Japanese on Acid?

As a disclaimer, let me first say that I have absolutely nothing against the Japanese people that invented Mario. Quite the contrary, I love Mario, as my Power-Up tattoo should prove. That being said...

How much acid were they taking when they created the original Mario game? I'm not talking Super Mario, or even the one with the pipes and the crabs and the turtles and whatnot. I'm talking about the first time we ever saw Mario, the old arcade game with Donkey Kong up on the rafters of that building. I mean nothing in any video game needs to be realistic, and maybe I have a hard time looking at a fictional piece of game design creatively and not literally, but seriously. Take a second to analyze that game.

1) You are a plumber. Plumbers on the job tend to get pretty dirty, but somehow your shirt is impeccably clean. So either Mario goes to the dry cleaners after every single job or the game designers have a very skewed vision about the cleanliness of plumbery.

2) You are chasing after a princess. Look, I totally agree that love can conquer all and that everyone has a soul mate. But something in me highly doubts the possibility of the princess of an entire kingdom falling madly, head over heels in love with a small, Italian plumber that can barely say his own name clearly. Maybe in some kind of tripped out plumber dream, but never in the real world.

3) The princess has been kidnapped by a giant monkey and it's your job to save her. I'm willing to ignore that there's a such thing as a giant monkey. That aside, what the hell kind of king gets the news that his daughter has been kidnapped and immediately thinks, "Oh, I know, I'll call the local plumber! Maybe in his spare time he can fix the leak in the upstairs bathroom!"I have too much faith in the parliamental system to see that being a logical train of thought for someone in charge of an entire kingdom.

4) The giant monkey has set his hideout as a building clearly in the middle of construction. Kidnapping a princess is not an easy task; it requires a certain degree of smarts. So I would argue that there is no way a relatively intelligent giant monkey would choose that pile of rafters as his hideout. Anything works better than that; an island offers security, underground you have privacy, and even a finished building seems safer than a haphazard stack of beams. Sorry Mr. Yamuchi, not buying it.

5) The monkeys best defense against your advances is to throw barrels you. And not even logical barrels. Dear Japan, rolling objects to not just stop tumbling to fall down a staircase, or even move backwards up a slope. That's just not how things work here in the states. And not only that, but what is an infinite stack of barrels doing at the top of that scaffolding? And why on earth do some of the barrels break to produce little walking flame men! I'm not asking for a lot here people, just a little bit of rational thought in my arcade games.

And last, but not least...
6) When you reach the giant killer ape, he gives up. Yup. That's it. No extra barrels to throw, no monkey punches, no temper tantrum. "Oh hey Mario, sorry about all that barrel stuff back there, just lost my mind for a second. Want the princess? Take her! Go to town! Why don't we do lunch sometime?" Sorry world but that is not how I like my giant monkeys to act. That ape is at least 10 times Mario's size! And he just throws in the towel like a giant, ape-like baby. What kind of message does that send to America's younger generation? Don't worry kids, if at first you don't succeed, just give up everything you've ever worked for. Nice.