Mythology Gag / Friday Night Funkin': Mario's Madness

"You want fun?! WARIO SHOW YOU FUN!"

— The Wario Apparition

Given that this Friday Night Funkin' mod is based around Mario-related creepypastas, it’s no surprise the mod itself is loaded with references towards its source materials.

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It's-A-Me / Starman Slaughter

• In the cutscene preceding It's-A-Me, you can faintly hear Hotel Mario's "NO" when Girlfriend tries to use her demonic powers, and is prevented entirely.
• Like with Too Slow in Vs Sonic.exe, the name for It’s-A-Me is a reference to one of Mario’s Character Catchphrases.
• Super Horror Mario himself isn't actually based off of any specific fanfic; instead, he is from an infamous piece of work called "Super Horror Mario", made by DeviantArtist Shadow-Shana in 2011.
• The poison mushrooms notes in It's-A-Me are taken from CoolRash's Mario.exe fangame.
• Sandi has said that the start of Starman Slaughter is a direct reference to Cmyth's scrapped TGT song, Paralysis.
• Similar to Horror Mario, Horror Peach's design draws heavily from another art piece by the same artist. Meanwhile, Yoshi.EXE takes from the jumpscare◊ seen at the end of his origin game.
• In the cutscene following Starman Slaughter, Horror Mario says that "Mario will get you next time!", the same quote that inspired Shadow-Sana to create the original Super Horror Mario art. Additionally, just before he says this, a brief shot shows him in the exact same pose as the original drawing.

So Cool

• The concept of the song is that Boyfriend is streaming a reaction to the reveal of Chris Pratt as Mario, with the intro itself being taken from the original presentation.
• Chris Pratt’s idle is taken from the mugshot used in the reveal of his role.
• At the beginning and near the end of the song, Chris Pratt’s “it’s a me, a Mario” meme is used.
• Two of the messages in the live chat call Chris Pratt “the Jurassic Park guy” and “the guy from Marvel”, referencing his roles as Owen Grady in the Jurassic World trilogy and Star Lord in the MCU respectively.
• The song’s game over has audio of Chris Pratt talking about his role as Mario playing in the background, which comes from a memetic video that spawned the “it’s a me, a Mario” meme.

Nourishing Blood

• The song's seemingly non-sequitur title is actually based on a quote seen on the physical cartridge◊, describing a Cheat Code has been programmed in to the bootleg. It's meant to say that holding up and pressing start will refill your health, but the translation came out a bit wrong.
• The song is entirely built around the Flintstones theme, which played on the title screen of the original bootleg (a hack of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy). The song also uses other memetic songs like Scatman’s World, All Star, Peanut Butter Jelly Time and the Space Jam theme song.
• Grand Dad's vocals are sampled from the infamous video of Vinesauce streamer Joel's astonished reaction upon seeing the title screen. A brief audio clip from the video also provides the lead-in to the song.
• The majority of the song is styled after 7 GRAND DAD's title screen: A solid blue void, with characters having blue outlines. At the start of the song Grand Dad jumps down from the title text to face BF, and the "PUSH START BUTTON" text can be seen below the battlers.
• Grand Dad's up pose on the "title screen" portions of the song feature the miniature Fred Flintstone in a star that appears on the title screen.
• Partway through the song, other Joel memes like BonziBuddy, Kermit the Frog and the Ghostbusters logo appear behind Girlfriend, as well as running around in the background. Bob Ross appears as well, and the painting he leaves behind resembles one of the landscapes drawn in Joel's "Bob Ross Mario Paint" video.
• Later on, the sprites shift to the original 8-Bit style of 7 Grand Dad's gameplay, with other bootlegs like Kung Fu Mari in the background. While this happens, Grand Dad's and BF's health bar icons change, reflecting how the original bootleg featured wildly different designs for the main character between title screen and gameplay.
• While most pause screens in the mod use a remix of "Creative Exercise" from Mario Paint, Nourishing Blood has it remixed further with the infamous "Who's been drawing dicks?" quote from Joel placed across the whole track.
• Should the player die in this song, the soundtrack of the death screen is a random song from Joel's Super Ghostbusters album (with every song being included).

MARIO SING AND GAME RYTHM 9

• The butchered title and concept of the stage as a whole is a direct reference to stereotypical Mario bootlegs. The musical style of the song is also reminiscent of the style of the original Somari rom hack.
• Boyfriend and Girlfriend in this song are now a Pikachu and Eevee respectively, as a nod to Somari 3D Blast 5 where several enemies are replaced with Eevees and Eeveelutions.
• BF and GF being Pokémon, given the nature of Friday Night Funkin's gameplay, may also reference the "PICADANCE" DDR clone from the somewhat infamous "Pokemon 4-in-1" NES bootleg.
• All of Somari’s poses are based on poses Sonic does.
• The song’s mechanic requires players to hit rings in order to survive, which all spill out if the player misses any notes, as a direct reference to how rings work in official Sonic games.

Alone

• Beta Luigi’s idle shows him holding a white flower, identical to one he holds in his official artwork.
• The remaster of Alone is heavily built around the main theme of the original Luigi's Mansion, the game that the entire song is based on. Additionally, the instrumental contains some references to Totaka’s Song, which can be heard in two different tracks in Luigi’s Mansion.
• At the start of "Alone", a silhouette of Boyfriend hanging by a noose briefly appears the screen alongside the lightning flash. This is based on a visual glitch back in Luigi's Mansion where, when E. Gadd's calling Luigi while he's in the attic, Luigi's shadow gets displaced upwards high enough to leave his feet off the ground, giving the illusion of hanging above.
• V2 adds a few more:
  • Boyfriend and Girlfriend become Luigi’s Mansion ghosts.
  • Mario appears in the song trapped in a painting, referencing his fate in Beta Luigi’s story.
  • Losing gets you the message “Good night!”, which is the same game over phrase used in all Luigi’s Mansion games.

OH GOD NO / I HATE YOU

• OH GOD NO on the level map is a hole in the water, which is the level where most of the creepypasta takes place in.
• The names of both songs are references to the original creepypasta. OH GOD NO is Luigi’s last words when Mario throws him into the lava, while I HATE YOU is a Title Drop.
• OH GOD NO is a direct recreation of the original creepypasta’s climax, with Mario facing off against Luigi. The song also has Luigi saying several lines from the original creepypasta, complete with either pixel art from the original creepypasta or text in blood with it, depending on where it showed up in the pasta.
• The game over screen for OH GOD NO is an inversion of the final image in the original creepypasta, being based on the end screen for Super Mario World; Bowser is in place of Peach, and Mario is the one who has been burned instead of Luigi.
• Near the end of OH GOD NO, a weird-looking mushroom appears only once in the chart, referencing its odd placement in the original creepypasta. Like the .exe adaptation, it causes a jumpscare upon hitting it, but instead of numerous images from unrelated sources, it's instead a single image Foreshadowing Luigi's soon-to-be fate.
• In the background of I HATE YOU, multiple eyeless Boos and drowned Mario corpses from the original pasta appear to vibe to the song. The splash of blood reading "I HATE YOU" also appears, as does the shadowy figure in one of the windows.
• In V2, the end of I HATE YOU has Boyfriend using his cape to knock Luigi into the lava, as a direct reference to his fate in the original creepypasta (only it was Mario knocking Luigi into the lava there).

Thalassophobia

• Thalassophobia is based on the infamous hoax of the L is Real statue, with the courtyard being the location of the song and Luigi being stuck beneath the statue’s water.
• The main gimmick of the song is a slowly deteriorating Super Mario 64 health bar at the top of the screen, which can be replenished by hitting coins, a reference to how drowning can be prolonged in Super Mario 64 by collecting coins.
• The midway point of the song has the silhouette of a Maw-Ray swim by, with Super Mario 64 being the game it made its debut.

Apparition

• The song takes place in the hallway where the Wario Apparition is said to appear in Mario 64.
• Apparition’s HUD in V2 is styled after an old recording from the mid 90s, as a reference to the style of most "Mario 64 is Personalised" media.
• The pause menu music in "Apparition" is the infamous 'nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah' pause theme from Wario World.
• Wario Apparition's left pose (and his mid-song animation in V2) has him temporarily gain Mind-Control Eyes, a reference to a commercial for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins wherein Wario attempts to hypnotize the viewer into destroying Mario.
• The instrumental break of "Apparition" is the infamous "Looping Stairway" theme from Super Mario 64, which sees association with the Wario Apparition through the "You want fun? Wario show you fun!" meme based on him.
• Wario Apparition’s up and down poses in the Legacy version of the song are based on fanmade images of the Apparition in Mario 64.

Last Course

• The visual aspect of the dodge warning is a blue block with an orange mesh exclamation mark on it, styled after the Message Blocks from Super Mario World.
• The song’s background is a remake of the background in a comic he appears in, being in the forest with several eaten enemies littered throughout.

Dark Forest

• The start of the song uses the title screen theme from Super Mario World.
• Coronation Day Peach’s design is based on her design in the unused Pink Forest level.
• The background has a broken bridge that Boyfriend and Girlfriend are standing on, an element originating from ‘The that Peach ends up falling down on.
• The middle of the song has Coronation Day Peach throw Boyfriend into the cabin from 'the in the middle of the song, complete with Mario’s corpse in the background.
• The ending has the background and Peach glitching out, just like what originally happened in ‘The.

Bad Day

• Super Bad Mario is depicted as pixel art while Boyfriend and Girlfriend are in the normal art style, matching how Super Bad Mario in his original videos is depicted as pixel art while everyone else is in live action.
• The background of the song takes place in an illustrated recreation of a clip from the first Super Bad Mario video, where Mario bounces off a cat's head to get a coin.
• The song’s mechanics are the most used things by Super Bad Mario to cause fails in his original videos, those being shells, poison mushrooms and spin jumping.

Day Out

• The song’s art style is a recreation of Luigi’s Day Out’s style, right down to Mario’s shading.
• The idles for both Mario and Luigi are directly inspired by poses they make in the original video.
• Several of the voice clips used in the song originate from Luigi’s Day Out, albeit with different context from the original video (for example, in the original video, Mario calls Luigi a dumbass geek because he pissed himself, while in the song, he does so for Luigi joining the song).

Dictator

• Mario's speech to Boyfriend is a parallel of what he said to Sonic in the original video, with some details changed.
• The song’s art style is made to resemble that of the original series, with all shading being in black.
• The ending of the song and the game over has Secret History Mario execute Boyfriend and Girlfriend via banzai bill, as a reference to what he does to Sonic in the video.

Race Traitors

• Like with most other songs in Content Cosmos, the song is made to resemble the original video’s art style.
• Mario’s line at the start of the song is lifted straight from the original video.

No Hope

• Devil Mario's mid-song dialogue is lifted straight from the beginning of the fourth episode of the Power Star series, originally stated to Luigi.
• The background is based on the ending silhouette of the series, with Luigi dead on the left and Peach's body on the right.

Golden Land

• As the name and GB's visual gimmick implies, a majority of the song is based on Super Mario Land 2: The Six Golden Coins
  • The song begins with a few bars off of "Choose Your Pipe", which itself is built on the main motif that many of the songs in Six Golden Coins is based on.
  • After GB reveals his true face, Mario Castle in the background has the silhouette of Wario dangling off of the front by a noose, a more grisly version of his defeat in the original game where he simply jumped off the balcony and ran for the hills.

No Party

• The song's gimmick of writing words on the "touch screen" is a recreation of the "Host Hoedown" minigame seen in the series' video of the same name. When asked to write "criminal", it's presented in red instead of gray, as it was in the original video.
• The introduction text of No Party, showing the song's title and composer, uses the "Start!" font from Mario Party DS. The song also ends the same way as minigames in the same game, with the "Finish!" text and whistle sound effect.
• The Game Over is entirely based on the original “Piracy is No Party” image, which itself was taken from a scene in Mario Party DS.
• One of Hallyboo's quotes when you lose is that "you were always destined to fail, just like Luigi". In the original Host Hoedown video, Luigi is the player character, and gets crushed by a Thwomp after "CRIMINAL" moves around to be impossible to write.
  • Another Game Over quote is "We don't serve criminals here," a nod to Monty Mole's item shop dialogue in the series' second video.
• Hallyboo is voiced by Juno Songs, who created "Host Hoedown WITH LYRICS" and later became Hallyboo's official voice actor.

Paranoia

• The song takes place in Mario Clash, one of the only 3 Mario based games on the Virtual Boy.
• The level's opening includes a warning for people recording or streaming that it's best to use full-screen capture instead of window capture (due to the level's window- and desktop-manipulation gimmick); the screen is stylized in the same manner as the Clash's boot-up warning telling users to read the instruction and precaution booklets, down to including the message in Japanese below.

Overdue

• The Freeplay icon for Overdue shows Mr. L tearing a rectangle in half to bust through it, referencing when he does the same to the world map in Too Late.exe.
• All three of the backgrounds used during the song are based on levels in Too Late.exe as well. The forest with the car is based on the first new level, the fleshy interior is a mid-game level, and the hallway with infinite Mr. L's is taken from the game's ending.

Powerdown / Demise

• MX's dialogue during "Power Down" is taken straight from his game of origin, Mario '85.
• In the background of "Power Down", you can see the decapitated head of Lucas (Mario '85's protagonist) impaled on a stake, just like in the Game Over screen of the game.
• In the background of Powerdown, several elements from the original Mario ‘85, like the living cloud, hill with an eye, bisected Toad and broken flagpole are littered across the area the song is in.
• Demise is a complete recreation of the iconic chase scene from Mario ‘85, with MX chasing Boyfriend across 1-1. The climax also has MX fall into, and then jump right out of a hole like in the chase scene’s Bait-and-Switch.
• Demise has a segment referencing the Super Mario Bros. 2 boss theme, which had been used in Mario ‘85 during the MX chase segment.

Promotion

• The introductory cutscene begins as a recreation of the original Promo Show video, until it's interrupted by BF and GF falling from above.
• Partway in the song, Luigi can be seen underwater on the screen next to Mario, causing the plumber's upbeat demeanor to turn morose. In the original Promo Show video, Luigi was used to advertise Super Mario 64, only to end up drowning instead, with Mario being Forced to Watch as Luigi's health slowly drained.
• The game over for the song (as well as the other songs in Classified Castle) is a direct remake of the (now removed) ending of “Genesis” from the original series, with Stanley fading from the dark as distorted music and a voice repeating “number 9” over and over plays in the background, up until Stanley awakens.

Abandoned

• "Abandoned" takes place in Wet-Dry World, and forces you to hit the water level switches from the same stage in order to keep the water level down.

The End

• The scene at the beginning of the song shows a photo of Boyfriend and Girlfriend posing while Costume Mario lurks in the background, which recreates the ending screen seen in 09.02.97, only with Boyfriend and Girlfriend taking the place of the crying child. The scene is also accompanied by a slightly off-kilter remix of Donut Plains and a pitched-up scream of a Headcrab Zombie, which also directly references the ending screen.

All-Stars

• Ultra M's real eyes being on his hat invokes Cappy's appearance. In the same vein, the introduction to the song shows the mod's other characters with Ultra M's eyes on their headwear, akin to how Cappy could both capture enemies and take the form of other hats.
• The first act of "All-Stars" takes place in a ruined version of New Donk City's park. The capture-able "A" from the MARIO puzzle is seen embedded in the ground, and the "I" is still on its pedestal.
• The second act's choice of opponents—LG, W4R, and Y0SH, along with Omega—correspond to the playable cast of Super Mario 64 DS.
• The ending of "All-Stars" quotes the "game over" theme from Super Mario World.
• Ultra M's hymn towards the end of "All-Stars" begin with "Come now, take the step. Don't look back, there's nothing left", a twist on the fact that most 2D Mario games prevent you from moving too far to the left in the level, to remind you that you've long since lost the ability to turn back. It's possibly an even more specific reference to the very first Super Mario Bros.'s Ratchet Scrolling, where the camera wouldn't move to the left after being pulled to the right, possibly trapping Mario on a ledge with a risky jump ahead.
• Like with Triple Trouble in Vs Sonic.exe, the name of the final story song is lifted straight from the name of a game in the source series.

Bonus song (Unbeatable)

• Unbeatable is entirely based on an old and infamous Nintendo commercial, with all the characters being low polygon 3D models like the original commercial, and three characters from it (The Figure, the Duck Hunt Dog, and Bowser) singing. Several lines from the commercial are also used throughout the song.
• Mr. Sys’ name (short for Steal Your Soul) is a reference to a Nostalgia Critic episode, where the Critic makes a joke about how it feels like the animated man from the commercial is trying to steal his soul through the TV screen.
• A part in Bowser's section has the SMB1 castle theme play in the instrumental, a nod to the song's use as the commercial's backing music. The end of the section also prominently features castle organs, a common instrument in more modern themes in Bowser's castle.
• All four of the song’s mechanics are similar to the tricks old Nintendo games would do to make themselves Nintendo Hard, specifically One-Hit Kills, getting hit by things you had no way of knowing about on your first playthrough (the zapper and fire bar), and of course, the game itself blatantly cheating (knocking your health back constantly to the point that the song ends off in a draw).

Other

• The credits showcase a series of images that suggest that the entire thing was a musical production, similar to how Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 are revealed to be All Just a Dream and a form of stage play, respectively.
• The Warp Zone from V1 is based directly on the Warp Zone of Super Mario Bros. 3, a tan isle with gray pipes leading to different levels, down to the numbers above each pipe. The landmass even shares the general shape of the original, albeit with the right edge extended offscreen. While V2 revamps the level select into a full-blown overworld, the hub world is a recreation of the map used in V1, and while BF no longer uses pipes to get from world to world (instead using Star Road stars from Super Mario World instead), the classic gray pipes from the SMB3 warp zone can be seen littered around the edges as decor.
• Content Cosmos's design is pretty clearly based on Star Road from World, with a nearly-identical background (differing primarily in that the smiling moon from the original is faceless in the mod).

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