Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 47 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 47th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

In this article, I will tell a story of anticipation and disappointment as I extracted what ultimately turned out to be a faulty jigsaw puzzle from a Japanese guide for Donkey Kong '94.

Jigsaw Japes

The Game Boy version of Donkey Kong is more commonly known as Donkey Kong '94 as it was released in 1994, and to reduce confusion with the more popular Donkey Kong arcade (and its many ports to Nintendo and third-party systems). The game revolves around Mario having to rescue Pauline just like in the original arcade, but the story and gameplay becoming more complex as Donkey Kong takes Pauline through a variety of environments. In puzzle stages that are each only 1 or 2 screens in size, Mario must unlock doors with keys, push levers, and build temporary platforms and ladders to reach the goal. Donkey Kong Jr. appears as well, as a stage element where he periodically pulls levers, causing platforms Mario is walking on to disappear. This game got a spiritual successor with the release of Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the Game Boy Advance, which in turn spawned the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series.

In Japan, the game received an illustrated guide by APE, a company that was known mainly for its Mother/Earthbound series before rebranding as Creatures, Inc., under which name they went on to develop a variety of Pokémon titles. APE and Creatures have connections to famous Nintendo personalities such as Satoru Iwata, Shigesato Itoi and Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka. This is the cover of the guide:

(I am using a scan generously provided by Random Hoo Haas for this article.)

The guide is illustrated by Benimaru Itoh, a manga artist who worked for APE/Creatures as an art director and illustrator. Here is some Mario-related work by him from another source, the Super Mario Kart official guide:

Note also the prominent inclusion of the Mother characters on the right due to Itoh's involvement with that series.

One of the features of the Donkey Kong '94 guide are these jigsaw pieces on many of its pages, 54 in total:

Note the puzzle piece in the bottom right.

From the moment I saw these, I decided that I had to piece them together. By analyzing them in the guide, I was able to determine that they would produce artwork of Mario, Pauline, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. in a 6x9 rectangle. I assumed that these were intended to be cut out from the guide and pieced together by the readers, however, as you will see, apparently no one bothered to actually test whether that would result in a workable jigsaw puzzle and these were ultimately just a decoration that the designers did not expect anyone to take seriously and actually put together.

For this, I had to use image editing software to carefully cut the pieces out of each page. I use Inkscape, a program I have been an extremely early adopter of (I have been using it since before its first release in 2003, by using an early beta version), and have been using for most of my posts both here and on my public blogs, as well as my side projects like my comics. 

For each of the pieces, I had to make a vector mask consisting of overlapping rectangle and circle shapes to isolate them from the background. The quality of the scan is high-resolution but limited by the fact that the book was scanned by being pressed against the scanner in an intact state instead of the pages being removed from the binding to be completely flat (a completely understandable decision as doing so would destroy the book, and is usually done only for scans where the utmost quality of the resulting image is more important than the eventual state of the book that is being scanned). As such, the aspect ratio of the jigsaw pieces is different on every page due to the paper being at a slight angle as the book's binding warps it, so I had to adjust the masks individually for all 54 pieces.

In the end, this is what I had. These are the cleanest cutouts I was able to achieve, and visually do not contain anything from the background of the pages. The next step was to actually assemble the general shape of the puzzle:

So far, it was looking passable, although the area around Mario's head was starting to look peculiar. I tried actually putting the pieces together, which is where the truth was revealed to me:

Not only were there overlaps in some of the pieces, which would have been able to be fixed with enough work, but some parts of the image were completely miscut. Mario in particular was a complete disaster, with the pieces showing redundant parts of his face in a way that was impossible to fix, and one piece even being sideways ( bottom row, third from the left; that piece needed to be turned 90 degrees left before being cut).

Apparently, Benimaru Itoh's original illustration got hopelessly mangled by whatever process the editors used to create the jigsaw pieces. I have attempted to move some of them around to fix whatever was possible of Mario:

As you can see, in order for the illustration to be even halfway legible, at least three of the pieces needed to be moved a significant distance to overlap with others. I hope you can agree that this is beyond being fixable; I was expecting small gaps between the pieces due to the aspect ratio (which I was prepared to fix by retouching them with small areas of color), but I did not expect the entire puzzle to be unusable in the end.

The entire experience was not only tedious due to the precise cutting of the pieces, but ultimately very disappointing. I expected such a feature to have undergone some basic form of quality control, which it evidently did not. I can only hope that if I attempt similar projects in the future with other puzzles related to Mario (of which there are many; there have been dozens of Mario activity books released in Japan in the 1990s), that the results of those will be more satisfying than this.

Thank you very much for reading.