Kurt

@Endall Not only do people study Mario games, they're also one of the most important bodies of work in the last 50 years. Their cultural impact cannot be overstated. Games are both a medium and an artform, drawing from principles of visual, mechanical, and narrative design. Video games also represent an enormous industry, larger than both film and music. They are a powerful participatory medium, with decades of rich history. Mario games in particular are highly-respected examples of accessible game design, and Nintendo's works are often seen as a standard to which the rest of the industry is held. But if you're reading this, I'm sure you know how important games can be. Otherwise, we wouldn't be commenting on a crossword puzzle, would we?

@Babydoc Totally fair to bounce off a theme, but the framing here feels a little unkind. If someone expressed they had never listened to music, watched a film, or read a book because they were "too busy earning a living," I imagine most of us would find that a very odd thing to say!

@Allan It's funny how easy it is to feel a sort of fond reflection for a distant, darkened orb. Funny too how I can think of Pluto's relative cultural awareness and then feel sad for Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, and the hundreds or thousands of other dwarf planets in our solar system that have never been discovered.

@Tom R The question mark blocks in Mario games are a source of resources for the titular character. Question mark blocks appear in a row of bricks, like how they're depicted in this grid. When the character jumps up and hits a block, something useful for the player comes out of the top of the block. These could include coins (which increase the player's score), one-ups (which grant the player another opportunity to try to win if they fail), or occasionally, even a vine (which grows directly up and out of the block, offering the player a new route to explore by climbing up the vine like a ladder). In short, the question mark blocks aren't stand-ins here. Each answer above a question mark block is a resource that emerges vertically from said block in the video game, which makes it a pretty clever visual nod for fans of the series.

@Andrew A lot of folks enjoy the lateral thinking involved with more opaque clues. There's a genre of crossword popular in England called "cryptic" that heavily leans into more abstract paths to the answer. That said, some clues really are just dubious. For something like OREO, I think both editors and solvers have seen so many variations that there's a (misplaced?) effort to be inventive. Unfortunately, there are only so many ways to hint at a brand of cookie.

@Mackenzie I was shocked that the columnist didn't recognize the puzzle's visuals! My partner and I messaged our septuagenarian parents and they all instantly knew what it was. But I suppose that just goes to show how diverse our experience of media is, as a whole. (And good on Caitlin for being a good sport about the unfamiliar-to-her theme.)

@Steve L I don't know what makes poems with fountains so lovely, but I'm reminded of this similarly poignant offering from contemporary poet Suzanne Buffam: "Joy unmixed with sorrow / is like a fountain turned off at night."

@ER Perhaps you ought to give one a try! It's quite a rich medium to explore.

@Desert Dweller Would love some more context for this younger solver who was very surprised to see folks unfamiliar with the theme in the comments. Which terms were new to you?

Thanks for sharing, folks; glad I asked. The "ditties" most often stuck in my brain are probably short loops from video game soundtracks! In particular, the recent faux-retro compilation UFO 50 has hundreds of tiny tunes that are very top-of-mind for me lately.

@Kv I searched for this comment! Sometimes I'm on the wrong side of the jock / nerd divide for these puzzles, haha. I wonder if the clue was always tied to Mr. Ewing, or if that was an editorial shift from the NYT team.

@Francis I had a lot of trouble with the bottom-left corner, but CHARLIXCX was mercifully close at hand! Last year's "Brat" was so widely talked-about that I knew it instantly in spite of never having actually listened. As for MIIS, this was another gimme for folks born in the last 40 years or so. The Wii was the best-selling console of all time.

@Phishfinder It's actually "ELIDE"! The word is most commonly used in linguistics, but it applies to any instance when something's skipped over. One example of the word in use: people from Toronto (Ontario, Canada) often say the city's name as "Tron-o." Thus, the first o and final t of Toronto are "elided."

@Owen Hodge In the video games, Mario characters can enter a large green pipe and emerge from a different pipe elsewhere on the screen. Answers in the puzzle reference this mainstay of the series by showing words that "enter" the pipe and finish elsewhere -- the real answers to 82D and 87D are FIREF[LOWER] and MUSH[ROOM], respectively completed at 31D and 30D.

@Dan Ha! As much as I disagree with the sentiment, I can appreciate a witty rebuttal. I hope next week's theme is more to your taste.