The Most Mario Colors my be the "silliest" post Louie Mantla's ever written, but it's fun and scientific and perfectly fascinating study of the use of color in Super Mario game indicia: "Green is the most common color overall, with a whopping 55 uses in 40 logos."
Every logo in this analysis adheres to the following criteria:
The title must be in the polygonal style
Mario's name must be in the title
Mario's name must be multicolor
The sequence of colors cannot be in rainbow order
There has since been further study of this entropic process.
However, if we measure the entropy of the colour sequence we get a significantly lower number: 3.6 bits. This is because there are dependencies between the colours. If the first M is blue, it is always followed by a green A, for example.
We can use these depedencies to build a decision tree which can be used to figure out what colour sequence is used in a Mario title, revealing as few letters as possible. I threw one together for the non-sports Mario titles
The significance of color to logotype eventually attains Borgesian qualities in the lore, if only by implication. Is it pink or purple? And yet no-one has unraveled the significance of his attire's color scheme, though its evolution has been charted.
