a curated selection of thoughts collected within a 1 gb limit
it’s a weird time for movies right now. one of the most awarded movies ever made is an A24 movie, greta gerwig released her first film to gross a billion dollars in the box office, most of the expensive blockbusters are actually losing money, and one of the biggest success stories in recent memory is a video game movie based on one of the biggest properties in pop culture…oh yeah, and something about employees being treated unfairly.
mario used to be hands down my favorite thing growing up. i had the games, i watched the newgrounds parodies, i even had a DVD of the super mario world TV show from the 90s. fun fact: had it not been for me looking up random mario videos on youtube, i probably would’ve never found out about smosh. that’s a diamond occurrence right there. but anyways, there’s no denying just how big mario is. so it was no surprise when this year, they finally bit the bullet and released the super mario bros movie to an unsuspecting public.
and now it’s come to this. some people love it, some people hate it, others will die by it. but where do i stand, the only sensible person here who happens to have a neocities website? to commemorate this film finally streaming on peacock, i thought it would be fun to dedicate a whole article to it. i mean, i never really did a whole article on just one film before…and that will wait another while because i just had a brilliant idea.
okay, if you don’t know or remember or care, this is the first animated mario movie with direct involvement from nintendo. but it’s not the first mario movie ever made. there’s two more, in fact. and if you care enough to sit down for a minute, we’re gonna go through them one by one. let’s start first and foremost with the one that i hate quoting in full.
now then, super mario whatever. let’s just call it great mission for short. so great mission for short is a 1986 anime film made to promote the first mario game. and promote it certainly does. there’s product placement for stuff like super mario ramen, where mario might as well look at the camera while eating his own name brand food. and then there’s mario rice seasoning, which comes out of nowhere and distracts mario from the climax, leaving him vulnerable. that’s right. it’s so bad, it directly interferes with the plot. otherwise, i guess the pacing is alright. it does a good job for an hour-long OVA.
for years, the only way you could watch this was on a 240p VHS rip. but now? it’s absolutely stunning. there’s a fantastic remaster by kinekovideo with new subtitles and entirely rescanned cel animation from beginning to end. it certainly helps sell how pretty this looks. putting aside some animation errors, there’s some good composition going on here. they sure did the best they could here.
…alright, time to be rude. what sucks about this OVA? for one, it’s a little unfocused. mario plays on the famicom and all the mario characters come out of the TV. okay. mario and luigi operate a family business in baking and groceries. again, okay. possibly even moreso, in fact. but then luigi just suddenly knows about this mystical gem and brings out a book that has all the info about it. i can excuse bowser jumping out of the TV for no reason, but this is where i draw the line.
in general, there’s a lot of odd little quirks about the film. mushrooms are split into separate emotional powers, like happy or sad, toads are like pixie fairies that spawn from coins or something, luigi, who sports a blue hat and overalls, hits question blocks with his head instead of punching them, bowser has a dad, and the enemy lakitu has this thing where he can wake up spinies by taking out a big light to get them out of hibernation. also joining this cast is father time from rudolph’s shiny new year and a blue dog made from an amiga computer. in other words, it’s an early tie-in. and i wouldn’t have had it any other way.
honestly, it could’ve been worse. princess peach could definitely take a hike, though. i think her voice actor was around, let’s say, 16-ish when this came out. she’s probably a better performer now, but you could tell she didn’t have the most experience with acting. but mario and luigi are really fun. plus, mario’s voiced by yamcha from dragon ball z! i’m told that yamcha is the worst character ever created, but my DBZ knowledge only stems from dragon ball fighterz, the live action movie, and some toonami airings here and there. so make of that what you will.
now, let’s draw our attention to the elephant in the room. this blue amiga dog follows the mario bros for the whole movie, and then he turns into this stupid ass prince who takes peach away from mario! yeah, this dog turns out to be prince haru of the flower kingdom, who was turned into a dog but was turned back to normal by, uh, true love? they hardly know each other, haru and peach. this isn’t the classic super mario story! though, i will admit the dog form was more annoying. carry on, then.
hold on, flower kingdom? isn’t that where the new mario game is taking place? and those toads, if they are toads, look strangely like the ones in the OVA. that can’t be right. you’re telling me this straight-to-video film meant to promote mario ramen might actually lay the foundation of the series forward?
fine, i’ll allow it. as long as they don’t use that J-pop song ever again. they really got some mileage out of that, huh?
easily one of the most infamous video game adaptations out there. in the eyes of someone who even vaguely knows what a mario is, this film was destined to suck ass. for one, it’s such a loose interpretation that you’d hardly even call it a mario movie. full marks for having bob hoskins as mario and dennis hopper as king koopa. dennis never looked the part, but after david lynch’s blue velvet, he could probably rule over a garden and he’d still look like the most horrifying person you’d ever meet. he’s a goddamn villain with or without the look. partial marks for john leguizamo as luigi. he feels a little miscast, but i could see him talk with daisy and get that he’s supposed to be luigi. samantha mathis as daisy was pretty cool, too.
but then, you have characters like iggy, spike, and toad who are all nothing like what they’re based on. goombas are like de-evolved humans that used to be reptiles or something and yoshi is just a small dinosaur. i think one of the female characters was meant to be big bertha. like…the giant fish from mario 3. i don’t understand. this might honestly be one of the worst ways to adapt a video game by far. the only way you’d understand it being a mario movie is if you look at it and say, “well, bob hoskins looks like mario. so i can only assume that's luigi right there, and they’ll definitely have bowser somewhere in the film.” it only works by assumption and assumption only.
but on its own, it’s not that bad.
so get a load of this malarkey. billions of years ago, there was a meteor that landed in brooklyn that supposedly killed all the dinosaurs. but in a completely stupid “what if” scenario, dan castellaneta tells the audience what happens if the dinosaurs evolved into super mutants that evolved from that meteor. crash land to years later and we see mario and luigi get lured into this nightmare version of manhattan that’s overrun by these lizard people who have evolved into humans. king koopa, that’s dennis hopper by the way, is a dictator of this city and threatens to de-evolve any of his opposers into goombas.
meanwhile, this woman named daisy is kidnapped and taken in because she has this meteorite necklace that has this power to merge both the koopa world and our world into one. there’s this other lady as well, but she doesn’t really have a good character, so we’ll skip her. meanwhile, there’s this king who is daisy’s dad that is turned into this weird orange fungus thing. so now it’s up to mario and luigi to save daisy, who is technically princess of this land, save the king from being orange julius, stop king koopa from merging worlds together, and take that rock that came from a prehistoric meteor that fell into brooklyn, as shown in a terrible pixel animation narrated by dan castellaneta.
there’s also something with nuns. i don’t know if that’s meant to be bowser or mario or whoever that is. it came from an egg. so is it human or…?
i firmly believe the general public is often wrong about certain movies. freddy got fingered? funny as hell. ishtar? doesn’t even look that bad. josie and the pussycats? i can’t even forgive you at that point. seriously, go watch josie and the pussycats. it’s such a funny movie. anyway, there’s a strong divide with this cyberpunk adventure you call a super mario movie. i stand right in the middle where i can honestly say it’s…okay. it’s not what you’d call a cohesive narrative. but one of the worst movies ever made? it hardly looks like it. the actors do a good job for whatever they were given, the set design looks fantastic, some of the effects genuinely look great for the time (emphasis on some), and it’s an overall fun movie. it really feels like whatever flaws it may have might actually be a plus to the film. but some are not as forgivable as others. it gets a little too boring for my liking and most of the characters i just did not care for. again, there's a whole lady villain that i do not remember. i think mario had her own girlfriend at one point. it's kinda messed up that i only remember the names of the only pre-established characters in the film because it's meant to be so radically different. the idea of it can only be made by complete psychos, but it's ingenius because of it.
honestly, the more i look into this movie, the cooler it sounds in my head. it was directed by husband and wife, rocky morton and annabel jankel, two of the creators of max headroom, that glitchy guy in a suit that eminem dressed as. and according to screenwriter parker bennett, it was always supposed to be a prequel of sorts. but it’s not exactly a prequel either. it’s technically a prequel, but it also serves as the real life inspiration for nintendo to make the original super mario in the first place. swear to god, i have proof:
"our take on it was that nintendo interpreted the events from our story and came up with the video game. we basically worked backwards."
it really seemed like this was where they were going whether anyone liked it or not. but looking into it (or just reading wikipedia), it seemed like there was a bit of interference from producers and switching things around at the last second. and even the directors might have been in over their heads, at least according to some of the actors. actually, here’s a real quote from dennis hopper during a conan o’brien interview:
“my six-year-old son at the time – he's now 18 – he said, 'dad i think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy king koopa in super mario bros.?' and i said, 'well henry, i did that so you could have shoes,' and he said, 'dad, I don't need shoes that badly.'”
but somehow, there’s still a big cult following behind it. if you look at the super mario bros movie archive, you’ll find just how much people will rally behind it. in fact, someone out there took time out of their day to put together a restored EXTENDED CUT. yes, the morton-jankel cut was released in 2021 on the internet archive, adding about 20 whole minutes worth of deleted scenes. what the hell is the deal with this movie? why this one of all other films? why was there so much passion put into something you could barely call a super mario movie?
you know that film, the thief and the cobbler, by richard williams? that film has been in the rough for well over 50 years, going from a bunch of storyboards in the trash to a butchered miramax cut to a series of FOUR fan edits that frankenstein together each and every scene in order to finish the vision of one of the most esteemed animators of all time. the mario movie is basically second or third to that level of dedication. the directors were dedicated to this product, at times unbearably so, even though it was destined to fail by association. this may have totally soured the possibility of getting another mario film ever again. but as we all know now, we can’t assume it ever stopped them.
so up until now, nintendo mostly stayed in their lane in terms of film and television. any TV show, movie, or short film was mostly commissioned by them to other studios, mostly in japan. but in 2018, news broke out that nintendo had struck a deal with universal pictures and illumination that they were making a brand new super mario movie. it was a shock. i remember not looking forward to this at all. i mean, come on now. illumination making a super mario movie? surely, us ADULTS don’t want to see the minions running around over and over. and on top of that, the creators of teen titans go were also picked to direct it as well…i’ll allow it. teen titans go, i’m on and off about. but these guys are fairly experienced with DC cartoons anyway. plus, that meant maybe this new film was gunning for a ballsier approach to writing. i was up for a really comedic type of mario movie. now i’m sort of with you.
then, they announced the cast. some choices were fine enough, like anya taylor joy from the witch playing peach. charlie day as luigi made a lot of sense too, and jack black as bowser was probably the best choice they could’ve made. but chris pratt as mario and seth rogen as donkey kong? am i losing my mind? i never thought i’d say this, but we might have another disaster on our hands. however, i’m tough but i’m fair. i gave the new trailers a shot and they were surprisingly…great! it looked and felt like something you see from the games. it felt so…organic. i’m not gonna lie to myself and admit that i was ready to see this in the theater.
i didn’t, but you get the idea.
alright, stop beating around the bush. is this 2023 super mario bros movie great? no. is it at least pretty good? yes. see, the thing about this film is that it’s made by illumination. not that they aren’t a talented studio, but i can’t help but feel that their output isn’t exactly what you call high art.
it doesn’t have to be. i mean, their business model works damn near every time. basically, each film has a budget that never goes over, let’s say, triple digit numbers. so they can basically generate bigger profits by underspending on their own work.
you can call it detrimental all you want, since it’s prone to limiting story potential and, at times, even visual quality. but it’s honestly a smart move when you get down to it. it’s less risky than, oh i dunno, that new indiana jones movie costing $300 million to make. fun fact: that film needed about $750 million in the box office to break even. this mario movie is a third of that, only $100 million, which makes it illumination’s most expensive film to date. and it certainly shows. there’s just so much visual clarity and world-building, it’s insane to think they made this at all. so many ideas and possibilities to tell such a grand story. there’s so much to pluck from the mario timeline that it would be insane to underutilize it. and that’s why illumination made the conscious decision to cap this film at 93 minutes.
and there’s your problem.
don’t get me wrong. this is clearly the best mario movie we’ve ever gotten. it’s such a fun experience overall despite its shortcomings. anyway, let’s talk about its shortcomings.
you guys remember that mortal kombat movie from two years ago? actually, that’s a bad start. have you guys seen that mortal kombat movie from two years ago? that had the same problem as well. it was just under two hours in runtime and all that amounted to was a series of things that just sort of happened. and i’m still pissy about that ending too. all that hard work for this guy to defeat the big bad only for someone else to do his homework for him. then after that charade, they pan to a flier with johnny cage on it and the movie ends. i feel that a game like mortal kombat deserves more time to explore its stupid, convoluted lore. and no, i don’t mean twiddling your fingers and then teasing a sequel right after.
that’s the super mario bros movie. it’s a series of things that sort of happen. granted, it’s a more cohesive narrative. but it’s never given the time to fully develop into something bigger in scope. and as a result, lots of aspects are left undermined or flat-out ignored. toad might’ve gotten it the worst, i think. the minute he’s let onto this grand adventure, he’s reduced to that one guy you bring to the family party and doesn’t know a single person there. i’m glad he advances the plot somewhat, but it’s to a point where he ends up just…tagging along. he’s just there to smile and look cute.
by the way, i hate it when they try to force cuteness. there’s a lot of moments where a character keeps referring to how cute they are and it comes off as…marketable? i dunno. it’s one thing if you do it to crack a joke. that’s the puss in boots way of being cute. it’s another thing if you say something like “i’m too cute to die!” you know what’s cute? two dogs that look the exact same getting confused at one another. cuteness is supposed to be a natural occurrence. and the mario movie has that going for it, but going off about how cute you look just feels-
ah, whatever. let’s just make fun of the pacing. you’d never believe it, but i’d say the older mario movies were actually better paced than this. luigi, god bless him, especially needed some work. he’s got this whole arc about him standing up for himself and being his own man. i guess it develops, but not in a way that really pays off so well. mario’s got all the development in the film to overcome so much in his path. meanwhile, luigi runs away from skeletons and nearly dies from lava. and yet, at the climax, they’re both treated like super ultra badasses who can do anything equally. i don’t wanna assume that he’s as capable as mario. i wanna see him prove it to the world. i want him like in luigi’s mansion where he fights his way to save his brother despite running away from ghosts all the time. i know he’s got that dog in him. but it’s not being let out at the moment.
oh, and the licensed songs are complete butt. there’s so few of them, but most of them feel so out of place, it’s baffling. i could see why they could pick something like no sleep till brooklyn for when mario and luigi are running around in brooklyn. but using holding out for a hero in a training montage feels too hammy. there’s better ways to use that song and it’s definitely not that.
but the worst example is when they get to the donkey kong setting. mario, peach, and toad speak to this big gorilla with a sports coat and a cool car. throughout the scene, they’re driving all around going crazy. they make tight turns, they drive at basically 100 mph, and they jump off the ramp into a big cave. so we established that the way there is a little chaotic…the song, take on me, does not help this scenario.
it’s weird because the actual original soundtrack is fantastic, you know. it’s a loving tribute to all the mario games so far. it’s also weird because illumination made that minions movie last year and the licensed soundtrack was so good!! it was all basically covers of old 70s songs from people like thundercat, weyes blood, kali uchis, st vincent, and tame impala. and the stuff they did use in the actual movie fit so well. i love that lately they’ve also been taking the time to collab with cole bennett for some lyrical lemonade stuff.
look, it sounds like i despise this movie, i know. but truth be told, this is damn near everything i could’ve wanted from a mario movie and more. the visuals are top notch, the story is simple enough to be enjoyable, the performances aren’t even that bad, and the film is just solid in general. i especially love some of the character moments as well, like with mario and DK. you could really feel that genuine frenemy relationship they got going on. despite everything i’ve ever said, this is not bad. it’s a fun popcorn movie. but better yet, it’s the mario movie i always wanted as a kid.
however, it doesn’t have dennis hopper, does it?
i mean, it’s a completely accurate adaptation. everything’s in its right place. but after a while, it does everything you expect it to. where’s the fun in that? you know, some people love this new movie for the references. they’re also completely psychotic. now a guy like me, i’m in for something i’d never expect. where’s the weird moon logic? where’s the nightmare manhattan world? where’s the blue dog that turns into a dumbass flower prince? where the hell is the mario rice seasoning?
again, i definitely like this new movie the most, but i simply just can’t get over the other films. and in comparison, this just seems too predictable. i blame nintendo more than i blame illumination, if i’m being honest. they’ve been so scared of letting other directors and studios work with their franchises that they’d do anything to make sure it’s, well, exactly what you’d expect from a mario movie. but what we miss out on in the end is that level of experimentation, trial and error, and, in all honesty, risk. it even has a lame post-credits sequence that teases yoshi. that’s not a surprise, that’s just the next thing on our shopping list.
part of it might also have to do with the passage of time. you see, i have this moron thing where i moreso gravitate towards the times when something that goes on for more than a decade looks like utter crap. not all of them, but definitely not zero. you ever watch an early episode of regular show and get that evergreen feeling from how loose everything looks? you ever notice how the first two seasons of the venture bros feel more like a motion comic than what we got later down? you remember when curb your enthusiasm didn’t even have leon and used to look like they filmed it in 40 fps or whatever? that’s what i mean. it’s not that everything gets worse throughout the course of time. of course not! but it’s generally more interesting to see where a project starts off from its humble beginnings to what seems like the standard nowadays.
that’s kinda why i wanted to do a triple deal with these mario movies. it’s crazy enough that there’s three of them now. but it’s even crazier just how different they are in scope and characterization. in a sense, it’s as if this new movie was worth the 38-year wait. granted, i would’ve been WAY more excited for this back in maybe 2011. but i guess the kids can have this one for now.
that being said, it’s much more exciting when no one has any idea on how to make a movie out of friggin super mario bros. hopefully the billion dollar success story of this current movie inspires nintendo to man up and let these guys go crazy again. because i am so ready for anything at this point. even if god forbid the sequel ends up being lamer than lame, at least it’s proof that they’re up for anything at all. i would rather have a good movie than a bad one, but i am so down for a passionate mess any day of the week. even if it takes a year or perhaps another three months.
…huh.
yeah, sorry for the long wait. i think i finally hit some sort of writer’s block for this website. truth be told, i’m no longer equipped to do a new article once a month. i’ve got a bunch of drafts on my apple notes and i’d rather put them out whenever they’re ready. even if these articles are really stupid, which they are, at least you know who to blame. stick around.