F-ZERO X CM

Nintendo shot the F-ZERO X commercial in Los Angeles on 3 and 4 June 1998, and ran it across Japan from 15 June 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 page is worth more than the commercial. 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.

It is sometimes said that the suit’s coloring became Captain Falcon’s dark alternate costume in Super Smash Bros. It did not: SmashWiki attributes that palette 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.