No, this has been directly confirmed by Nintendo developers at various points. For people to even be able to try SMB, they'd have to be convinced that the NES wouldn't suffer the fate of the Atari 2600 and the like. It wasn't just about the VCR-looking design - the marketing materials had very careful wording to avoid associations with the failed game consoles, and accessories like R.O.B. (that never even existed in Japan!) were mostly made to make the NES look like a complex electronic toy, and not a game console.