Canadian coins featuring Nintendo characters...?

Pixelboy · October 6, 2015

A few days ago, I sent an e-mail to the Royal Canadian Mint, after discovering that they actually welcome suggestions for new coin collections. The Mint has been releasing attractive collectible coin collections for years, and this year, they released a coin collection of Looney Tunes characters, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the first film to feature Bugs Bunny.

So I submitted this idea where they could do a couple of collections with Nintendo characters. The first collection would be all about Mario and friends (Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Toad, Bowser, and possibly Wario), and the second collection could showcase other famous Nintendo characters (Donkey Kong, Link, Kirby, Samus Aran, Pikachu and possibly Fox McCloud).

I wasn't expecting to receive a reply any time soon (or ever) but the guy in charge of the "online suggestion box" at the Mint actually replied to me today and told me he thought Nintendo-themed coins was a great idea! However, there's a catch: Any themed coin collection released by the Royal Canadian Mint must have some kind of connection to Canada, preferably an historical one. For example, Bugs Bunny was first drawn by Canadian Charles Thorson, while working for Warner Brothers, and he also inadvertently named Bugs Bunny and essentially set up the style for the Looney Tunes characters. So the Royal Canadian Mint used that Canadian connection to green-light the release of the Looney Tunes coin collection.

I told the guy that I wasn't aware of any direct connection between Nintendo and Canada, beside the fact that pretty much every Canadian from coast to coast knows who all these Nintendo characters are. It's a given that such Nintendo-themed coins would be highly popular with collectors of all ages, but it's just not going to happen unless some kind of Canadian connection can be found.

So I thought I could post this story on this forum, in the hopes that someone here could actually be aware of an historically usable connection between Nintendo and Canada which I'm not aware of. If such a connection could be found and verified, then in a couple of years we could actually see Nintendo-themed Canadian coins become reality.