Doc von Schmeltwick
Multi-hat Koopa cutie
- MarioWiki
- Doc von Schmeltwick
Fair warning, this is gonna be a long one; see this discussion and this draft page. 
The decision to swap his character out for King Boo in Double Dash!! while keeping the design intended for him was essentially the death knell of this character. It left him with barely any distinguishing characteristics (besides his wonk Sunshine design) and little reason to continue appearing in spinoffs if they could just have the more popular and distinct King Boo do so; King Boo even replaced Boss Teresa's old board role in Mario Party Superstars. He's well past the point where he's likely to make a comeback in any form unless they decide to remake SM64 from the ground up, which is unlikely at best considering they seem satisfied rereleasing it in a limited-time compilation or an even-more transient subscription disservice. One could say that he was a prototype King Boo from the beginning or even an early iteration of the same character, but much as Koopa Kid was for Bowser Jr., they coexisted in the GameCube era, though unlike KK and BJr, they managed to appear in the same game (albeit intrinsically linked).
We all know how many iterations the famed "Big Boo" enemy/boss has gone through. But what if I told you that mixed in with those, is an individual recurring character we've completely overlooked?
This is "Boss Teresa," written as either "Oyakata Teresa" or "Bosu Teresa." He was the leader of the Boos until he was basically combined into/replaced with King Boo (more on that later).
He was the owner of Big Boo's Haunt, appearing in three missions. Curiously, in the Japanese release, the "Oyakata" name was used for the first mission, the "Bosu" name was used for the balcony mission, and no name at all was used for the Merry-Go-Round mission. Japanese fansites often try to list them as two characters, usually lumping the MGR one with the first mission's one due to requiring normal Boos being defeated to spawn. Despite this, official sources treat all three as the same, generally using one name or the other. The same goes for following games, where they generally consistently use one of those names.
Hudson Soft liked this guy enough he appeared in the early Mario Party games. Notably, he was a board feature in 2 and 4, in the latter of which he was a curious blue color. This is most likely so he has a distinct icon since in that game, all talk icons have a neutral pose facing the screen, but it may also act as a callback to the standard Atomic Boos having a muted periwinkle color in Super Mario World, like at the top of this thread.
Large-sized Boos that may be him appear in certain minigames as well, like Running of the Bulb here from the first game. Neither English nor Japanese in-game descriptions mention the big fellow at all, though I'm hoping the official Japanese guide may shed some light. That being said, Japanese sites like Pixiv Encyclopedia call this one "Gasu Bosu Teresa" (Gas Boss Boo, of course) owing to his foggy appearance. There's also large-ish Boos in Pedal Power and Skateboard Scamper, but until further notice they seem to just be normal Boos. Mario Party-e was US-only and involved in a SMW-based minigame, so it makes the most sense to consider that a normal Big Boo and not the Boss Boo character.
It's at this point King Boo is introduced. Here, he's oddly colored with a minty green body, minty blue tongue, and minty pink eyes. He's also only the same size as a normal Boo, much smaller than Boolossus from the same game (though bigger than Boolossus's constituent parts). Pre-release materials seem to depict him as a normal Boo, even, with no crown in sight.
It's at this point we reach the second mainline appearance of "Boss Teresa," this handsome devil (according to the fanartists, at least, image search ボステレサ at your own risk). With his slobbering mouth, huge tongue, and distinctly pudgy appearance (despite Boos already being spherical), you'd think this was a separate character entirely... if not for the 30th anniversary official Super Mario Pia Japanese guidebook explicitly stating that he is the same character as the SM64 boss - and he is still massive compared to the LM character. Which brings us into...
...King Boo's often-decried 'basic bitch Boo' redesign in Double Dash!! But wait, it gets interesting here: unused text strings in the internal data refer to the ghost not as "King Teresa," but "Boss Teresa," implying he was meant to be the character from before until very late in development. But wait, there's more! The finalized design can be seen in materials at a very early period of development, implying that this white-bodied, large-sized, normal-crowned design was envisioned as a redesign for Boss Teresa, combining aspects of his SM64 and Sunshine designs into a more standardized appearance (ignoring the out-of-house MP4 design, releasing between LM and DD). Why did they change it to the LM character? Probably for marginal advertising/representation from LM. Granted, they could have had the best of both worlds by editing the final model into a separate slot for the LM King Boo, having them both be on a team with Boss Teresa being heavyweight and King Boo being middleweight, and giving them the classic Boo item as a special, while making Petey's partner be Big Bob-omb or another character, but hey, that's hindsight. If you think this makes Boss Boo and King Boo a singular character, then there's something to further bump things up with...
Super Mario 64 DS, where along with the original Boss Teresa appearing in his old role (with a spiffy new model to boot instead of an upscaled Boo model, though this just means he has better animations than them), the MKDD King Boo appears as the Luigi-unlock boss, using the stock throaty-laugh sound effect King Boo did in LM. However, they are not fully distinguished either; they use the exact same "spiffy new model," with basically an on/off switch to determine if the crown is there. Their behavior is also not much different; King Boo fights in front of a mirror, and usually only his real version or his reflection is visible at any given time, and he can also spit blue fire like a Flame Chomp and occasionally slowly teleport when switching visible sides. But wait, there's more! The English script refers to both as "Big Boo," and while the Japanese script does use "King Teresa" for the crowned one, that's on top of the "Oyakata Teresa" and "Bosu Teresa" already in use! Meanwhile, the French localization uses "Roi Boo" for both, meaning "King Boo."
"Boss Teresa" appears one additional time shortly before SM64DS as a boss in Mario Pinball Land, again being on a similar level of importance as the (highly off-model) Petey Piranha. He's gone back to looking like a giant-sized standard Boo. Also, the Japanese name is again inconsistent; while the (presumably Nintendo-written) official site still calls him "Bosu Teresa," the (third party-written) official guide uses "Biggu Teresa," which is shared with Big Boo from SMRPG (which I severely doubt was intentional, considering "big" is a generic loanword and it's highly improbable that they were inspired by an obscure line in SMRPG's instruction manual; "Biggu" is also primarily associated with Yoshi bosses that Kamek enlarges, though oddly not Bigger Boo). He never made any fully new appearances again, though as of this writing, he has appeared more recently than King Boo thanks to an MPL-inspired WarioWare microgame (where he is unnamed).
King Boo takes an appearance similar to his original one in later Luigi's Mansion games. Despite this, influence from the MKDD design is still present, namely the white color and his massive size. Even in the LM 3DS remake, while he's back to his normal size and some of his other colors are reverted, his body is stark-white.
So, what happened?
The decision to swap his character out for King Boo in Double Dash!! while keeping the design intended for him was essentially the death knell of this character. It left him with barely any distinguishing characteristics (besides his wonk Sunshine design) and little reason to continue appearing in spinoffs if they could just have the more popular and distinct King Boo do so; King Boo even replaced Boss Teresa's old board role in Mario Party Superstars. He's well past the point where he's likely to make a comeback in any form unless they decide to remake SM64 from the ground up, which is unlikely at best considering they seem satisfied rereleasing it in a limited-time compilation or an even-more transient subscription disservice. One could say that he was a prototype King Boo from the beginning or even an early iteration of the same character, but much as Koopa Kid was for Bowser Jr., they coexisted in the GameCube era, though unlike KK and BJr, they managed to appear in the same game (albeit intrinsically linked).
It needs to be decided how to handle this on the wiki, because lumping him in with all the other Big Boos out there is clunky at best; these are more removed from standard Big Boos than many instances characters and species we do have split from each other. So, hit me with your thoughts on this (that was a bad pinball boss joke to tie into the above image, sorry). Anyway, responses are open.
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