Dream Sketches: Super Mario Good Morning Starshine (Patreon)

The other night I had a particularly vivid dream that I simply had to draw out!

So in this dream I'm playing a new sequel to Super Mario Sunshine titled Super Mario Good Morning Starshine, though it had nothing to do with the song. The game opened up on this tropical island where this sort of cross between a luau and a series of Olympic-style games were being held, with athletes practicing alongside hula dancers. Mario was there, being controlled by me, just walking around some palm trees when suddenly this giant bird monster appeared.

I happened upon this gigantic bird creature, a huge colorful ostrich-like thing that stood well over 20 feet tall, with powerful scaly yellow legs, a vibrant red and green body, and a red head with big angry looking yellow eyes and a flamingo-like beak. It immediately started attacking mario, running up and snapping at him with its huge beak, but I kept dodging it by jumping up in the air as it ran past Mario. It would then turn around and immediately smash its beak into the ground, sprinting at Mario trying to ram into him like a snowplow. I kept jumping and dodging its attacks like a bullfighter, but eventually I missed the timing and the bird monster flipped Mario up high into the air, then opened its beak wide and snapped Mario up, swallowing him whole.

The screen faded to black and then cut to a scene showing Mario being dumped into the bird's stomach. I remember thinking to myself how impressive it was that the developers bothered to put this sequence in the game instead of just having the bird spit us out or something. The stomach itself was big enough for Mario to stand up in. It was dimly lit and largely empty, a big round room the size of a walk-in closet, made of veiny, slimy-looking purple organic flesh. There wasn't much to look at but at the opposite end of the room was a tunnel in the wall going straight down and filled to the top with a nasty greenish-yellow digestive fluid, no doubt the entrance to the intestines. But what really caught my eye was the sight of Scratch the chicken-bot from the old Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, seemingly dead or unconscious lying on the floor with his head and one arm hanging down into the pit, floating in the acid. His eyes had big cartoon X's in them.

I made Mario walk up to Scratch to investigate, reaching out to give his body a nudge, only for Scratch to suddenly wake up and grab Mario by the arm, tugging him closer. "That's telling, Hedgehog!" He screamed in Mario's face with his trademark squawking voice. "That's telling! Ah-ha ah-haaaaa!" Mario desperately tried to pull away from Scratch, struggled to get out of the robot chicken’s grip, but he was too strong, pulling Mario right up off his feet. He then immediately dived down into the tunnel full of acid, dragging Mario down with him, the "camera" cutting to a view from inside the intestine to show Mario desperately holding his breath with huge frightened eyes as he was helplessly pulled deeper into the tunnel.

The view faded to black again, then opened back up outside at the resort, but from a worm's eye view looking up at some palm trees. Scratch walked into the shot looking down at the viewer with a wicked grin, then proudly lifted up Mario into view, or rather, what was left of him: only his head, neck, and right arm were still intact, but beneath that dangled a clean white spine with a few ribs hanging on, as well as a black electric cord with a plug sprouting out of his left arm stump for some reason. The cross section of his body had visible pink meat but otherwise there was no blood, and he had black X's for eyes. It was overall cartoonishly gory, but still shocked me how graphic it was for a Mario game. That's when I woke up.