Since When Is There a Telephone in Donkey Kong?

This week, I’m a guest on a Retronauts episode about Pac-Man Fever, the 1982 album by Buckner & Garcia in which each track is about a popular arcade game. (Additionally, there is a song about Mouse Trap.) If you listen — and you should! — you will hear me say that although I usually write a post about every Retronauts I appear on, I don’t think there’s anything to write about for this particular one.I lied, it turns out!As it often does, the internet ended up delivering me a thing to write about: the telephone in Donkey Kong.The novelty single “Pac-Man Fever” was released in 1981 and proved popular enough that Columbia Records offered Buckner & Garcia the chance to make an entire album. They said yes, obviously and while the result didn’t measure up to the original title track, the album isn’t exactly a total loss. Almost every song features something interesting even if it doesn’t turn out to be wholly successful.“Ode to Centipede” actually starts to go somewhere interesting, almost…