Talk:Super Mario Bros.: A Giant Color/Activity Book

Suggestions to Rename and Clean-up Pages for the early Golden Book brand Coloring and/or Activity Books

Hi, I'm a new member here but I've recently been documenting these Super Mario coloring and activity books Golden Book put out between what looks like 1989 and 1992. I also provided the cleaned up full page scans on this page and the ones for "book 1" to one of your members here. Since then I've also scanned the SMB3 coloring book and done some research in Golden Book's product codes (they appear in the upper right of every front cover) and ISBN's from these books and think I could be helpful in clarifying some things. I apologize in advance for the lengthy explanations below, but I think it's important to explain my findings. That said, here's the short and to the point version.

Golden Book was careless in their use of ISBN's, with many not even having any information registered at all. They didn't seem to have official names for different books in the same franchise and they also would re-release the same book with less pages and remove the "Big" or "Giant" from its name. Their product codes however are unique to each release and provide some insight, but are not entirely consistent either. As such, for the Wiki's purposes, I'd suggest renaming the following pages:

• "Super Mario Bros.: A Color/Activity Book (book 2)" -> Super Mario Bros.: A Giant Color/Activity Book
• "Super Mario Bros.: A Color/Activity Book (book 1)" -> Super Mario Bros.: A Big Color/Activity Book

Also recommend:

• "Super Mario Bros. 3: A Color/Activity Book" -> "Super Mario Bros. 3: A Big Color/Activity Book"
• "Super Mario Bros.: A Coloring Book". -> Super Mario Bros.: A Big Coloring Book (Might also considering adding (1993) or (Live-Action) to better distinguish it from "Super Mario: The Big Coloring Book", which is a different book from a different company in 2020 with an almost identical name).

The activity book is already named "Super Mario Bros.: A Big Activity Book" and seemingly has no other versions, so it could remain unchanged.

My reasoning for prioritizing the "big" and "giant" versions is:

• 1) For this small selection of books specific to the Mario franchise, it effectively gives them all a unique (albeit similiar) name.
• 2) It would make for simpler explanations of the differences in their other versions in their articles. Instead of saying "These pages were added in the Big version." you can simply show every page in order as they appear in the biggest version, and add applicable notes listing which pages are missing from the smaller versions.
• 3) I'm fairly confident the big and giant versions came first, and the smaller ones are cheaper re-releases that remove pages to save money. I can not at this time prove it definitively. If you're curious to my reasoning, you can read my notes below in researching Golden Books coloring books.

That said, I'm a new member, I don't feel comfortable making any drastic changes myself at this time. If senior contributors agree to the name changes, I'd be happy to help directly with the editing of the text to reflect these changes going forward. Also, regardless of that, I have the scans I made on hand, they're freely available on the Internet Archive as well, and I still have the physical books I can use to help improve the accuracy of these articles.

Below are my unabridged research notes in trying to better understand how Golden Book labeled a surprisingly large amount of coloring books released in just a few years time:

Golden Books naming formula for their coloring books was almost exclusively: (Franchise Name): (Size [None if not Big or Giant]) (Coloring, Activity, or Color/Activity) Book. I can confirm Golden Book reused the naming convention on tons of coloring books they put out in this time period, and it's very confusing because there will be multiple books with the same name on the spine and possibly cover but have completely different contents. Alternatively, the spine can CONFLICT with the cover, as the title on the spine of this Giant Mario book is just: "Nintendo Super Mario Bros. Color/Activity Book" which describes different books as well as a different version of this exact book.

However, this seems to be the only Mario related book they released in the US to carry the "Giant" designation, so calling it "Super Mario Bros.: A Giant Color/Activity Book" should serve as a unique and accurate name. It's also likely the Giant book was released before any of the others. It's ISBN, 0-307-03252-3, lists it's published year as 1989. By contrast, the two versions I have of the one labeled "book 1" on this website have ISBN's dating them to 1990 (ISBN 0-307-01207-7, titled: Super Mario Bros.) and 1992 (ISBN 0-307-01193-3, titled: Nintendo Reg Clr $days), despite them all listing a 1989 copyright on their cover page. However, I've also discovered Golden Book was not consistent with registering ISBN's. The SMB3 one brings back no information and ISBN 0-307-01207-7 is reused for the Big Activity Book, which although I haven't scanned yet, can confirm I've seen multiple pages that don't appear any of the 5 books I have examined and scanned.

I've been personally using the product codes on the cover to label the versions I upload to the Internet Archive as they never seem to repeat the EXACT number. Every product code seems to be 4 digits, and sometimes will have a dash followed by one or two more digits. I haven't seen any of these product repeated without some kind of -XX designation to differentiate. However the product codes aren't always informative in themselves. For this book in particular, there's one labeled 3252, and another labeled 3252-1. I have both, the only difference I could find are the covers. They slightly re-worded the back paragraph, there's a price printed on 3252, and the color saturation seems a good bit higher. As far I can tell, none of the actual pages inside are any different and the covers even use identical art.

However the same isn't true for 1207, 1207-1, 1207-2, which in order refer to "book 1", the Activity book, and the SMB3 Color/Activity Book. The only consistent aspect to their product codes is ones endings in -14, -15, and -16 never seem to be "Big" or "Giant". I found ONE single exception on eBay for an old Disneyland, which has a -14 version that still used the giant label. All others books with those designations are simply A Color and/or Activity book, no Big or Giant qualifier. They all seem to be bound by staples instead of softcover book bindings. And among the few I have on hand and compare, seem to contain less pages than their Big and Giant variants.

I suspect the -14 is used to mark smaller, cheaper re-releases of a book that remove pages to keep costs down. -15 and -16 are used if there's already a book using the product code XXXX-14. For example, the live-action Mario coloring book has two non-big versions with slightly different back and front covers, and their codes are 3887-14 and 3887-15. And here on the wiki, the cover image for "book 1" has the code 1207-14. I can also confirm there's versions of the SMB3 Coloring book that are 1207-15. A reminder, the first one's big version was 1207 and the big SMB3 book is 1207-2, so they already used 1207-14 for the earlier books smaller version and likely just advanced one number to name SMB3's small version to get 1207-15. This also implies the Big Activity Book never received a smaller version and I've seen no evidence it has any alternative versions at all.

Another reason I think the smaller versions are re-releases is I've yet to see a book with a -14, 15, or -16 designation that doesn't have a big or giant counterpart. Initially I thought the live-action Mario movie books were an exception, however I did find a big version later. It has the code 4037 instead of 3887, which I can't explain. Also one other strange exception to this convention is I have a version of "book 1" that has a green banner instead of red/Big or blue/Giant ones. But it uses the same "A Color/Activity Book" naming as all the other smaller versions that don't have a green banner. It's product code is 1193-95. I don't have a copy of 1207-1, but from what I've seen, it appears the internal pages are the same, but without a complete copy I can't confirm there's no additional changes beyond their covers.

The last reason I believe the smaller books are stripped down re-releases is for the two versions of "book 1" I own and have scanned, it feels like small version is missing things that complete the "plot" of the book. Not that either of these coloring books based on Mario 1 have complicated plots, but the smaller version cuts the two-page image of Bowser turning the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom into bricks, something not only mentioned in the manual but appears in the Giant book's telling of Mario 1 in the same placement as "book 1"'s big version (albeit it's a one page image in the Giant version). And the three pages needed for cutting out a castle door on the page to reveal the kidnapped Toads inside is also cut. The last three pages are stock art of Mario doing various unrelated activities that were in the same section as the big variant's spread of stock art used to make coloring pages.

If you wish to view any of the books I've scanned yourself, you can find them converted to digital PDF books here. These versions include two blank pages to reflect the interior of the front and back cover, which was necessary to keep the pages correctly oriented on the left and right sides as they appear in the physical books.

Anything else beyond this would be speculation on my part, and this post is already very long. --14:45, March 29, 2026 (UTC)J. Gray Dingler (talk)

I've edited and added information to the articles per what you wrote here. Maw-Ray Master (talk) 08:07, April 16, 2026 (UTC)