F-ZERO X CM

Nintendo shot the F-ZERO X commercial in Los Angeles on June 3 and 4, 1998, and ran it across Japan from June 15 to the end of August. The conceit is simple and very late-nineties: the racers arrive at an airport like a touring band, mobbed by photographers, with the arrivals board reading F-ZERO X against Dallas, Cleveland and Miami. Captain Falcon walks through the terminal in the red helmet and the crowd loses it.

George did the special makeup and costume. Nintendo’s own making-of page says it plainly, and gives him more space than it gives the director. ¹

The crew around him was not a games-marketing crew. The director was Bruce Schluter, who cut title sequences for Independence Day, Twister and Mission: Impossible. The cinematographer was Adam Kimmel, who shot Beautiful Girls. The composer was Walter Werzowa, the man behind the Intel chime. Nintendo described the whole unit as top American professionals, and hired them to make thirty seconds of a Nintendo 64 racing game look like a film.

The making-of page matters more than the ad. Nintendo published a full profile of George alongside it, and it is the best-sourced document about him this site has found — a first-party page, archived in 1999, saying things that appear nowhere else: the barber’s son from Shinsaibashi, the punk band at the School of Visual Arts, the road through Greg Cannom’s studio and Boss Film to S.M.G. Inc. in 1986, a monthly show on NHK’s satellite channel at 12:45 in the morning. The whole document, and what it settles, has its own page.

SmashWiki traces Captain Falcon’s dark alternate costume in Super Smash Bros. to Blood Falcon, a rival racer from the games themselves, with no commercial involved. The suit in the ad is Captain Falcon in his own colors: red helmet, not black.