Luigi's Chinese Cowboy Impression

Submission 16,102

Part of a series on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. [View Related Entries]

About

Luigi's Chinese Cowboy Impression refers to an exploitable image of Luigi wearing a cowboy-like outfit and squinting his eyes from an episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. The image became a popular source for redraws after being posted to 4chan in 2014, where people redraw or photoshop new characters into the same pose.

Origin

The scene comes from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! episode "Rolling Down The River".^[1] Mario and Luigi sneak onto a riverboat in order to save Princess Toadstool (Peach) from Captain Koopa. They disguise themselves as gamblers and play a game of cards with some of the ship's crew, but their cover is soon blown after they were discovered to be cheating (shown below).

A screencap was made from the scene, and posted to YouChew Forums^[2] by BradDLC on March 22nd, 2013.

Less than two hours later a caption was added to it on YouChew Forums by NegroTed (shown below).

"luigi's chinese cowboy impression is so offensive that mario's stomach ulcer practically explodes and he is unable to ask luigi to stop being so fucking racist.jpg"

Spread

The scene has inspired numerous redraws and memes referencing it over the years, including over a dozen redraws on DeviantArt^[4]^[5] as of February 2022 (examples shown below). "Luigi's Racist Chinese Cowboy Impression" has been used as a Drawception prompt a number of times, resulting in galleries of amateur interpretations of the scene.^[6]^[7]

On August 23rd, 2017, Tumblr^[3] user figmentjedi posted a screenshot from Splatoon where a player speaks to another with a redrawn version of the meme, gaining over 1,200 notes in four years (shown below).