At the seasoned and experienced age of 33, I know myself pretty well, and that understanding of myself doesn’t include any furry tendencies…but I can’t deny I somehow end up playing and watching a lot of furry bait franchises. Robin Hood was my favorite Disney movie for many years, Zootopia is one of my modern animated loves, and you will find me yelling for a new Sly Cooper if someone so much as passively mentions developer Sucker Punch.
There are many characters I love that I’ve had to be careful about searching for on social media. Stumbling upon something not-safe-for-work when looking for an animal character that walks on two legs is a canon event, and I imagine another generation is about to experience it now that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has brought Fox McCloud back into the popular consciousness.
Not just a ladies man, but a lumas man. pic.twitter.com/2DMtgleSSc
— That COMICBOOK Guy (@Culture3ase) April 1, 2026
Nintendo and Illumination’s take on the suave, space-faring adventurer doesn’t feel quite as overt in its camera-winking, face serving thirst trapping as, say Nick Wilde in Zootopia (especially the sequel, which made me feel pretty sure someone involved in its production wants to fuck the fox cop), but The Super Mario Galaxy Movie clearly is positioning this fox pilot as someone cool and desirable.
He’s the embodiment of the “girls want him, guys want to be him” archetype, and you can see it in how Toad fawns over his cool space boots and Peach is in awe of his universe-bending backstory. The Lumas also look up to him as a hero. He’s a roguish daredevil flying across the galaxy fighting god knows what, and that’s dangerous and sexy. The movie stops just short of making him Mario’s rival for Peach’s love with a well-timed punchline to break the tension.
My guy is farming aura at all times, and actor Glen Powell does a decent job injecting some swagger into an otherwise lifeless script. Mario as a franchise often leans harder into cute and colorful aesthetics over cool ones, but with Fox in the cast, the balance is more than corrected.
This will inevitably introduce Fox and the rest of his crew to a new generation of furry artists, and after the moment Nick had when Zootopia premiered in 2016, it feels like Nintendo is knowingly putting their biggest furry-bait hero on the largest stage it can. And I get it. This dude is so cool, and I know that coolness translates into something else entirely for some folks. Go with god, Fox fans. Just make some cool safe-for-work art for the rest of us, too, yeah?