Funny thing is that's Mario from Mario Land. The SMB Mario isn't mentioned, neither is the one from Donkey Kong, nor the one from Mario Bros. Key Mario entries imho are missing from this pic, and odd thing the new mario pinball is displayed but not the old one.

pic 2 isn't working I'm interested to see it.

Hmm...it works for me.  Try the link?

http://static.fjcdn.com/large/pictures/3f/8b/3f8ba6_283681.jpg

There are a bunch more like it.

Not much change other than the technological advance.

Even the link didn't work for me for some reason.

Well, I like this, and I know one of you or Trucks posted this earlier I think. It's definitely material to work with.

The one on the bottom is the most representative of what I mean. Look at his pose, why is he hunching to the side, it looks silly. In the Super NES sprite, he's jumping, and that's cause he's trynig to jump higher. In the one on the right, he's fanfaring, and it kind of looks awkward. Look at the difference between that fanfare and the one in my avi.

Very different emotion. Even in the sunshine model he looks more focused on his adventure.

On the topic, here is some sunshine artwork. To me this works:

Some attitude on the boxart. It's too bad the game lacked appeal in general...

I think it was a great game personally, but some things just didn't work, and it was undersold by the gamecube platform imho. Little retail exposure, little interest in the cube due to PS2 dominance. It's hard to sell a game on a console that struggles to garner attention.

But I think some of the direction was right, and if paired to what made Galaxy a success, that mixed bag would be the ultimate Mario direction imho.

For contrast, here is the Galaxy box art:

And the direction gets worse:

Well, it's the one most looking like original Mario. And Ron Jeremy.   

if it was not kiddy, it would be bizarre. A fat, short plumber with mustache killing creatures by jumping on them; that concept with a more real/mature orientation would be bizarre as fuck!

:) On the Wikipedia page I got this:
" Ronald Jeremy Hyatt (born March 12, 1953), usually called Ron Jeremy, is an American adult film actor. Nicknamed "The Hedgehog", and "The Agnes Buster" (due to an ex-girlfriend) ^[1] he was ranked by AVN at number one in their "The 50 Top Porn Stars of All Time" list.^[4] Jeremy has also appeared in non-pornographic films "

@bold italics. Is something amiss? :3

Ron Jeremy is nicknamed "the Hedgehog" because he is an extremely hairy man, or so I've been told.  I've never watched his movies... or Peter North's.  I've just heard their names before... honest!

Yep: you forgot to mention he made a porn Mario movie that's actually less aweful than the official non-porn one.    Should my future children want to, I'd have no doubt on which Mario movie allowing them to watch!   

He's jumping in celebration in the last picture, something like this:

Joy is an emotion too you know. Mario doesn't need to be accompanied a story of Shakespearean proportion. We just need a basic reason to go through multiple levels.