LEVEL Magazine, Issue 44: Pages 34-35
Image by LZ Creations
The last spread from a 6-page article written by Johan Martinsson about my book, The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
Special thanks to Mózsi Kiss for providing the following translation.
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Page 34 – When LEVEL gets a hold of Logan Zawacki, he says that he is now 28 years old and the manager of the photographic laboratory at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida.
28 years. That means that he would have been four years old in 1983, when he supposedly received his first science grant. Something is – as you have of course understood already – not right here.
It turns out that it is all made up. The scholarship, the subterranean tunnel, the forgotten island, the whole story.
Or not all of it. One of these things actually does exist. The book where all this was documented.
It is 76 beautiful pages filled with excavated skeletons from Mario’s world, tons of facts and topographical maps of the invented islands – complete with places such as the “Pipe Maze,” “Vanilla Dome,” and the “Castle of Koopa.”
“Imagine if Mario’s universe really had existed! That idea made me take on the assignment of interpreting the Mario mythology from a more realistic and scientific point of view,” says Zawacki. “Science has always used skeletons as physical proof of ancient cultures, so I decided to do the same.”
Zawacki started searching for pictures of real skeletal parts that could be used to illustrate the fossilized remains of the Mario characters.
“Every fossil consists of several different components that I have joined together. For example, I created Bowser’s skeleton by combining skeletal parts from a bear, an iguana, a turtle and a dolphin.”
After creating the images of the fossils, Zawacki fixed them to the paper through a printing technique that was considered out-dated already in 1860 – all in order to give the reader a feeling of flipping through an old book on anatomy.
The result feels so authentic, it is difficult not to be convinced that both goombas and chain chomps really existed, once upon a time. But the book also lets us know that they do not exist anymore – an insight which leaves the reader unexpectedly discouraged.
The Mushroom Kingdom is one of the places where time stands still. Peach, Luigi and Mario can never age and die – they can only play their roles over and over in a drama that is repeated in infinite, timeless cycles.
But the Excavation of Mushroom Island sees that world in the rear-view mirror. It has been destroyed. All its inhabitants are dead. Page 20 shows the skeleton of the Princess. Zawacki reports that an examination of the body revealed that she had a large tumor in her left breast. On page 49, we learn that a Homo Sapiens male dressed in a green cap with an L-shaped character had been trapped in a pipe and had starved to death. Page 55 reveals the discovery of a human head, which had been separated from the rest of the body by a falling block in the Donut Caverns. It is Mario.
The immortal are dead, and it feels wrong.
“The fact that all the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom were dead became inevitable the exact moment I decided to present them as fossils from a long lost time. And I understood that I had to explain why the characters died to place them in a credible reality – where all people, plants and mythological things have one thing in common: death.”
Page 35 – It is unclear what Shigeru Miyamoto thinks of Logan Zawacki’s scientifically unsentimental way of killing all his iconic characters – but all things considered, it is difficult to think that the game genius would feel anything but honored by “The Excavation of Mushroom Island.”
Not because it confirms that he has always made historically correct games – but because it confirms that he has made something much more than this. He has created his own history. He has fantasized and turned his fantasies into physical reality.
Once upon a time, the idea of a plumber who jumped on small two-legged brown animals and collected coins to get extra lives, was just some funny thoughts in the head of a young Japanese game designer. Today, Mario is a reality for billions of people.
“The Excavation of Mushroom Island” is a tribute to the fantasy and its incredible power. It is difficult to imagine a better way to show Shigeru Miyamoto respect.
[The caption: To order Logan Zawacki’s book “The Excavation of Mushroom Island,” send an e-mail to LZcreations@hotmail.com]
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