For forty years, gamers have treated Bowser’s name origin as if an unsolved mystery.

The official line from Nintendo is that it’s “unconfirmed.” Wikipedia likes to rest on “multiple competing theories.” The gaming press periodically revisits the question, shrugs, and moves on.

They’ve all been looking in the wrong direction.

Instead, in plain sight, the name has been confirmed not by Nintendo but by the people who actively avoided the name.

Hating on Korea

Mario’s nemesis in Japanese has always been called Kuppa, named by Shigeru Miyamoto after gukbap, a Korean rice soup dish. Miyamoto reportedly also considered naming him after yukhoe (raw beef) and bibimbap. The man liked references to Korean food as villainous.

When Super Mario Bros. was localized for the American market in 1985, someone at Nintendo of America decided that slights directed at Korea like “Kuppa” wouldn’t work for Americans. They needed another name for a villain, the fire-breathing turtle-dragon.

They chose “Bowser.”

Apparently, nobody wrote down why. Nobody filed a memo we can cite. The decision was made by a small team. Nintendo of America had roughly 35 employees at the time, no formal localization department, and was operating out of Redmond, Washington while frantically trying to launch the NES into a market still traumatized by the 1983 video game crash.

The Obvious Pop Villain

In 1985, if you were an American in your twenties working in entertainment-adjacent industries, there was a very specific cultural reference sitting in your mental inventory for “tough guy with a funny name.”

Bowzer.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman was the breakout star of Sha Na Na, the nostalgia doo-wop group that had been inescapable in American pop culture:

• Woodstock, 1969 (immortalized in the documentary)
• The movie Grease, 1978 (massive hit)
• The Sha Na Na TV variety show, 1977-1981 (syndicated for years after)

Bowzer’s whole act was a villain persona with the muscle shirt, the slicked-back hair, the theatrical sneer. The comedy he created was in the contrast: an intimidating figure performing sincere 1950s love ballads. The tough guy who sings love songs. The cruel kindness jokes, like saying he was told by his manager he’s not very nice, so he’s trying to prove him wrong by asking everyone to send get well cards to his hospital room.

The spelling difference is notable. Localization teams routinely adjust spellings to avoid trademark issues or to make names feel more “natural” in the target language. Bowzer becomes Bowser.

The Negative Proof

Here’s where it gets interesting.

In 1993, Hollywood produced the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros. movie. Dennis Hopper played the villain. But in the film, he’s called “President Koopa” and never Bowser.

Why?

In an interview, screenwriter Parker Bennett explained the decision. They didn’t use “Bowser” because, and this is the key clue, it immediately brought to mind “the ’50s Sha Na Na guy.”

Boom.

This wasn’t research. This wasn’t something they had to look up. The association was reflexive. Instant. Obvious.

The filmmakers in 1993 knew exactly where the name came from. It was so obvious to them that they actively avoided it, worried the comedic association would undermine their (inexplicably serious) film.

Bowser no longer was cool, no longer was pop. A generation had passed.

If it was obvious to Hollywood screenwriters in 1993, it was obvious to Nintendo of America in 1985. The difference is that in 1985, someone saw the connection as a feature rather than a bug. A tough villain name with existing cultural resonance? Perfect. Ship it.

The Dismissal

I see some historians dismissed the Sha Na Na theory partly because “the trend of naming Mario characters after musicians hadn’t started yet.” This is terrible reasoning.

Conventions don’t emerge from nowhere. They start with individual decisions that later become patterns.

We know exactly how Nintendo of America’s localization worked in this era because we have documented cases from just a few years later. When Super Mario Bros. 3 was localized in 1990, a product analyst named Dayvv Brooks was tasked with naming Bowser’s seven children, the Koopalings.
Brooks, a former Tower Records employee and DJ, immediately reached for musicians:

• Ludwig von Koopa (Beethoven)
• Roy Koopa (Roy Orbison)
• Wendy O. Koopa (Wendy O. Williams)
• Iggy Koopa (Iggy Pop)
• Lemmy Koopa (Lemmy Kilmister)
• Morton Koopa Jr. (Morton Downey Jr.)

We only know this because someone tracked Brooks down in 2015 and asked him. He didn’t file a memo in 1990. There was no documentation. The knowledge existed only in his memory until a journalist finally thought to ask the right question.

Brooks wasn’t at Nintendo in 1985. But the method he used of reaching for pop culture references that “just fit”, clearly was part of how NoA approached localization. The Koopalings weren’t an innovation. They were a continuation.

Who Are You Going to Call?

The leading candidate is Howard Phillips.

Phillips was NoA’s fifth employee, starting in 1981 as a warehouse manager. By 1985, he had evolved into the company’s key liaison between Japanese developers and the American market. His job was explicitly to advise on what would resonate with US audiences — including, according to documented sources, advising on “the renaming of characters.”

Phillips was born in 1958. In 1985, he was 27 years old — exactly the demographic for whom Sha Na Na’s Bowzer would have been a vivid cultural reference. He was also, by all accounts, deeply immersed in pop culture and an avid consumer of entertainment media.

Has anyone ever directly asked Howard Phillips: “Did you name Bowser? Were you thinking of Sha Na Na?”

Phillips is still active. He does interviews about Nintendo history. He’s been asked about the NES launch, about Nintendo Power, about his role in rejecting the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 as too difficult for American audiences. He’s been asked about almost everything.

So? Bowser?

The Bowser is Bowzer

Here’s the most beautiful part.

Over forty years, Bowser evolved from a one-dimensional fire-breathing villain into the comedy shtick of a 1970s Bowzer:

• The bumbling dad who genuinely loves kids
• The hopeless romantic pining for his girl
• The adversary who holds grudging respect
• The antagonist whose menace is increasingly played for comedy

And in 2023, the apotheosis: Jack Black voicing Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. movie, sitting at a piano, singing a power ballad called “Peaches” about his unrequited love.

It’s as Bowzer as Bowser can get.

The tough guy who sings love songs.

Whether or not anyone at Nintendo in 1985 consciously intended the reference, the character arc rhymes perfectly with its namesake. Bowser became Bowzer. The archetype was encoded in the name from the beginning.

If anyone reading this has contact with Howard Phillips, please ask:

“Did you name Bowser after Sha Na Na?”

The answer might finally close a forty-year-old case that was never actually mysterious. We just forgot to ask the right people the right question, to stop believing it is unknowable.

Joe – Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod – Funny you should ask, I’ve got a car now.
Joe – Oh wow, how’d you get a car?
Rod – Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe – You’re kidding!
Rod – I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe – Uh, what kinda car do ya’ got?
Rod – I’ve got a BITCHIN CAMARO!

The most dangerous actors aren’t the incompetent or the overtly malicious, they’re the genuinely skilled professionals who understand that what they’re doing serves no legitimate purpose but continue doing it well.

Admiral Holsey stepping down suggests at least one officer has decided not to be that person.

Alvin Holsey, Admiral Who Oversaw Boat Strikes Off Venezuela’s Coast, Retires: The admiral had abruptly announced that he would step down as the head of the U.S. Southern Command.

Understanding why requires looking back fifty years.

Creighton Abrams was arguably the most capable American tactical commander since Ulysses Grant. Both demonstrated mastery of logistics, both operated under severe political constraints, and both accepted operational risks their predecessors had avoided.

A critical difference between these two men lay in civil-military alignment: Grant’s civilian leadership shared his strategic objectives, while Abrams served an administration whose domestic political imperatives systematically undermined coherent strategy.

The constitutional position on Abrams’ tactical work under President Nixon is unambiguous. Congress never authorised military operations in Cambodia; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’s writ extended to Vietnam alone. More significantly, the military maintained dual reporting systems that recorded ordnance falling on South Vietnamese coordinates when it actually struck Cambodian territory.

This went far beyond unauthorised action into being a deliberate falsification designed to deceive the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war.

A crime.

It occurred within a broader pattern: Nixon had intervened to obstruct the 1968 Paris peace negotiations to secure electoral advantage, then required the war’s continuation through 1972 for re-election. American casualties served the GOP’s domestic political purposes, literally throwing soldiers’ lives away to win votes.

Abrams’ role was executing Nixon’s strategically incoherent and illegal policies whose consequences extended far beyond military failure. The destabilisation of Cambodia, while not solely attributable to American mistakes, was materially accelerated by it, contributing to state collapse that enabled Khmer Rouge consolidation and genocide.

Abrams’s culpability should not be reduced to mere order-following. The Abrams Tapes, declassified two decades after his death, demonstrate that he understood the conflict was “basically a political contest.” His failure was therefore not one of comprehension but of institutional role: generals propose military solutions because military solutions are what generals are positioned to propose. His legitimate concern, that American withdrawal was outpacing South Vietnamese military capacity, was correct. His proposed remedy, however, reflected the persistent American misapprehension that a complex insurgency with deep political roots could be addressed through conventional operations against geographic sanctuaries.

The hunt for COSVN epitomised this confusion. American planners conceived of a simplistic targetable headquarters, a “jungle Pentagon”, despite evidence they faced a distributed network of cadres. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan compounded this Americanization error by treating military capability as the binding constraint when the fundamental problem was political legitimacy. The Saigon government’s inability to command popular loyalty was never a problem that American firepower could resolve, especially from 90,000 feet.

The sixty-day operational limit also telegraphed the campaign’s own negation plan. Any adversary capable of basic strategic patience would disperse, wait, and return on schedule. That anyone would claim American success was measurable in captured rice and destroyed bunkers merely confirmed total absence of meaningful strategic metrics. The North Vietnamese simply relocated deeper into Cambodia, the Cambodian state authority collapsed further, and so the Khmer Rouge recruitment accelerated.

Most damning is how the promised “breathing room” was a shrewd lie, exposing the American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon as a delusional sycophant. His saccharin cables consistently contradicted accurate CIA assessments and field reporting, to give Nixon what he wanted to hear instead of reality. The Paris agreement that Nixon celebrated as his gift to the world was immediately ignored and within months the North Vietnamese were rolling into Saigon after domestic American backlash had accelerated withdrawal timelines.

None of this absolves Hanoi’s strategic choices, Thieu’s venality, or the Khmer Rouge’s ideological pathology. It shows American ideological intervention created conditions that other actors easily exploited. Whether Abrams’s resignation, like Holsey’s, or public dissent would have altered this trajectory is unknowable. What remains clear is that his silence stands as complicity in an illegal campaign whose strategic bankruptcy he understood.

Nixon knew peace talks were potentially ending the war in 1968 but he convinced America to elect him by scuttling them. He repeatedly lied to the public and to South Vietnam to take power, which meant expansion and prolonging of war while declaring himself the anti-war leader. Tens of thousands more Americans were killed needlessly by him, just to abruptly abandon South Vietnam and let it fall catastrophically in 1975.

Cambodia’s genocide followed.

Abrams had to hide his knowledge that the President’s war plan was strategically bankrupt. Today Hegseth doesn’t have to hide anything because his audience doesn’t care.

The cruelty is the point now; the incompetence is a feature. You don’t need competent complicity when there’s no accountability mechanism left to evade. You just do the crimes, lie about them badly, contradict yourself publicly, and get rewarded because the crimes signal tribal loyalty.

The system that produced Abrams’s silence has decayed into one that produces Hegseth.

Admiral Holsey walked away. Under Trump there will always be someone who won’t.

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I ran over my neighbors
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Now I’m in all the papers

My folks bought me a bitchin’ Camaro
With no insurance to match
So if I happen to run you down
Please don’t leave a scratch

I ran over some old lady
One night at the county fair
And I didn’t get arrested
Because my dad’s the mayor

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Donuts on your lawn
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Tony Orlando and Dawn

When I drive past the kids
They all spit and cuss
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And they have to ride the bus

So you’d better get out of my way
When I come through your yard
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And an Exxon credit card

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Hey man where ya headed?
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I don’t want unleaded

“Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen, released on their debut album “Big Lizard in My Backyard” (1985).

The remarkable thing about the paintings of Rudolph Wacker may be how unremarkably good they are (“New Objectivity”).

Sitting with friends the other day, I noticed every single person was saying their favorite painting of a set on the wall was by Wacker.

I mean, it’s like he had a way of capturing a scene in such an authentic way as to beg the question of why it’s even a scene. It’s a literal depiction of nothing in particular, a pleasing still life “magic of the everyday” that draws you in to wonder why.

During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.

The Nazis certainly didn’t appreciate his perspective, as they tortured Wacker to death in 1939.