Gulp! Ghost Guy! Golly! Ghost Golly is not the first ghostly Shy Guy in the Mario universe, that being the more conventional Boo Guy, but Ghost Guy is much more interesting to me, for many reasons!
First of all, they are a reference to Beezo, and I love Beezo! At this point, Fly Guys were already pretty well-established as the go-to flying Shy Guy variety, but Beezo is a lot more fun to me, and I am happy to see it referenced. Ghost Guy does not have the insect wings, but it DOES have the bident, the weapon which I have literally never seen in my life outside of the context of Beezo. I could conclude that Beezo invented the concept of the bident, and I would never encounter anything to refute this!
This probably does not mean anything, but I also like how Ghost Guy has no eye holes in its mask, while in all of its sprites, Beezo has no mouth hole for some reason, even when there was room for one.
Some Ghost Guys are DANCING Ghost Guys, and some wear two-toned masks like Phanto! This ghost is like a Super Mario Bros. 2 Greatest Hits Collection!
Compared to Boo Guys, Ghost Guys have a more interesting bottom, where instead of a ghostly tail, their robes are the end of their bodies, like a Pac-Man ghost. And that is not all that is neat about their robes! But before we go into depth on that, we must talk about the mask... these are the only variety of Shy Guy where we can see for ourselves what’s behind the mask, since the Poltergust can remove them! Let’s look!
It’s a funny face! Eyes-In-A-Void, but also, fascinatingly, a “mouth” formed out of the robe itself, almost like these really are animate robes, but still things that need to eat and all that. Wow! The Shy Guy Face mystery has been solved since all the way back in 2001, huh?
No! It has not! As with all of the basic enemy ghosts in the game, Ghost Guys are artificial creations of the artist Vincent van Gore, so if anything, this is what he headcanons Shy Guys as looking like under the mask.
All that being said, though... I kind of think this COULD be what they really look like under the mask, but at the same time, not the end of the mystery. Sure, the mask is gone, but now the face is hidden in the darkness of the robes! It is just a new mystery under the old mystery. All we can truly gather from this is that Shy Guys have eyes and mouths, and we already knew that! It’s what the point of the mask is!
In conclusion, Shy Guy Ghost is really really neat! A neat entity on its own, and a really neat think to think more in-depth about! Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s fun either way!
