My son ALWAYS wanted to pick a theme for his birthday that nobody made party supplies for!  My husband and I are both artistic and creative thinkers, so we enjoyed the challenge every year.

For his eighth birthday, Jake wanted a MARIO themed party, since he was getting Super Mario Sunshine as a present.

Party supplies: I searched the web for Mario graphics and printed labels on stickers for each plastic cup.  I got red plates and transparent plates, printed Mario graphics and glued them on to the red plates and then glued the clear plastic plates over that! We used a red tablecloth, yellow napkins, and blue cups.

Decorations: My husband HAND DREW giant Mario characters on poster boards and we cut them out and put them up all over the walls. If you can't draw, printing out some 8x10 graphics would be just as good.

In SMS there are "Poinks" - pink piggy things you fill with water and pop over enemies - does that sound like balloons to you? We got pink balloons and used construction paper and glue sticks to add eyes, curly tails and pig snouts - and viola! Poink Balloons!

In every Mario game there are eight red coins to collect on each level, so I used red plastic cake plates and hung them in a zig zag pattern on my ceiling, making sure to number them like the red coins are numbered. On the other side I printed out a small sign that said "Jake is Eight". It looked like a Mario Level hanging above our heads!

Grab bag items:  I bought all sorts of Mario candies from Gamestop - pez and little GameCubes that played music.  I went to the craft store and got styrofoam eggs and hand-painted them to look like Yoshi eggs.  From Avon I found Mario and Yoshi plush zipper pulls! The biggest hit were red baseball caps that my sister embroidered big M's on for all the kids! They looked awesome!

Food: We served Pizza (of course!) and Luigi's Real Italian Ice (instead of ice cream) and I made 3 different gallons of Kool-Aid and labeled them "Yoshi Juice" - the kids went nuts!

My best friend who is a pastry chef made the cake - she used a large round cake and several "wedge" shaped peices along with cupcakes to reproduce a SHINE SPRITE, which is sort of shaped like a sherriff's badge, except it's yellow with eyes.

Activities: Since SMS is a water based game, we bought water guns and let the kids have shoot outs in the back yard.  If I'd had a little extra time, it would have been nice to paint some Mario enemies on wooden signs and put them all around the yard as targets!

With a little creativity, these ideas can be adapted to fit any Mario game and would make a small child's birthday party the most memorable one yet!