Nintendo Owns the Kremlings: Squashing a Myth

[E-Man]

From what I understand from the Mario Wiki, the Japanese version insists that K. Lumsy is King K. Rool's younger brother. I'm not sure if Klubba and Kudgel for Donkey Kong Country 2 are officially related, though.

Also, if you take the CGI TV show into account, Klump and Scurvy are long lost brothers as stated in the "Christmas" special.

[Jermungandr]

Let's complicate things even further by bringing Donkey Kong Jr. into this.

Cranky is DK's grandfather.  Cranky is also the Donkey Kong, Sr. from the arcade games.  Modern-day DK is said to be the Donkey Kong Jr. featured in the arcade titles... which doesn't make sense since "Jr." implies "son," not grandson.  Jr. should actually be DK's father.  Is Country DK actually Donkey Kong III and Jr. really has been missing for all of these years?

Also, Cranky becoming a frail old ape in the Country series while Mario is still young as ever.  Do gorillas age faster than humans?  Or is the "Jumpman" Mario from the arcade games actually the grandfather of present-day Mario?

The tail-end of this video does a pretty good job of covering this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alcxiiN6xkU&t=11m50s

[Helmo]

Let's complicate things even further by bringing Donkey Kong Jr. into this.

Cranky is DK's grandfather.  Cranky is also the Donkey Kong, Sr. from the arcade games.  Modern-day DK is said to be the Donkey Kong Jr. featured in the arcade titles... which doesn't make sense since "Jr." implies "son," not grandson.  Jr. should actually be DK's father.  Is Country DK actually Donkey Kong III and Jr. really has been missing for all of these years?

Also, Cranky becoming a frail old ape in the Country series while Mario is still young as ever.  Do gorillas age faster than humans?  Or is the "Jumpman" Mario from the arcade games actually the grandfather of present-day Mario?

The tail-end of this video does a pretty good job of covering this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alcxiiN6xkU&t=11m50s

Spoiler

Also Game Theory is fucking dumb... "Is Dankey Kang actually Dead!?"

[Jermungandr]

Also Game Theory is fucking dumb... "Is Dankey Kang actually Dead!?"

Eh. I used to really not like Game Theory myself, but it's grown on me recently.

You don't really have to agree with everything someone says to be entertained by them. I like their episodes where they actually get all scientific and actually learn you stuff. ("How much fart power does it take to propel a human through the air?"). But you have to take their more anecdotal episodes with a buttload of salt.

[Kosheh]

Let's complicate things even further by bringing Donkey Kong Jr. into this.

Cranky is DK's grandfather.  Cranky is also the Donkey Kong, Sr. from the arcade games.  Modern-day DK is said to be the Donkey Kong Jr. featured in the arcade titles... which doesn't make sense since "Jr." implies "son," not grandson.  Jr. should actually be DK's father.  Is Country DK actually Donkey Kong III and Jr. really has been missing for all of these years?

Also, Cranky becoming a frail old ape in the Country series while Mario is still young as ever.  Do gorillas age faster than humans?  Or is the "Jumpman" Mario from the arcade games actually the grandfather of present-day Mario?

The tail-end of this video does a pretty good job of covering this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alcxiiN6xkU&t=11m50s

im so glad i have a youtube series to sort out the events of the donkey kong mythos. whew. now i can sleep at night knowing that jumpman the carpenter is mario's dad and also an asshole, thanks to the sexual maturity of gorillas

[Jermungandr]

The funny part is they could have easily proved the exact same thing without bringing in "sexual maturity" at all. Amusing since the video creator considers this the "lynchpin" of the theory and it wasn't even necessary.

I think they just wanted to say "sex" a lot. Who wouldn't.

[Kriven]

Except Matt's theory disregards a crucial character from the Jumpman Era:

Pauline.

Pauline, Mario's one-time girlfriend, captured by Donkey Kong and rescued by Jumpman. Sure, maybe she's actually Super Mario's mother. But if that were the case, the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series shouldn't be playing out in nearly the same way that it is. Pauline, DK, and Mario are all there, all adults, and all approximately at the same level of biological development. You could say that the Mario in MvDK is actually Jumpman, but... well, all the recent games with Mini Toys featuring other Super Mario-era characters puts that one to rest. The only other explanation is that the MvDK Pauline is actually the child of the original Pauline, and possibly the sister of Mario & Luigi... but that's just twisting things to conform to Game Theory's interpretation.

As far as the games indicate, Jumpman is Super Mario, and Pauline is the same Pauline we've known for thirty years.

[Jermungandr]

I don't see why she can't be a really hot senior citizen.

To be fair though, the original Pauline looks nothing like the modern-day character they call Pauline.



I mean for starters, she's a blonde in all official art, not to mention the game sprite itself. I don't see why modern-day Pauline couldn't be a completely different character. Doesn't even have to be related, just someone who happens to share her name.

Hot senior citizen is on the table though. Her hair could be brown from dying out all the grey.

[Koopaul]

I'm actually a part of the DKVine community. We talk about the lore of Donkey Kong all the time. Its pretty much the only DK fan site on the web... And we get really crazy about this stuff.

People either respect me greatly or hate me greatly there.

...

I suppose that can be said anywhere.

[E-Man]

I often visited that site and it has a lot of interesting, entertaining stories and lore ideas. Considering that you piece together nearly every Rare game (even the Star Fox series) into its own canon, it certainly takes about as much work as me trying to make a passable map of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Say, Koopaul, got any DKVine style insight on how Pauline exists in Mario's current time period without any significant aging, how Mario and the current DK are about the same age if Yoshi's Island DS is anything to go by, and how Cranky Kong aged so quickly without the current DK aging like that?

[Kriven]

a passable map of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Where did you put Yoshi's Island as geographically define in the Yoshi's Island franchise in comparison to its position as an attached landmass to Dinosaur Land in Super Mario World?

[E-Man]

If you mean turn that small Yoshi's Island found in Super Mario World into its significantly larger counterpart from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, then that's what I did.

[Helmo]

My theory: Nintendo doesn't give a fuck, so any info you find will just contradict everything else.

[Gors]

/\ this is totally the case, I bet Nintendo laughs at the fans trying to tie them up

same with Pixar theory and other stuff

[Kosheh]

My theory: Nintendo doesn't give a fuck, so any info you find will just contradict everything else.

Hey that's basically what I said in another topic let me post it here because it's like, exactly what you said, but like
check it out it's three paragraphs long

I feel like games by Japanese development teams throughout the 90's didn't really think things through on the matters of continuity. Each title was new and fresh and was an expensive risk taken by that company - and with each game tells a new story as it's somewhat tedious to hear the same story repeated several times (case in point: people's disappointment with Starfox Zero not exploring a new chapter) That's why you have games like Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei exploring different plots with different characters in different locations; they don't necessarily bear any continuity with one another.
You're probably better off thinking of Nintendo's games in this way so you don't lose any sleep over it.
Interestingly though, I feel like Nintendo's localization teams are solely responsible for throwbacks to older games through dialogue alone - but I think that's solely to keep veteran fans roped in.

It's not until you have this day-and-age of games, where Western developers began to take the helm of game design and create long, intricate, character-driven storylines with tons of continuity between games, where the games continue to build on an existing universe instead of constantly making new ones to elaborate on that now have older, inquisitive, hardcore fans speculating on their continuity and as a result, modern Japanese developers, like American developers are beginning to weave continuity into their game's plots (the best example I can think of at the moment would be the Pikmin series, and the Mario and Luigi saga, in terms of "casting") whereas older franchises are scrambling to weave some continuity into their plots due to demand (as seen in Hyrule Historia)

It's...weird, frankly. It seems to me like Japanese developers focus on core gameplay mechanics with story details as an afterthought (which results sometimes in everything being so different from game to game sometimes, like the original Paper Mario in comparison to TTY it built on the old formula but did everything so differently that it felt incredibly fresh) whereas Western developers develop the two in tandem that results in a more fluid universe and less fan speculation.

tl:dr;

Japan: "What's continuity"
Adventure Island developer: "ah yes continuity. forever will our games live on in obscurity"

West: "World of Warcraft overarching storyline"
Developers afterward: "Lol"

2004

West: "Good lord Japanese developers stink. None of their plots mesh together"
Square Enix: "We fixed that. Check it out -releases sequels to numbered FF games-"