There are hundreds of thousands of these types of posts all up in the internet’s grill, but I’ve decided to do one of my own. Why? Because I like this stuff, and sometimes I talk about it. So do you. There are entire books on this process.
Let’s just move on to…
No. 1: Super Mario Bros. has a “Negative World”
The moment this left the lips of a known NES-head, a flood of hush flowed through all parts of the room within earshot. I remember specifically, it was my neighbor Chris who first brought the legend to my attention in the second grade. He claimed that his cousin in San Bernadino had found the legendary negative levels and confirmed their existence. Strangely, he described them as a never-ending water world in which you could shoot fireballs. But even more extraordinary… the levels were discoverable in level 1-2. Gullible as I might have been, I wasn’t going to fall for that rubbish. Within weeks, I heard it again at school. And again at football practice. Same watery description, same inexplicably convenient access. I worked with the notes I took- the vague descriptions of simultaneous jumps and crouches and water pipes- trying for hours to find the levels myself and to become one of the prophets of the SMB negative worlds. But alas, I was never very good at Super Mario Bros. The mystery left me as I moved on to Sega, and then adolescence.
The internet, free time and a sense of nostalgia brought me up to speed on this about a decade after it first consumed me. Turns out, “Minus World” is actually just a big glitch in the original SMB game for NES. It’s essentially a replica of worlds 2-2 and 7-2 that warp you back to the beginning of the level instead of bringing you to the next. I knew that this was likely the explanation, but sorry if I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t some glorious alternate storyline hidden away in one of the pinnacles of video game history. It’s like finding out that, not only is there no Santa, but that your all toys came from the same place where your mom buys your underwear.
No. 2: The 3 Men & A Baby “Ghost Kid”
OK, so I’m seven, right? 3 Men and a Baby is a really, really big deal. I saw it in the theater with my parents, they talked about it at BBQs, their friends saw it, their kids saw it… even the freaky kids with the really religious parents somehow broke their “no movies not starring Michael Landon” rule to catch this flick. Everyone was completely in love with this movie.
So- I’m still seven. I’m at a summer day school, and I’m chatting with a teacher. She’s, I dunno, mid-20s. I bring up the diaper scene in the movie to describe it in detail in front of her, then laugh my ass off, when she says to me, “You know, there’s a ghost of a dead boy in that movie.” I stop dead in the story. I tell her she’s messing with me, expecting a teasing push and to move into a saner conversation. “No… it’s true.” She calls to her friend, “Hey [Tina or something], remember that thing about 3 Men in A Baby having a…” Tina or whatever interrupts: “Oh, are you talking about that ghost kid? My boyfriend showed me that- it’s so gnarly.” It was 1988. Things were still gnarly in Oklahoma.
She goes into detail about the ghost. It’s behind a curtain, it’s only in one scene. She adds a little gratis backstory. The kid committed suicide. They had used some of his old bedroom furniture as props. She remembers a last-minute detail, “Oh, he wanted to be a magician. That’s why his ghost is wearing a top hat.” The penny drops… my brain, still the tender age of seven years, begins to spin. I ask her if the “ghost” is about four feet tall. “Yeah.” And, it’s wearing a top hat. “That’s it.” And the scene is in Ted Danson’s character’s bedroom? “Yeah, I think so… you saw it?!” No, I say (I’m still seven when I say this), “That was a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson. It’s in another part of the movie.” Here’s where it gets interesting: she tells me I’m crazy- and that I’m being rude. Later on, she picks me last for hot potato and gives me the stink eye for a week.
This one really doesn’t need an explanation- it was one of those silly little pre-digital age urban legends that we wanted to believe so badly that we made it seem plausible with the most insane excuses. I later heard someone say that the kid supposedly killed himself with a shotgun that can also be seen in the shot. In a sense, the internet and all it’s cynicism has taken the steam out of these tall tales. Sadly, this is no longer a world where precocious seven-year-olds have to pull the shades of reality down for their elder caretakers.
No. 3: Mikey Died from Pop Rocks & Pepsi
This one actually never got to me- my girlfriend told me about it and I thought it was just too goo not to include. Legend goes like this: Mikey, the finicky kid made famous by enjoying a breakfast cereal that everyone thought was delicious (I liked Vienna sausages and I couldn’t even get on the morning announcements) apparently also enjoyed the closest thing an 80s kid could get to crack cocaine…. Pop Rocks. In addition, rumor was that he liked to dabble in another illicit kid drug from that era: copious amounts of cola. Combined, it was a highball of doom… literally an explosive cocktail that could and supposedly did take lives. One Little Mikey’s in particular.
Given that I didn’t actually hear this one as a kid, I went right to the research. The whole thing was devised by the superlative “they” that now make less-reliable cars, uncomfortable airline seats and crappy television. First, they observed the gaseous nature of both Pop Rocks and Pepsi. Then, they imagined the effect of these two substances combined in a human gastrointestinal system. Afterwards, they placed the whole thing into a narrative in which some sugar-crazed or culinarily ambitious child met his demise. Why did they choose Mikey? My guess is that famous kids didn’t grow on Disney trees back then, and Mikey was as good as they could have done to punctuate the shebang with a little celebrity intrigue.
It didn’t help that, in 1983, Pop Rocks stopped advertising. To the astute conspiracy theorist, silence speaks volumes.
FOOTNOTE: The actor who played Mikey actually reprised his role as a college-aged kid in later Life cereal commercials and seems to currently be working as an ad executive in New York.
No. 4: There’s another Super Mario Bros. 2
Yes, its another Super Mario Bros. legend. Look, I said the game was influential.
Before The Wizard took our remaining (and by that time waning) NES attention sharply to Super Mario Bros. 3, there was a weird little rumor buzzing around that the SMB 2 we all knew and some of us kinda liked in a twisted way wasn’t the only one out there. There was, according to the kids with subscriptions to Nintendo Power magazine, an “evil” version that was so hard it was banned in the U.S. Minds blew at the mere suggestion that a game could be so unbeatable that our nation’s legislators took time away from improving health care (ha) and ending the energy crisis (double ha) to make sure that kids never had to experience it’s criminal difficulty.
Turns out, they were about 63% right on this one. There was a Super Mario Bros. 2 that was released in Japan long before our familiar U.S. version that was essentially a much more difficult version of the first game. In fact, it was such a hard (not to mention unoriginal) game that NES decided to redevelop the game for the U.S. They took an odd little Arabian Nights-themed game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, slapped Mario, Luigi, Toad and the Princess into the player roles, simmered and allowed to steep into the quasi-canonical SMB 2 we know today. Despite the rumors, the government did not intervene on this one. However, around that same time, kids did get a taste of federal brouhaha in their video game stew with the 
controversy surrounding an arcade game called NARC, in which mercenary-blooded cops walk around with humongous guns blowing up junkies who throw needles at them. The fear: kids who played violent video games would act violently in school. Had you asked me, an impossibly difficult and only slightly updated version of Super Mario Bros. had a much higher potential of inciting violence in a kid back then than hosing down a few 8 bit punks with an Uzi that consisted of 3 black lines.
