Super Mario Bros. (1993, 104 minutes)

"Wow, you mean there were dinosaurs here in Brooklyn?"

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I’m sad to be saying this: we’ve made it to the end of our John-uary Leguizamo retrospective. But I am going out with a bang - 1993’s Super Mario Bros.! A movie that both traumatized and raised an entire generation of Nintendo-loving kids. The first video game to be adapted into a live action theatrical movie, Super Mario Bros. notoriously flopped at the box office, pissed off critics, scared kids, worried parents, and disappeared for a while except in the hearts of gamer millennials everywhere. But now with the release of a 30th anniversary 4K collector’s set from Umbrella Entertainment, fans (likely now all in their 30’s or early 40’s) are sharing their love for this twisted piece of film history. 

“It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin’ nightmare. Fuckin’ idiots.” - Bob Hoskins 

The Mario Brothers (Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi) are two down-on-their-luck plumbers in Brooklyn who come across Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an NYU student running an architectural dig (?) that may reveal what killed the dinosaurs. But, it seems the site of this dig has opened up a pathway between our world and an alternate dimension where dinosaurs actually didn’t die but also evolved into humans (?). Turns out, Daisy is a Princess of this “Dinohattan”, sent to our dimension for safe keeping from the evil President Koopa (Dennis Hopper) who wants to combine the two universes and take over both (?). And I guess you can figure out the rest: Mario and Luigi set out to save Daisy and subsequently the world as we knew it in 1993.  

There is a lot that went wrong with the production of this movie from rewrites, to on site fights, injuries, and a lack of involvement by Nintendo. But it can be boiled down to the fact that filmmakers overworked the lore of Mario. They tried to make Mario understandable to adults and to too wide of an audience. I mean, I was six when this movie came out. I had already bought into the story of a plumber chasing dinosaurs through a mushroom kingdom stomping on brown turds called Goombas to get to a princess. Kids were ALL IN! You don’t have to make it make sense. We didn’t care when we played the game, and we didn’t care when the movie came out. But they attempted it anyway. And despite being doomed from the start, many of us hold this movie near to our hearts. I’d like to focus on why that is, rather than why it’s so bad. (Anyone can see that.) 

The casting of Mario and Luigi could not be better. This movie introduced the concept of Luigi as Mario’s cool younger brother instead of his equal,l as they did on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show! a few years earlier. Giving Mario a caretaking role adds depth and warmth to their sibling relationship while making Luigi a bit more naive gets them into (and out of) trouble in creative and fun ways. Plus, I think as kids we were always looking for someone that was easier to identify with. Older plumbers from Brooklyn, is a little tough when done with real actors, but throwing in a young guy in a backwards hat watching alien shows, it connected us to our heroes in a new way. Despite hating the work and being drunk a lot, Hoskins and Leguizamo did a great job as their respective characters. It’s the same thing I’ve said previously about Leguizamo -- he puts his whole self into his roles. He is committed and that is what makes him so believable and enjoyable to watch. The chemistry between the two is strong enough to get by, even when Hoskins seems tired as hell, it works. 

Though a lot of the creative choices don’t work-- why make Dinohattan a thing?-- the team behind Super Mario Bros. attempted to build new stories for beloved characters. The good choices they made are differentiating Mario and Luigi with age, choosing Daisy over Peach, making Koopa a skeezy politician (quite reminiscent of Trump by the way) instead of a King. I also love how their being plumbers is so present and important to the plot, they’re our unlikely, lovable heroes.

Other choices like the look of the Goombas and turning Toad of ALL people INTO a Goomba (why??) are painful and ruin a lot of what makes Mario fun. They even ruined the fun of Yoshi by making him a dog-like raptor. This Polygon article points out that where this movie failed, Last of Us excelled in creating new stories for existing characters. As they did for Bill and Frank, who in the game are very minor characters. That took guts and they stuck the landing. Super Mario Bros. took risks too… There were just too many that were wrong for it to work. 

I think now it’s easier to appreciate the movie for the impact it made on millennials and younger Gen-Xers as children. Again, it was the first video game movie! It further legitimized video games and Nintendo as cultural icons at a time when parents were really stressed out about the role of video games in the lives of their children (and their wallets). Kids who loved video games were seen in a new way. Is it a bummer that it turned out to be a wet pile of fungus? Definitely. In the long run however, we will never forget the goombas in the elevator or the coolest Luigi to ever live.