We have musicals based on everything. Musicals based on singing trains, making musicals, cats…So logically someone is bound to make a musical based on a video game at some point. Thankfully, plenty of fans of both games and musical theater have heard the curtain call, and so we have a number of fan-made musical productions based on Nintendo series.
Being one of the most popular Nintendo franchises, it’s only natural that Mario is represented fairly heavily on stage. There’s no official Nintendo-licensed musical to speak of, but plenty of Mario fans have taken it upon themselves to make their own elaborate stage productions featuring plenty of plumbers, princesses and, in the case of this first performance, music by The Beatles.
It’s not quite as elaborate as the first Mario musical, but I have to give them props for the Goomba costume. Even if it never actually does anything in the performance, it’s still a nice costume. It’s probably for the best that there was never an official Mario musical, as a Nintendo-managed one probably wouldn’t feature Mario playing air guitar. Of course, that’s not to say that there weren’t any musicals that received the Nintendo seal of approval, as this next clip should make perfectly clear.
Pokemon Live was a musical stage show based on the Pokemon anime series. Running for 90 minutes, the production featured numerous songs from the cartoon and fleshed out the series’ storyline a bit (by which I mean it just made things up). It goes without saying that the musical was largely ignored by critics. Oh, and the amazing new Pokemon that was teased in the trailer? It’s just a robotic Mewtwo – so technically it’s not a Pokemon at all. The musical toured several US cities as well as a few other countries like Portugal and Belgium from 2000 to 2002, which is why it’s impossible to find any high quality clips of the performance. Regardless, enjoy this track from the cast recording CD while you ponder how 10 year old Ash Ketchum suddenly became a tenor.
Pokemon isn’t the only RPG to be turned into a musical, though. Youtube user, “Brentalfloss”, who some might recognize as “that guy who added lyrics to the Mega Man 3 intro and the Moon theme from DuckTales” arranged one of Chrono Trigger’s most notable pieces, Frog’s Theme, into a musical extravaganza. Credit should also go to Parker Simmons (aka, Youtube user, “DarqV”) who animated it.
Technically, this next one isn’t a musical so much as an opera, but it’s so epic I just had to include it.
This Japanese commercial for the first Fire Emblem game (also known as “That One With Marth In It”) featured a full vocal interpretation of the game’s theme music sung by a full choir of knights, paladins and even a horse.
The commercial was recreated for the release of Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi (also known as “That One With Roy In It”). The horse also returned.
The song also featured in Super Smash Bros. Brawl where, as well as the vocals being changed to Latin, the lyrics were completely changed. The original songs were all about advertising the games and so “Fire Emblem, tough simulation/
When you’ll begin playing it, you won’t be able to sleep anymore” was changed to the more sensible “Fire Emblem, companions walk/The endless path together” and so on.
The above video is a rough storyboard of a song from Phoenix Wright: The Musical. It’s a fan-made project with the intention of taking all of the events of the first Phoenix Wright game and turning it into a fully animated musical. The project still seems to be in its infancy, with no finalized recordings and only rough animation, but it seems that the project has grown big enough that Capcom themselves have started to take notice. Just recently, the team received an e-mail from Capcom. But it wasn’t a Cease and Desist, it was instead an inquiry into the musical with the proposition of a licensing agreement. It’ll still be a while until we see the spiky-haired lawyer take on Broadway, but at least we have a few live performances of songs from the project to tide us over until then.
This isn’t the first Phoenix Wright musical that has received the green light from Capcom. The Takarazuka Revue is a Japanese all-female musical theatre troupe who perform classic musicals, operas and plays. And then they perform a musical based on Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
So yes. It’s a Japanese musical adaption of the English version of a Japanese game about lawyers investigating crime scenes and shouting at each other where every character, regardless of gender, is played (fairly convincingly) by a woman. And it had a sequel.
If these productions have proved anything, it’s that you can make a musical out of anything. Well, no one seems to have made a Zelda one yet, but it’s bound to be created eventually. Still, there are a surprising amount of musicals based on Nintendo games, all of which are summed up perfectly in this final clip – Brawl: The Musical.
