I lost my DDR Mario Mix dance mat in Hurricane Sandy and I have to buy a new one if I want to play the game. Do I have to look for the specific Mario dance mat, or can I just get any one that plugs into a gamecube port?

I'm fairly sure that anything plugging into a Gamecube port works just fine.

But why the hell are you playing Mario Mix? It's pathetically easy and (from a DDR and Mario fans perspective) a fairly crappy mix.

Any DDR mat will work.
Not any dance mat though, it must be from DDR to ensure that it will work.
So yeah, any mat from Hottest Party 1, 2, 3, etc and DDR1, DDR2.

Thanks. It hardly seems worth it to buy a mat alone. Do you recommend any of the Wii DDR games? Amazon has the DDR2 bundle for $30.

I recommend StepMania, mainly because it's free, but you need a PC Mat for that unless you want to play keyboard files. http://stepmania.com

I'd say DDR2 is the best (since I like the harder songs, and not all of the charts for the harder songs suck this time around) but really, I wouldn't pay more then $15-20 not including mat.

Yes. All Dance Dance mats will work. My brother has every hottest party, revolution, and Mario Mix, and uses both dance pads for any of them.