so thank you for tagging me in this
this actually
combines two of my favorite things
music history and video games
three
if you wanna count copyright law
we’ll get to that later
so
this is not really a mystery
definitely
Koji Kondo the composer of Super Mario Brothers theme
borrowed this melody from this band
the band is called friendship
they are an American jazz band
and this record was from 1979
self titled
the guitarist in this band is this guy
Lee Ritenaur who’s a pretty famous jazz musician
jazz guitarist
another member of friendship
the guy who actually wrote this song
the song is called let’s not talk about it
his name was Don Grusin and he had a brother who was a composer for movies
this guy Dave Grusin
he did the score for like
Tootsie and the firm bunch of movies
just kind of a fun fact there
and this song is called *let’s not talk about it
and it was definitely the inspiration for the like
dungeon theme for Super Mario Brothers
I should also mention that the
the part that is actually being interpolated is the bass part
even though the song was written by don
the bassist on the song was this guy
Abraham Laboriel who is a kind of legendary session bass player from Mexico
so the composer here is this guy
Koji Kondo who is a legend in video game music
but borrows fairly liberally from his influences
so this one is borrowed from friendship
and then the main theme for Super Mario Brothers is basically
an interpolation from this Japanese jazz fusion band called t square (called The Square at the time)
Kojikondo is a huge jazz fan and Japanese jazz fusion fan
he was also
interestingly a big classic rock fan
he played in classic rock bands when he was younger
if you really wanna go down a rabbit hole
listen to Deep Purple and then listen to legend of Zelda music
which was also composed by Kojikondo
so he was not afraid to borrow from his influences
as a lot of great musicians are
so you can debate whether he’s paying homage or is a plagiarist
but that kind of ties into like
the other part of this that I think is so fascinating is like
the copyright law aspect of it
you know this was early on in Nintendo
pretty early on in video games
and people were not really thinking of like
what are the copyright repercussions of borrowing melodies
and making them into video game music
Koji Kondo was kind of a pioneer in this realm
He actually has a cool story he was in college
and he found a job advertisement
like on his college job board for Nintendo
and he loved video games like arcade games
like Space Invaders and stuff
and he liked making music with synthesizers
so he only applied for one job
and that was to work for Nintendo
so anytime you’re early on in the technology
it’s gonna be kind of the wild west when it comes to copyright respect
there’s another fascinating Nintendo lawsuit
with the game Donkey Kong
because universal sued because they’re like
that’s King Kong and we own the copyright to that
you can’t just make a character called Donkey Kong
and they sued
but Nintendo’s lawyer is this guy Howard Lincoln (he also later ran the Seattle Mariners)
had went back through case law and found that universal
in a different lawsuit where they were being sued
had argued that King Kong was in the public domain
and they had won their lawsuit
so now their lawsuit against Nintendo failed
so that’s why we still have Donkey Kong
I don’t know if friendship or t square
any of these artists ever sued
I don’t know that part of it
but I do know this is not really a mystery
this is definitely where Koji Kondo got the music for Super Mario Brothers