Strike one more Super Mario mystery off the list.

Mario power-punches blocks with his fist, rather than headbutting them. The clouds in Super Mario Bros" are in fact white bushes floating in the sky. Mario was the bad guy in Donkey Kong Jr."

And his toadstool-patterned friends, the Toads, have bulbous heads rather than large turban-style hats.

That last little unexplained mystery has been puzzling the Super Mario community anew since a November 2017 Dorkly article weighed up some of the competing Toad Hat and Toad Head arguments.

In Super Mario 3D World, a power up gives Toad a smaller-sized crash helmet that replaces his toadstool-style headpiece, for example, while in two Super Mario RPG spin-offs some Toads have hair peeking out from what would appear to be a hat.

But most recently, in October 2017's smash hit Mario game, Super Mario Odyssey, Toads are seen wearing additional hats on top off their polka-spotted headpieces – a point in favour of Team Head.

Furthermore, the game's centrepiece, a magical piece of headwear called Cappy, can be used to take over other objects or beings that aren't already wearing another hat.

Since standard Toads can be possessed by Cappy, it follows that a Toad's hat is in fact his or her head.

Given that Super Mario Odyssey supports the Toad Head theory, perhaps it's to be expected that the game's producer is also on Team Head.

In a Nintendo Q&A video posted to Twitter he put an end to the debate – for now, at least.

We sit down with Mr. Koizumi, the producer of #SuperMarioOdyssey, and ask him some of those questions we have all wanted answers to! pic.twitter.com/9TjOC9ig3o — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 5, 2018

"So that, as it turns out, is actually Toad's head," he said, rearranging the replica Cappy atop his own head.

"I'm going to have to leave it up to all of you to figure out exactly how that works out. Maybe there's something inside," he chuckled.

He also commented on other pieces of character design trivia.

Though Super Mario Odyssey saw Mario given visible nipples for the first time, shown when he is wearing a boxer shorts costume, there was no accompanying belly button. Why not? "I didn't really expect it to be a topic among fans... it made me start to think about whether we should revisit the topic on the design side."

Regarding Mario's relationship with two of the franchise's leading women, first Peach and now Pauline, he said that people should "respect the privacy of those three at this time."

And he said that since the game's debugging team became so good at reaching supposedly inaccessible areas, designers ended up placing bonus coins in some of these places "to pay their respects for the testing team."

"Overall it seemed like a fun experience 'cause people were able to find new areas they could explore." — AFP Relaxnews