This reminds me a bit of Mickey Mouse. Back in the 1920s and early 1930s, Mickey Mouse was a mischievous character who could be a bit of a screw-up and a jerk, and did some stuff that seems boundary-pushing even today, regarding some of the jokes that involved Minnie's underwear in "Steamboat Willie" or "The Shindig" or "The Picnic", or a couple other early shorts (there were kind of a lot of underwear jokes actually, and apparently they make a good parachute too). Heck, "Steamboat Willie" in it's entirety is about Mickey goofing off on the job, making fun of his boss, being sassy with his girlfriend, and playing music via animal abuse, then he gets punished to peel potatoes and throws one at a bird.
(Another, somewhat later one I kinda like is "Building a Building", where Mickey gets distracted on his construction job and winds up getting into a big fight with his boss and destroying the project, before running off to join Minnie's business. Also Minnie dumps hot coals down Pete's pants, which is pretty great.)
But around 1935, when actual enforcement of the Hayes Code kicked in and Disney was starting to become the financially influential juggernaut we all know and dread today, they decided to downplay these traits and make Mickey an 'identifiable' (by which they meant boring) character who couldn't do anything that wasn't either nice, or very mildly foolish. At that time Mickey Mouse cartoons had a massive shift: Minnie mostly stopped appearing, Donald and Goofy became the central characters (because Donald was allowed to get angry and Goofy was allowed to be more of a doofus), and it seems almost every short for a few years was about them getting harassed by inanimate objects as they struggle to do basic tasks with uncooperative furniture and the like.
As for Mickey, he would barely appear after that, being the nice well-rounded bland guy, and get one or two scenes where whatever's going wrong isn't his fault in any way. (a little while later, they also redesigned Mickey to the look most people recognize now.) Eventually they made more shorts about Mickey being a screwup ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Fantasia in particular stands out), but it didn't really start becoming more common until the 1990s, if that (honestly I would say more the 00s when they made that Epic Mickey game where he basically ruins a world by mistake, and gets to sort of decide between fixing it or breaking it more).
So the question here is how they handle the characters. While Mario hews in the direction of being the smiley friendly flawless boring mascot type of guy, I seem to recall him doing some weirder things like deliberately stepping on Luigi's shoe in some golf or tennis game a while back, and probably other stuff, so I think Mario himself will do a few amusing things (the industry is much more accepting of weird sass in it's heroes these days, it's pretty much expected to some extent). But I suspect they'll mostly make Mario a nice quiet guy, and emphasize other characters to keep the story amusing (especially Luigi being scared of stuff).
Edited by Mitsukara, 08 February 2018 - 12:44 PM.
