Origins
Shigeru Miyamoto stated that Nintendo had wanted Mario to have a dinosaur companion ever since Super Mario Bros.; however, it was not possible because of the limitations of the NES. The inspiration for Yoshi can be traced back further, to the green dragon Tamagon in the 1984 video game Devil World. During the development of Super Mario Bros. 3, Miyamoto had a number of sketches around his desk, including an image of Mario riding a dinosaur. Takashi Tezuka, a Mario series developer, speculated that Miyamoto's love of horse riding as well as country and western influenced Yoshi's creation. The concept of Mario riding a dinosaur also came from the NES video game Excitebike, which featured people riding motorcycles. He again wanted to feature Yoshi in Super Mario Bros. 3, but was still unable to. Tezuka designed two power-ups to make up for this limitation, the raccoon and frog power-ups. Once the more powerful Super NES was released, Miyamoto was finally able to implement Yoshi into the series, putting him into the video game Super Mario World. Yoshi proved to be popular in his debut, which caused the next game in the series, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, to focus on his species.
The version of Yoshi seen in the Super Mario Bros. film was made using a 3-foot-tall (0.91 m) animatronic dinosaur. He was designed in the film by Dave Nelson. It had nearly 200 feet of cable and hundreds of moving parts inside of it, and was controlled by nine puppeteers. The body is cable-controlled, while the head is radio-controlled. Nelson described the overall process as being "difficult." The creation of Yoshi was handled by a company independent from the filmmakers.
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