The Super Mario universe is full of mysteries, like why Mario and Donkey Kong are friends now, whether or not their names are really Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, and why some of the characters from Super Mario Bros. 2 can pop up in other games if that whole adventure was a dream, but one mystery has divided the entire video gaming world: Is the “mushroom cap” on Toad’s head a hat or is it part of his head? Various sources have tired to solve that mystery with science over the years, like examining split-second frames of Toad being electrocuted to see if there’s any skeletal structure beneath the mushroom cap or using hacks to get a game’s camera to clip into the cap and see if he has a head beneath it, but now Super Mario Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi has offered a definitive solution to this mystery.
In a new video (via Polygon), Koizumi casually solves this seemingly eternal mystery by explaining that the cap is indeed part of Toad’s head, leaving fans to “figure out exactly how that works out” and wondering if there’s “something inside.” The coy implication there seems to be that there is something inside Toad’s cap, like a brain or some mushroom guts, but it seems pretty gross to imagine either way.
Elsewhere in the video, Koizumi tries to justify why Mario has nipples in Odyssey but not a belly button, explaining that he didn’t actually expect anyone to care about something so weird. (He doesn’t actually say it’s weird, but it is.) Anyway, now we just have to sit back and wait for Nintendo to finally clarify whether or not Zelda is the name of the boy and explain why Metroid can’t crawl, and then we can all move on with our lives.