Fans are debating if Mario Wonder has recast Charles Martinet

Nintendo fans are debating whether newly-announced Mario games could have recast historic voice actor Charles Martinet.

During its latest Nintendo Direct presentation on Wednesday, Nintendo showed off trailers for several new games, including Super Mario Bros Wonder and WarioWare: Move It.

Both these trailers featured soundbites from characters traditionally voiced by Martinet, and many believe that they don’t quite sound like him, to the point where ‘Charles Martinet’ was one of the topic trending topics on Twitter on Thursday.

The Super Mario Bros Wonder trailer, in particular, has had people poring over short phrases uttered by Mario, the most contentious being at the end of the trailer where he says “wowie zowie”.

Others suggest that a clip in the WarioWare: Move It trailer in which Wario says “excellent” sounds different to a similar “excellent” sample from older WarioWare titles.

There are numerous possible reasons why some fans believe Mario sounds different, one of which would obviously be if Nintendo has indeed replaced him with a new voice actor.

However, the fact that so many Mario games reuse voice lines, a number of which were recorded many years ago, means any time new lines are recorded they can initially sound jarring or different.

The recent release of The Super Mario Bros Movie will also doubtless still be fresh in many players’ minds, due to the controversy around the decision to cast Chris Pratt as Mario and reduce Martinet to cameo roles.

The debate around Mario’s voice in the games may also be exacerbated by the fact that Martinet, who used to post fairly regularly on Twitter, hasn’t posted anything for the past three months.

However, one of his more recent tweets was a photo of him having breakfast in Kyoto, where Nintendo is based. This may lend more weight to the argument that he’s still very much the voice of Mario.

VGC has contacted Nintendo for clarification on the situation.

For more Mario Bros. Wonder, check out our guides for how to unlock the Special World levels and locations for all Mario Wonder secret exits. At the end? Find out how to unlock the final badge and how to beat the Final-Final Test.