The Origins of Daylight Savings Time: Mario's Time Machine

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - A KoopaTV Daylight Savings Time article published on the Sunday it actually happens?

I'm declaring it now: Sunday March 10 is and will remain the worst day of the year 2019. Let me list the calamities on this day, each of which alone warrants it being a very bad day:

1. In most of the United States, it's Daylight Savings Time, a practice where the government is somehow in control of time, and you must change all of your clocks by an hour ahead (so you lose an hour of sleep)
2. It's MAR10 Day, or “Mario Day”, a horrific and once-unofficial acknowledgement of a pun that now has big sales and official recognition behind it in celebration of Mario, the Koopa-killing plumber
3. I have to get a haircut today. It's just a trim, they say... 

I'll refrain from talking about my hair for this article (articles about my aesthetic personal problems are weird) and I'll just talk about the connection between Daylight Savings and Mario.

...And yes, there IS a connection. After years of sleuthing, I can finally combine my passions of hating Daylight Savings Time and hating Mario into one article. (See related DST and MAR10 articles below the footer for background.)

It all focuses on Mario's own manipulation of time. You see, many years ago, Koopa Kingdom somehow acquired a time machine. As you may know, time machines are extremely dangerous in the gloves of the wrong people, so we stored it in the most heavily-guarded location in the land: King Bowser's Castle!

Guarded by a whopping two Koopa Troopas.
...But they're really intense-looking Koopa Troopas!

Unfortunately, soon after we acquired the time machine, it got invaded by Mario, the type of wrong-people-with-gloves kind of folk that we specifically didn't want to possess the time machine. And so, he does what any villain would do: not only use the time machine to go back in time, but also somehow cross the chasms of space and end up in a different universe.

Time machines are truly powerful stuff.

The statues in the background were alpha Bowser statues, but shaped like the Koopalings.
Unfortunately, sensing intruders and attacking them would come in the beta stage of development, so Mario had a relatively easy time infiltrating.

Where and when did he go? Philadelphia (a city in one of the Thirteen American Colonies owned by Great Britain... at the time), July 4 1776. It's a long way away from Koopa Kingdom. Why? He wanted to influence a very specific moment in history: the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Now, Mario didn't come to prevent the Declaration of Independence. Rather, he came to influence the minds of all of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, since they were all in one place.

One of those Founding Fathers, though he wouldn't know it at the time, was Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was an avid publisher and inventor, and a Founding Father of the United States of America.
He's also huge compared to Mario.

You may know Benjamin Franklin as the guy who first came up with the idea of Daylight Savings Time as a policy proposal. He wasn't seriously advocating for it in the new nation, but with this letter he wrote to the newspaper just a few years later, he did float the idea into the global public discussion.

Note these things. Benjamin Franklin was printing materials and working on newspapers at the time of his encounter with Mario. Mario obviously came from the future—referring to Dr. Franklin as a Founding Father long before there was anything founded—something that you could achieve by changing the time.

No doubt Dr. Franklin was inspired by this encounter. No, he couldn't build his own time machine, but he could come up with a way to come from the future. Daylight Savings Time coupled with reverting back to Standard Time. All he had to do was get everyone to go along with the clock changing. Thus, government control over time was created.

You could argue that it's not really Mario's fault that happened—Mario didn't directly pass along the idea of Daylight Savings Time (how could he? It doesn't exist in the Mushroom Kingdom, and for very good reason)—but if Mario wasn't going back in time to change things up, this timeline where Americans (and most of Western civilisation) are enslaved by their time-lord government(s) would've never happened. And you thought the United States was founded on freedom.

And you bet I can blame Mario for not thinking about the consequences of his actions. This all started because Mario broke into our castle, after all. We weren't using the time machine to screw things up. There's a reason why it's called “Mario's Time Machine” and not “King Bowser's Time Machine”.

You may still be wondering what Mario specifically was trying to accomplish from his unobstructed time with the Founding Fathers. Well, aside from creating a big headache for Koopa Kingdom, he was creating a big head for America:

Mario went through all of this just to have his head carved into a mountain?!

...It's true...
There's Mario, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.
And Mario is getting people killed even as a rock carving.
(Source)

Knowing everything is Mario's fault doesn't actually change anything or get Daylight Savings Time abolished. If you're interested in that, see the countless resources and articles KoopaTV has written about Daylight Savings Time. Koopa Kingdom is no longer in possession of that time machine, by the way. This article counts as the article for Monday. As for commenting ideas... well, there's plenty of material here!


The political class in America has no interest in being on-the-record about Daylight Savings Time.
Ludwig has written to the current President to try to get Daylight Savings Time abolished.
Twice, in fact.
He's also passed along a petition to have it abolished with over 160,000 participants.
Daylight Savings Time dooms the world.
The last MAR10 article was back in 2017, about Mario trying to assassinate a beloved cast member with the help of the CIA. He's working with America a lot...
Read more about why Ludwig rejects MAR10 Day here.
News from the next day! President Donald John Trump actually gave a response!
Mario's time traveling forces Ludwig to condemn time travel.
Due to connecting hatred of both Mario and Daylight Savings Time, this was awarded the Best KoopaTV Enlightenment Movement article of 2019!
In 2020, KoopaTV remarks about how it's created a great opinion shift on the issue.
Also in 2020, Ludwig explains how the time machine allows for babies.
By 2021, KoopaTV is upset at the attention MAR10 keeps getting, so we're making four new days to counter it.