Widely considered one of the greatest YTPMVs of all time, Big Beat Mario has been stuck in our collective heads for a full ten years now. Sort of insane how time flies, huh? In honor of its anniversary, I’ve sat down with its creator, Triple_sSs (henceforth referred to as “Triple”), to briefly discuss the now-classic video.
What were some of the inspirations to make BBM?
Triple: Well first and foremost, my biggest inspiration for it was the music of Fatboy Slim. I’d say Fatboy Slim is up there among my fave artists, to be honest. He was one of the pioneers of the Big Beat electronic genre that was popular in the 90s. It usually had heavy compressed breakbeats, loud acid synths, and the use of samples from old funk & rock songs. The kind of thing you’d expect from the 90s basically. For example, his song “Build It Up, Tear It Down” shares some similarities with Big Beat Mario if you ask me.
Also I had made some sample-based electronic tracks around that time as a side hobby, and I wanted to try putting those skills to use to make a YTPMV. While some of my other YTPs from the time may have had YTPMV sections, I felt like this was my chance at making a legit, full-fledged YTPMV.
The idea for BMM started out when I had the Hotel Mario cutscenes in Sony Vegas, and I came upon that part where Mario unplugs the toasters, and the music which plays over the image of the lights flickering in the hotel caught my ear. Hearing the one part that has those trumpets playing, combined with the loud distorted audio that the Quebec Gamers cutscenes are known for, made me think “Hey, this kinda sounds like something I’d hear in a Big Beat track. Maybe I could build a cool YTPMV around this!” So I started looping that part over and over, and that’s how everything started.
How long did it take to make?
Triple: My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but I believe the idea started sometime in the fall of ’08, which was over a year prior, and I was working on the project in my spare time over the next year, then it really started coming together in the latter half of ’09. And during this time, I was also sharing my progress with a friend of mine, NS2. Though he’s not involved in the YTP community anymore, he was a very close friend at the time and I wanted to let him know about what I was working on. He was very encouraging the whole time and he could tell I was making something special.
The part in the middle where it cuts to the “Toast” segment and switches to a more House music sound, I thought that would be a nice second-act kind of thing to change things up and keep the video interesting. Towards the end of the video, it was actually a little bit difficult to work with, because I had so many channels and sounds going on in Vegas, and it was hard for my computer at the time to process it all and it slowed things down a lot! But in the end, I was able to finish it regardless.
Did the original vision for the video look like something different than the finished product?
Triple: Not really. What you see in the video is pretty much all the ideas I had for it, as far as I recall. Which, honestly, is a bit surprising for me because when I make videos like this, there’s usually all sorts of ideas that I’ll be kicking around and don’t always get used. I will say however, I didn’t come up with the actual title until a little later on. (The project file was just titled “Hotel Mario YTPMV”) One of the titles I had kicking around in my head was “The YTPMV To End All”. That was mostly a joke of course, but eventually, I came up with Big Beat Mario. Big beat was the music genre I was going for, so it made sense to have a name like that, and my bud NS2 agreed.
Did you have any idea that the video would become so insanely popular?
Triple: When I finally finished the video and uploaded it to YouTube in December 2009, I did have good expectations for it. What I didn’t totally expect was just how overwhelming the praise for it would be! Suddenly I’m hearing this is not just one of the best YTPMVs of the year, but of all time. That’s when I realized I’d really made an impact here. Then not soon afterward, I started seeing a few other YTPMVs popping up that were titled “Big Beat X” and so on. While they were usually not bad, they didn’t really have the actual big beat sound like my video had. However, there was one YTPMV among these made by thapoint09 called “Sonic Is Talking Balls”. It actually has lots of inspiration from big beat music (perhaps more so than Big Beat Mario, in my honest opinion) and it sounds awesome! To this day it’s still my favorite YTPMV inspired by Big Beat Mario.
Another thing I should add: The popular YTPer, MrSimon/TheElectricCheese, actually approached me at one point and asked if I might be interested in joining his now-defunct netlabel Breakbit Music (then called ROFLTrax) since he was so impressed with Big Beat Mario! Though I never took up the offer, I thought it was a really nice gesture nonetheless.
What was your reaction to the finished product? Do you love it as much as everyone else?
Triple: Well once it was done, I stood back and thought “Wow, I actually made this.” Even now I still think that! It’s the kind of flash-in-the-pan creativity that you don’t see often. And going beyond myself, it looks like Big Beat Mario was also a big inspiration for other YTPers and YTPMV makers, and really inspired them to try making more original compositions with YTPMVs, instead of just synching & pitch-shifting random clips to the notes of a Mega Man song or whatever, as was popular at the time. So it definitely left a noticeable impact afterward. And hell yeah I love it! Sometimes I’ll bring up the video and jam out to it and amaze myself for the millionth time. Also, since Big Beat Mario came out, I’ve actually had 1 or 2 other YTPMVs in the works for a while, but I’ve been sitting on them since unforunately I just haven’t had the time or motivation to finish them. But hey, never say never, they might get finished someday!
I’d like to once again thank Triple for his time and generosity in opening up, and also for making a video that continues to entertain and delights us. Check out his directory page here to view all of his videos.