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Children everywhere rejoiced as The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters today. Box offices everywhere predict a big weekend win as Mario and Luigi take on the big screen with other classic Nintendo characters, Princess Peach, Bowser, and Toad, but despite its massive budget and an all-star cast including Chris Pratt and Jack Black, reviews of the film are overwhelmingly average so far, which – interestingly enough – makes this the latest entry in a line of somewhat-mediocre Mario movies.
Far from being the first time Mario and Luigi hit the big screen, the new Super Mario Bros. movie is actually filmmakers’ third attempt at a movie adaptation of the franchise: previous attempts include 1993’s Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, a 1986 animated film originally produced in Japan. To some, the existence of previous Mario movies raises some important questions: is there something Universal could have done to make the newest film better than the ones that came before? Is there a reason why none of the Super Mario movies have been received well, and if there is, what should filmmakers avoid in the inevitable future of Mario films?
Let’s try and take a swing at those questions and a couple more – starting, of course, at the very beginning.
‘Super Mario Bros.’ 1986 – Solid Animation, Loose Story
Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach was Nintendo’s first attempt at a Mario-centric movie, five years after everyone’s favorite Italian plumber made his first appearance in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong (1981). The animated film, based on the Super Mario Bros. game from 1985, was first released in Japan and centers around Mario and a blue version of his brother Luigi, who both work at a nearby grocery store. Mario and his brother are called to adventure after Princess Peach leaps out of a video game, followed by King Koopa, who kidnaps the princess after Mario tries and fails to defeat him.
Chasing after the kidnapped princess and her dog Kibidango, Mario and Luigi are transported via a pipe to the Mushroom Kingdom, whose citizens have all been turned to inanimate objects by King Koopa. As Koopa plans to force Peach to marry him on Friday the 13th, Mario and Luigi must travel through the Mushroom Kingdom in search of the Mushroom, the Flower, and the Star, three mystical powerups they’ll need to reverse King Koopa’s evil magic.
While it’s clear that Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach stayed true to many of the series hallmarks, even as new as they were back then, the movie itself received middling ratings, with IMDb giving it 5.6 out of 10 stars. Comicbook.com describes the film’s story as “loose, to put it lightly,” and it’s hard to blame them for it: especially as, at the end of the film, Princess Peach’s dog Kibidango is revealed to actually be Haru, the prince of the Flower Kingdom who was turned into a dog by King Koopa – oh, and he’s also Peach’s fiance. Sorry, Mario.
However, despite the film being filled to the brim with what’s been described as “Nintendo craziness,” the animation of the movie is admittedly very well done, so much so that it’s launched a fan-led restoration project, leading to the forty-year-old animated movie being remastered from 16mm film to 4K, including audio that’s been restored from a VHS tape to 4-channel Dolby audio, according to leading studio Femboy Films. The full, restored film can be found below – how do you think it matches up to the new, 3D-animated film?
‘Super Mario Bros.’ 1993 – Live-Action…Parallel Universes?
Nintendo’s next attempt to put Mario on the big screen came seven years after the original animated film and took the entire concept in a new direction: namely, live-action. Bob Hoskins starred in Super Mario Bros. (1993) as Mario Mario – yes, that’s his full name – alongside John Leguizamo as Mario’s brother, Luigi Mario. The brothers, who work at a Brooklyn-based plumbing company, meet Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an NYU archaeologist looking for dinosaur bones under the Brooklyn Bridge. In a series of unfortunate events, Daisy is kidnapped by henchmen of King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), the ruler of a parallel dimension where dinosaurs survived the meteorite impact 65 million years ago and evolved enough to form a monarchy and the city of Dinohattan.
Following Daisy and the henchmen through an interdimensional portal, Mario and Luigi find out that Daisy is actually descended from the dinosaur residents of Dinohattan – more than that, she’s actually the kingdom’s long-lost princess, whose parents had been overthrown by the evil King Koopa twenty years prior. Together with the aid of Toad (Mojo Nixon), a guitarist who was devolved into a Goomba for protesting against the king, the brothers rescue Princess Daisy from King Koopa’s grasp, successfully defeating the evil king and reinstating Daisy’s father as the rightful ruler of Dinohattan.
Unlike the 1986 animated film, the 1993 live-action version of Super Mario Bros. clearly strayed farther from its source material in a couple of notable ways – for one thing, Princess Peach is non-existent. Instead, Luigi gets the romantic focus of the film alongside Princess Daisy. The concept of the dinosaur-based parallel universe was reportedly inspired by Dinosaur Land in Super Mario World, released by Nintendo on the SNES in 1990. Still, audiences could be excused for thinking the concept came out of leftfield – and they wouldn’t be the only ones, given that that Super Mario Bros. movie received a 35 Metascore and a 4.3 audience score from Metacritic, a 28% and 4.10/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, and box office revenue of $21 million worldwide on a 48-million-dollar budget.
However, despite its initially poor reception, Super Mario Bros. (1993) did end up making something of a comeback, with a “warts and all” mentality leading some fans to love the movie despite – or possibly, because of – its faults. Still, no one denies that this movie adaptation strayed a little too far from its source – hopefully, warning the filmmakers of The Super Mario Bros. Movie off of doing the same.
Moving Forward
Even if reviews for The Super Mario Bros. Movie range from mixed at best to average at worst, it’s at least clear that Nintendo and Universal learned from some of the mistakes made by its predecessors – by all accounts, the new Universal-made movie is at least loyal every part of its source material, even including material from the wider Mario franchise like Rainbow Road from Mario Kart and Cat Mario from Super Mario 3D World, along with a wide variety of Nintendo characters like Donkey Kong, Cranky Kong, and Kamek, along with the main Mario-based cast which, yes, does actually include Princess Peach this time.
Additionally, while The Super Mario Bros. Movie has attracted some criticism for its choice of voice actors, it is an animated movie, possibly hoping to call back to the charm of the 1986 animated film while avoiding some of the pitfalls of the 1993 live-action adaptation – it’s not clear as to whether or not their attempts have succeeded yet, but at least the effort to call back to slightly better times was there.
Ultimately, it’s hard to tell how the new Mario movie will land this close to its release – maybe, in a couple of decades, it’ll reach the same “cult classic” status as Super Mario Bros. (1993), or maybe it’ll be the next big thing right off the bat and spawn a whole new series of Mario movies, launching the franchise to film success for the first time in its career.
What do you think – has Nintendo learned from its past movie mistakes? Is The Super Mario Bros. Movie better or worse than the 1986 and 1993 films? What’s your favorite of the three? Let us know in the comments!