. It’s not what you’d expect, and you might even bet good money on the other explanation seeming more correct. But sometimes the thing that seems like it should be obviously true just isn’t.
There’s one more edit to the portion of Super Mario RPG featuring Valentina, although it has nothing to do with her specifically. In the game, Mario sneaks into her castle by disguising himself as a statue. In the original game, Mario is passed off as a work of art titled “A Plumber’s Lament.” In the remake, this is swapped out for “In Search of Lost Brother,” which itself is adapted from the original Japanese, Otōto o Tazunete Yonsenri (弟をたずねて四千里), “4,000 Leagues in Search of Little Brother,” which is presumably a reference to the anime series 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother, the title of which is a reference to the Jules Verne novel. The brother in question would seem to be Luigi, who is in fact missing throughout Super Mario RPG, only showing up for the ending sequence, but the change would seem to reflect an infamous Nintendo edict for 2017 that pronounced that he was no longer a plumber. No one has said so, but it would seem to explain some other seemingly inconsequential changes. Mario’s house, for example, previously had a sign on it reading “Pipe House.” In the remake, it reads “Mario House.”
So why are fans of Jimmy Buffett’s music called parrotheads? Apparently, the “permanent vacation” vibe that his music creates prompted people to dress up in Hawaiian shirts to his concerts and eventually people started wearing hats with parrots on them. Thus, parrhotheads. Personally, that sound like a really annoying thing to do at concerts, but I suppose I’m more interested in finding out of there’s any other pop culture context for people wearing parrots on their heads. Is there?