Get ‘Em While They’re Young! Nintendo Launches Preschool My Mario Products

Nintendo, apparently dissatisfied with being a stalwart of nearly every school child’s life, is aiming even younger. A new range of products under the banner of My Mario has been announced, including wooden block toys, board books, and a Switch and mobile app that’ll let kids mess with Mario’s face, all focused on a preschool market. Gotta get ’em young and impressionable.

Initially launching in Japan, the physical toys will be available in select Nintendo stores, but will almost inevitably find their way to international markets soon enough. The range includes plastic crockery, a mini-backpack, rattle plushies, and super-adorable teeny clothing, so you can deck your toddler out as a nearly-walking Nintendo billboard.

The app, which is confirmed as coming to Switch and iOS, lets little kiddos goof around with Mario’s face, pulling and stretching the poor plumbers various features, causing him to react in different ways. It sounds super-basic, which is precisely what kids that age will want, reacting to their experimental input. Also, it’ll be free, so they can keep their complaints to themselves.

This new range launches in Japan on August 26, and will include the most beautiful-looking building block sets, but each block is also an amiibo! There’s a Mario, Toad, Yoshi, Luigi and Peach, along with items like ? blocks and green pipes, letting your kid build up a gaming scene, or just smash them into each other before chewing on the side of Yoshi’s face until the paint wears away. A Mario picture book looks equally well made, each board page interactive in some form. And oh my goodness, I want to go back in time and get the Mario romper suit with a hoodie for when my boy would fit in such things.

There’s also a collection of stop-motion animation videos that’ll appear on the My Mario website when it goes live, each about a minute long telling stories about the mustachioed hero, again aimed at the youngest kids.

All the physical objects will initially go on sale in Nintendo stores in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, but hopefully Nintendo will see the demand for international customers once everyone realizes those wooden blocks are secret amiibos and adults go insane trying to buy them. It’s unclear if the app will be available in English, but again, it’d be pretty daft not to.

I shall never stop finding it incredibly weird that an ambiguously aged, mustache-wearing portly Italian plumber is such a staple of everyone’s lives, and it only gets more strange when aimed at preschoolers. And yet he’s the best! Nintendo’s clearly aiming to ensure kids are fully enculturated before they can even say his name.