Haha. Well.
Way, way back in 2005 I was talking to friends about how Sakurai, being another developer (albeit a game developer, where I'm only an animator) would want to greatly diversify and create more distance in how the characters from different worlds and franchises would appear. After all, the cast of characters will be bigger and everything being realistic is boring when you can be creative with top of the line artistic software, no?
So I thought among many things "Hey, perhaps they'll use pseudo cel-shading to make Captain Falcon look like a 70s comic super hero!". Of course I saw him a few weeks ago and that clearly wasn't the case (which comes as no surprise). But however it looks like they modeled him to look like he did before SEGA got their hands on him and made the art so realistic.
Falcon in F-Zero X:
Falcon in Super Smash Brothers (N64)
So yeah, I think the idea was to make him look cheesy and outlandishly exaggerated. Kind of like Samus looks a bit bulky like she did in Super Metroid, as opposed to how much slimmer her armor become in the recent years. I mean, it's Smash Brothers. Everything is going to look ridiculous in the end.
