Super Mario Bros. (1993)
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| ♥ | This article is dedicated to the late Bob Hoskins (1942-2014), Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) & Mojo Nixon (1957-2024). May they rest in peace. |
| Super Mario Bros. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Luigi: "How come you always get everything? Even a Mario Bros movie?"
*Mario slaps Luigi* Mario: "I told you, we never talk about that! IT NEVER HAPPENED!" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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"The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a f**kin' 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! F**kin' nightmare. F**kin' idiots."
— Bob Hoskins
Super Mario Bros. (also known as Super Mario in Japan, or often referred to as Super Mario Bros.: The Movie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Not to be confused with the 2023 film)) is a 1993 adventure comedy film loosely based on the the Mario franchise by Nintendo. It is the first feature-length live-action film to be based on a video game. The film was directed by the husband-and-wife team of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, written by Parker Bennett, Terry Runté, and Ed Solomon and distributed by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution through Hollywood Pictures. Released on May 28, 1993, the film becomes a critical and financial failure, grossing an estimated $35 million worldwide, against a budget of $42–48 million. Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto felt the film tried too hard to replicate the games instead of being a good film. However, despite this, the film gained a cult following in later years and has been recently regarded as a cult classic.
Plot
Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi get the shock of their lives when they discover a parallel world populated by the intelligent descendants of dinosaurs. It seems they weren't destroyed by meteor millions of years ago but hurled into another dimension and, now, they have plans to rule our world. It's up to our unlikely heroes to battle the evil King Koopa and his Goomba guards, free the beautiful Princess Daisy and save mankind in this adventure of a lifetime.
Why It Got Bob-ombed
- Absolutely horrible and incorrectly grasp on the source material:
- The Mushroom Kingdom in the games is a cartoony fantasy world, but in this movie, the Mushroom Kingdom is a cyberpunk world named Dinohattan, which is something the games did not have.
- Unlike the video games, Luigi doesn't have a mustache.
- The Super Mushrooms act as anything but power-ups and are obtained from a weird fungus growing all over the kingdom, not from the question mark blocks seen in the games.
- In one scene, Mario even says he can't jump despite the fact that the games are well-known for being platformers, which revolve around the main characters JUMPING on certain objects, which is like if Sonic didn't run fast in a movie adaption (which by the way didn't happen, as his signature trademark was remained intact throughout the live-action Sonic duology of films and seems to be that way with the upcoming third film in the series).
- This movie tries too hard to cash in with the success of Blade Runner, even going far as to copy the movie's Los Angeles dystopian city setting as well, but it fails horribly at doing so, because first of all, the cyberpunk setting has absolutely nothing to do with the Super Mario Bros. franchise, and it is only done as an attempt to make the movie more adult oriented, which it clearly fails at doing as well.
- Executive meddling: Initially, when the Walt Disney Company owned the Super Mario Bros. film rights, it was originally going to be made a live-action fantasy film inspired by The Wizard of Oz, The Dark Crystal, The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, and Willow; originally, directed by Greg Beeman and written by Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker, Mario was expected to be played by Danny DeVito or Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks was expected to play Luigi, whilst the princess was expected to be played by Meg Ryan or Winona Ryder and King Bowser Koopa was expected to be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Michael Keaton.
- However, out of nowhere, the aforementioned people involved in the production of the movie were treated very badly by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, and the early drafts were therefore scrapped, which is extremely devastating given that their original concepts and ideas were more faithful to the original game with really neat references, and even had a bit of inspiration from The Wizard of Oz. The only reason why the original concepts were scrapped was because Morton and Jankel wanted to make a dark and gritty Mario movie with no inspiration from the games and with the same aesthetic of Blade Runner and an adult-oriented story, which sounded like an awful idea, considering the fact that said film was usually aimed at an R rating, whilst the Super Mario Bros. franchise was usually a family-friendly franchise that both kids and adults would like (though thankfully, the movie had lots of jokes and slapstick humor put into the final product to lighten up its tone significantly and ended up being rated PG).
- Some of these characters are in-name only compared to their game counterparts (but mostly in terms of appearance). For example:
- Princess Peach (or Toadstool) does not appear and in her place is Princess Daisy (who, during that period, only appeared and debuted in Super Mario Land). Also compared to Peach, Daisy only got kidnapped once and nowadays seems to make an appearance in the Mario spin-off games.
- Bowser, or Koopa as he’s referred to in this film, is a human with weird spiky hair on his head rather than a giant fire-breathing turtle with spikes up until the film's climax where the devolution guns Mario and Luigi use against him turn him into a monstrous Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Toad is just an emo-looking kid who becomes a Goomba. And speaking of which...
- The Goombas are portrayed as humanoid figures with shrunken, lizard-like heads, a design decision that has been widely mocked.
- The Koopa Troopas are obviously just a bunch of dinosaur-evolved humans instead of turtle-like creatures.
- The Bullet Bills are literally just ordinary bullets.
- Yoshi and Big Bertha also look completely different; Yoshi looks like a Jurassic Park reject rather than a cartoony dinosaur and Big Bertha is a human rather than a fish.
- Iggy and Spike are also not represented well. Iggy in the games is one of the Koopalings debuting in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Spike is just a regular enemy who also made his debut in that game, and yet in this movie they are portrayed as cousins.
- Poor character development.
- Mario is very out of character, Unlike his original counterpart, which had plenty of character and personality behind him, this version of Mario barely has any personality aside from being a regular plumber, Also he is a psychopath as well, as he vows to actually murder Iggy and Spike just for kidnapping Daisy. Not only that, but he even murdered several police officers by tricking them into crashing into each other in the police car and committed reckless driving also in another police car, which is very out-of-character for Mario.
- Luigi while not as bad as Mario's character development, he portrayed as an edgy teenager who is dressed in a rapper-like attire, and as mentioned above in WTMGBB#18 is actually Mario's son, something that the original version of the character wasn't at all, and acts very spoiled and is pretty immature overall, since he moans about everything, and often scolds Mario for being old, which is very out-of-character for such a lovable character like Luigi. He also obsesses over Daisy like a creep and doesn't have a lot of character development at all, making him a weak protagonist and a terrible iteration of the iconic Mario brother overall.
- The reason why Luigi was portrayed like this was due to the lack of a unique trait for the character and always being shown as just Mario's brother, which could imply that the filmmakers wanted to give Luigi his own personality, however this didn't work due to poor writing, since Luigi was given an unnecessary 90s makeover that tries way too hard to be both hip and trendy but fails due to poor costume design and the directors failing to understand the lore of the Mario franchise at the time, thus making this decision age extremely poorly, since Luigi's Mansion gave Luigi his own personality after the introduction of Waluigi, as he's nowadays portrayed as a cowardly and timid sidekick to Mario who can act very brave at times and knows when danger is afoot and tries to do the right thing as always, thus making this movie's portrayal for Luigi dated and cringy at best.
- In fact, Luigi doesn't even help his brother at times and is occasionally pretty stupid too, as he often gets confused for no reason and tends to cause conflict that makes things worse just to extend the film's runtime as forced padding, making Luigi not the best protagonist for the film itself.
- It begins with a pointless dinosaur extinction scene, which, in no way, relates anything to the plot.
- Very ugly and uncanny designs for a lot of the characters, with the Goombas being the absolute worst offenders of this.
- There is some gross-out moments, especially in style with fungi, such as the scene in which Koopa (transformed into a generic T-rex) becomes primordial slime or the scene where the fungus becomes a human.
- The writing is incredibly awful, if not worse than the movie itself.
- Terrible acting (except for Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo).
- There is some weird product placement at times, like in one scene where a Bob-omb is shown with Reebok logos on it's feet before it blows up.
- The soundtrack, while good, sounds way too comedic and quirky for the whimsical tone of the Mario franchise and is quite out of place for the film's dark tone, which becomes more apparent in some scenes that have a happy tone, making the soundtrack feel unsuited for a Super Mario film and sound more like something from Pee Wee's Playhouse instead.
- Some of the props in this movie look unoriginal, especially with the Devo Gun, which is really just a SNES Super Scope lightgun painted dark blue. This just shows how lazy the filmmakers were in making good props.
- Koopa's plan to merge the dimensions together and become King of the Earth is unbelievably stupid and idiotic, since if he did, then the entire solar system would get messed up and the rules of the universe would be contradicted very easily, and the fact that he plans to turn all humans into monkeys is just dumb since humans and monkeys aren't really related to each other, and it is never explained why he wants to do this since it's just something he wants to do for no reason at all other than to portray the character in the same light as his game counterpart Bowser, who had a reason to kidnap Peach, since he always felt lonely and wanted to marry her, whereas Koopa just wants to merge the human and dinosaur dimensions together because of plot convenience, that's it.
- In fact, doing so is quite dangerous since the only way to do it is to plant a shard of the meteorite into the center of the earth and thus is successful, but Lena herself does in fact plant it in and later gets killed as a result, which makes Koopa's plan seem ridiculous overall.
- What makes it worse is that none of his minions ridicule his idea, not even his cousins Iggy and Spike, as they just agree with him and go with it, which is stupid since they should clearly know how random the idea is and really, Koopa's minions are too oblivious to acknowledge the consequences that could happen in the process when doing so.
- Mario and Luigi don't sound like they have Italian accents despite this being one of their most famous characteristics, which was common in other Mario media made at the time.
- In fact, it would've made more sense if Italian-American actors played them.
- The pacing is not that great; it often ping-pongs from being dark-toned to comedic and vice versa.
- There are tons of filler and padding, such as Allosaurus rats feeding on fungus, thugs stealing a woman's egg from her stroller, The Goombas dancing on the elevator, a man falling off a bike, Mario face flopping on Big Bertha's breasts (which is quite creepy and inappropriate for a PG-rated movie), and so on.
- The film has extremely laughable dialogue:
- Examples being Koopa saying "Bob-omb!" and "Monkey!", which caused the both of them to become internet memes.
- Missed Opportunity: The original Super Mario Bros. theme is only used once in the entire film (despite being the signature theme of the entire franchise and is one of the most iconic video game tracks of all time).
- It can be too scary for younger audiences, even for standards from a PG-rated film sometimes, such as the scene where Koopa gets transformed into a T-Rex at the end, which got this film banned in Malaysia.
- False advertising:
- Mario and Luigi are heavily advertised wearing their iconic red and green clothes as well as their Thwomp-Stompers, when they only do it at the end of the film respectively.
- Also, despite what the posters, trailers, covers, DVDs, and what the name of the film tells you, Mario and Luigi are not brothers in this movie. They are portrayed as a father-and-son duo instead.
- Some posters show Yoshi, Velociraptor-type Goombas, and the T-Rex form of President Koopa, but they don't get much screen time in this movie.
- The film ends on a rather pointless cliffhanger where Princess Daisy asks the Mario brothers for help and it is never revealed what would have happened next, unless you count the unofficial sequel.
- The ending and post-credits scenes could've had potential to set up a sequel, but due to the film's bad reviews and failing at the box office, it was cancelled until 2018 when Universal Pictures and Illumination announced an animated reboot of this film. Though, if it did better, a sequel could've happened.
- However, there is a webcomic which acts as an unofficial sequel.
- Horrible, Lame, lazy, Lousy and Absolutely Unforgiving direction by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel.
- Some of the special effects look outdated and laughable. For example, the scene where Koopa, in his T-rex form, turns into primordial slime, is technically fake looking.
- Plot Hole: Iggy and Spike are apparently seen in the human world at the start of the film, despite coming from the dinosaur world that was blocked in the sewer 20 years ago which only got opened up by getting flooded by Scapelli and his henchman, and the film never explains how they got into the human world easily, thus confusing many viewers alike.
- As mentioned above, both Mario and Luigi are depicted more as both father and son, rather than brothers in other media, since it's explained in the film that Mario raised Luigi when he was young, and Luigi thinks of Mario as a mother his whole life, which becomes more obvious by the fact that Luigi looks like a teenager whereas Mario looks like a fully grown adult, and often treats Luigi as his own son, which is disrespectful to how they are in other media where they are twin brothers and even have their own parents in the animated Mario movie from Illumination. Thus making the title feel pointless.
- Speaking of which, Mario often refers to Luigi as "Kid" which obviously indicates that they're not even brothers in this movie, which upset a lot of Mario fans at the time and has received some criticism for contradicting the source material and main title of the film.
- For some reason, Luigi appears get a lot more focus in this film instead of Mario, and is treated as the film's main protagonist, despite Mario being the titular protagonist of this movie and the entire Super Mario franchise, and Luigi being the deuteragonist.
- Filming was apparently so taxing on the actors that they would get drunk just to make it through the whole ordeal. John Leguizamo was so drunk that he braked too hard while driving a van and slammed the door on Bob Hoskins's hand.
- The plot can be confusing for some viewers, since some elements important to the story are usually complicated and hard to figure out, and the film doesn't do much to adapt a game series that had very little plot back then, as the games focused more on the gameplay and less on story. This results in a plot that was mostly written in an attempt to give the film an actual story based on a video game with zero story, and when combined with the film having absolutely zero connection to the video games, it makes this film feel more like badly-written fanfiction rather than a film based on the Super Mario franchise, which is the reason why this film was panned when released in 1993.
- It started the trend of bad movies based on video games during from the 1990s to the 2010s, which suffer from the same problem with having zero resemblance to the source material and generally having abysmal writing and not doing enough to adapt the story of video games to film, since most video games back then expect for JRPGs had zero plot and mostly focused on the gameplay and less on trying to tell a story, something that most modern games would do years later, thus giving this movie a bad name most immediately. Thankfully, it stopped with Detective Pikachu and got better with the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog films and The Super Mario Bros Movie, killing the video game curse once and for all.
Redeeming Qualities
- Although not faithful enough to the games as mentioned above, there are a good number of references and design choices that are faithful to the Mario games, such as Yoshi having a long tongue and the Bob-omb prop.
- The costumes and the set designs are actually pretty good although they might be too gritty as mentioned above.
- To this film's credit, there are one or two funny moments, wacky hijinks, and slapstick humor to significantly lighten up the movie, such as the scene when Mario falls to the other dimension and when Mario and Luigi say their real names "Mario Mario and Luigi Mario", and the dialogue, while extremely laughable, is also really charming, funny, and memetic in its own right.
- To give credit where credit is due, a majority of the characters are generally likable and entertaining in their own ways:
- Mario and Luigi are really funny and endearing main protagonists who selflessly do the right thing and strengthen their brotherly bond throughout the events of the movie.
- Daisy is a sweet and warmhearted woman who, despite being a damsel in distress for a while, manages to pull through and help the Mario Bros. in saving the day.
- Koopa is a pretty entertaining villain despite not being a fire-breathing turtle and is comparable to the likes of Donald Trump.
- Toad remains a steadfast friend and ally of the Mario Brothers and Daisy even after becoming a Goomba and is nothing but kind and helpful.
- Big Bertha, Iggy, and Spike start out as villains but redeem themselves and help the Mario Bros. in stopping Koopa and their redemption is not half-bad. Iggy and Spike betray Koopa when, after having their intelligence increased, realize that he is an oppressive dictator and opted to help Mario and Luigi and Daisy in stopping him whereas Big Bertha becomes infatuated with Mario when he dances with her and decides to help him out in his and Luigi's crusade against Koopa.
- Yoshi is nothing but a very good friend towards Daisy and is still very cute and charming in its personality despite being a realistic baby raptor.
- The Mushroom King, despite being a sentient pile of fungus, does everything in his power to help the Mario Bros. stop Koopa and his heroics are rewarded in the end when he returns to normal.
- The love relationship between Luigi and Daisy is very sweet and endearing, although this has not been explored that much since then aside from a Mario Kart Wii course and some other small mentions here and there.
- In spite of its infamous cliffhanger, the ending where Mario and Luigi save the day and restore peace back to Dinohattan after defeating Koopa and subsequently restoring the rightful king back to his normal human form is nothing short of uplifting (even if its rather bittersweet since Daisy had to stay behind to help undo the damage that Koopa caused until she showed up again in the cliffhanger).
- Not only that, but the post-credits scene involving Iggy and Spike isn't half-bad either.
- The soundtrack by Alan Silvestri is good, and has some surprisingly great songs:
- Most notably, "Almost Unreal" by Roxette and "Walk the Dinosaur" by Was (Not Was).
- Although some of the acting is bad as mentioned above, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo's performances are good and the two actors have good chemistry.
- The film has gained a reputation of being "so bad, it's good" by its fans and has a strong fanbase to this day, and in all fairness, if judged by its own merits, the movie is actually not that bad on its own (especially given that there is nothing boring about this movie at all) and is tons of fun to watch (though albeit in a mostly ironic sense), even if it's just not a legitimate Mario movie.
- The cinematography is decent.
- Great sound editing that was done by THX.
- The 2023 reboot The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a massive improvement and it's a giant middle finger to this film. Not only that but it's a much faithful video game adaptation than this film.
Reception
Super Mario Bros. received negative reviews from critics and Mario fans upon it's release, who praised the innovative special effects, creative artistic direction, and the performances of its lead actors, but criticized the confusing narrative, lack of similarity to the games, and inconsistent tone. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two thumbs down on the television program Siskel & Ebert At the Movies, citing tonal inconsistency and lack of narrative, and the film was on their list for one of the worst films of 1993.
Even many of the crew regretted making it. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 28% based on 43 reviews, with an average rating of 4.1/10. The site's consensus states: "Despite flashy sets and special effects, Super Mario Bros. is too light on story and substance to be anything more than a novelty.". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B+" on a scale of A+ to F. On Metacritic, it assigned a score of 35/100 based on 23 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
Nevertheless, with the advent of the internet, it has gained a cult following as a "so bad, it's good" guilty-pleasure movie.
Cancelled Sequel
The film ends on a cliffhanger. However, even though there was therefore going to be a possible sequel, it's actually a sigh of relief that it was never made due to the negative reception and box office performance. Surprisingly though, an unofficial sequel does exist in the form of a webcomic.
Trivia
- This film was the first to use the now-industry standard Autodesk Flame software for its special effects, which were considered groundbreaking at the time, and some say that they still look impressive today.
- The original script for this film was considered way better than the final with being faithful to the source material, which unfortunately is a big kick in the groin to any Mario fan given that it ended up being unused. If you want to read it, click here: http://www.smbmovie.com/SMBArchive/preproduction/script/1_SMB_EarlyDraft_7-17-91.pdf
- Tom Hanks was originally signed on for the role of Mario and Luigi but was fired from the set during production.
- Bob Hoskins regretted starring as Mario due to the fact that he was injured several times on set, spend most of the time with John Leguizamo getting drunk to escape boredom and had no idea that Super Mario Bros. was based on the video game until he was told so by his son.
- After the film received negative reception and bombed at the box-office, Nintendo stopped making movies for nearly 24 years, in which they canceled many live-action or animated movies based on their properties from The Legend of Zelda and Metroid and remained the only theatrical live-action film based on a Nintendo game property until 26 years later when Pokémon Detective Pikachu was released by Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures. Years later, Nintendo announced that they would resume the movie business and team up with Universal Pictures and Illumination to produce The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Shigeru Miyamoto have co-produce the film and it was set to release on April 5, 2023 as a means of, as Deadline puts it, "optimizing the family audience". The film is being directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic the creators of Teen Titans Go!, and includes the voices of Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen, Kevin Michael Richardson, Sebastian Maniscalco, and series' longtime voice actor Charles Martinet (but unfortunately not as Mario and Luigi, but rather a currently unrevealed character).
- Nintendo and Universal also made a theme park called Super Nintendo World based on Super Mario, while Donkey Kong and various Nintendo properties are planned.
- However, in an interview with the CEO of Nintendo Co. Ltd, he makes a hints that there will be possible film adaptations of their game franchises in the event of the Mario film's success.
- Because of the recent delay, it will now be released in 2023 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of this movie.
- Most fans believe that the upcoming animated Mario film could be a massive improvement over the live action one, and they believe it could be good as well as being more faithful to it's source material as opposed to the live action one where it was not.
- Danny DeVito was considered the role for Mario.
- Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all considered for Koopa.
- Some of the scenes from the trailer and promos was been alternated and removed from the final release. Later in 2019, SMB Movie Archive (the fan-site of this movie) found a VHS with all the deleted scenes on his Twitter, which he could release in public and making the director's cut of the movie on Blu-ray and/or Ultra HD Blu-ray in the future. Here are the scenes that were cut.
- It could have an extended scene of Daisy's mother been chased by Koopa in the introduction.
- Mario and Luigi enter the Riverfront Café to prevent two guys who work with Scapelli (real names; Doug and Mike) where they steal the job since Mario Bros. got the call first. It was the first deleted scene that was finally uploaded on YouTube by SMB Movie Archive.
- After Toad was transformed into Goomba, Koopa's technology accidentally sneezed at Koopa where he was been de-evolved by turn into slime. The scene was removed from the final cut until the slime still appeared on the floor was appeared out of nowhere making a continuity error. The deleted footage was later been founded and uploaded on YouTube with the special scene at the end of the human-like-lizard who throw the cigarette at Mario in the prison scene.
- Extended car chase scene from reaction shots of Mario and Luigi, who are about to get crashed by another car.
- Extended scene where Iggy and Spike told Koopa after he finishes talking with Daisy, which was shown in the trailer.
- Iggy and Spike's rap on the Boom Boom Bar.
- The ending is different after Mario and Luigi used the de-evolved gun at Koopa as it revealed his true appearance was a Tyrannosaurus Rex/Human hybrid as the heroes quickly throw Bob-Omb at Koopa's mouth it causing him to fall off the Bridge and exploding in little bits once as he hit the water.
- After Koopa's demise when he turns into slime, the pizza delivery person gives him a pizza.
- An adult film parody with Ron Jeremy, Super Hornio Brothers, was bought by Nintendo with the intent to destroy copies of it.
- Critically, this movie did so bad that not even Nintendo themselves want anything to do with it anymore, which is thus the reason why the movie was no longer sold in stores almost everywhere, and was never sold on digital storefronts, until October of 2021, in Australia, where the movie saw a Blu Ray release, and another print run of the DVD, and a release digital for the first time, which is all done to coincide with the upcoming release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
- As with Barney's Great Adventure, the film was banned in Malaysia. mostly due to it being deemed "not made for children".
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