"It's a me, a Mario."
"It's the Birdman Little Daddy"
Mario in the 90s, chiling and throwing up the deuce
If you want to know the real, Mario is actually symbolism and Shigeru Miyamoto predicted the rise of Cash Money decades in advance. What most people don't know is that Mario, the Birdman, had a street past that he was trying to get away from. Why do you think he was always ducking down in pipes? In Mario 1, Mario and Luigi, aka Slim used to do nothing but fire on goombas(goons). What color did Mario turn when he got that fire flower? That's right, red. Mario was flamed up.
Anyhow, he and Luigi were in the process of trying to collect stars for their rap label in order to get off the street.
Birdman letting them birds fly
Now Mario was beating down the block trying to collect coins (Cash Money) to help finance his label. Although Mario was a street dude, he never had a lot of game. He was more of a gorilla sugar daddy than anything. Why you think he needed all that money? Princess wasn't trying to deal with him unless he came up off that bread. Now, what had happened was Princess was scandalous. She would constantly end up missing for long periods of time and Mario would wonder where she was. Ya'll know where she was at. Mario was just a Captain Save 'em.
She was never kidnapped. Mario was just the dude she called to pick her up when Bowser said it's time for her to go. She had to come up with an excuse for why she's always missing because Mario was known to lay that goon hand down back in the day and wouldn't have hesitated to lay the law down on Princess.
Now, you notice how after all that 'saving', Mario only gets a kiss, but Bowser is the only one with kids in that universe?
Mario got into them shrooms heavier and heavier from all that stress of "saving" Princess and never getting any love from her and something just snapped in his mind one day after all that drug use and fatigue from finding out the real reason why Princess was always gone. After increasingly heavy drug usage and letting that rejection bear down on his mind, Mario took a turn down an alleyway and joined the other team.
Part 2 to be continued.