A closer look
Super Mario actually breaks blocks with his fist and not his head, a detail hidden in plain sight since the original 1985 instruction manual. For decades, generations of gamers blindly assumed this chubby Italian plumber was giving himself severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy by using his fragile skull as a battering ram against solid brick. In reality, he is just throwing a very enthusiastic uppercut, which honestly makes much more sense from a medical perspective but ruins the hilarious mental image of a guy concussing himself for loose change. It really says a lot about our collective childhood observation skills that millions of us stared at a glowing television for thousands of hours and completely missed the tiny pixelated hand shooting upward to violently smash masonry in the pursuit of magic mushrooms
