Composer Grant Kirkhope is a legend for a certain generation of Nintendo fans, having created iconic music tracks for Rare classics like GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie rather infamously sampled the latter game's opening DK Rap while leaving Kirkhope out of the credits, and it seems he's still annoyed enough about the whole ordeal that he still hasn't seen the film.
Kirkhope commented publicly on Twitter about his exclusion from the credits at the time, and because he'd recently worked with Nintendo on the arrangements for the Banjo-Kazooie music added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, he had a contact at the publisher. So he reached out to find out what the deal with the credits was.
"So I got a response back from, I guess, one of the legal people," as Kirkhope tells industry newsletter Push to Talk. "And it said, basically, they came up with this three rule criteria, which was they decided that for any music owned by Nintendo that appeared in the movie, they wouldn't credit the composer apart from Koji Kondo. Then they decided that anything with a vocal, they would credit the composer. So the Donkey Kong rap score's there. But then they also decided if Nintendo also owned that, they wouldn’t credit the composer."
He describes it as "this arbitrary thing," and the theater would be "entirely empty" by the time his theoretic credit might come up. "There's only me and my wife and my kids sat there going, look what I did. You know, for a second, a bit of text, what's it matter?"
That theater experience is a purely theoretical one, though. "I tell you what, I still haven't watched the movie yet. I've seen that bit with the rap. But I was so pissed I haven't watched it."
The DK Rap was once the butt of a lot of jokes, but over the years it's developed a lot of ironic fans – by this point, the love might be close to genuine. It even made a comeback in Donkey Kong Bananza earlier this year but, once again, Kirkhope had no idea it was happening.
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