A Tale of Two Marios
A few weeks ago, I took my five-year-old to see the Super Mario Bros. Movie. She loves Mario, having watched me play hours of Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Kart 8 on my Switch, but outside of the immediate thrill of being in a movie theater, she was pretty ambivalent towards it. So was I.
A movie about a thickly accented Italian dwarf being sucked down a toilet into a world of anthropomorphic mushrooms should feel like a candy-coated fever dream. Instead, Illumination’s version was just so obvious. Not only was every story beat on Mario’s hero quest something that could have been written by ChatGPT, they didn’t even try to adapt the movie’s video game logic. So when Mario picks up a mushroom in the movie, it works the same way it does in the game: it makes him bigger, and it’s called a “power up,” with no further elaboration. As a multi-million-dollar Let’s Play with a B-list Hollywood voice cast, it’s passable, I suppose. But as a creative exercise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is bereft of any imagination whatsoever besides that which it inherited from the license.
A couple days later, the inamorata and I decided to watch 1993’s Super Mario Bros: The Movie starring Bob Hopkins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper in full-on Blue Velvet mode as King Koopa. (It didn’t end up happening, but Tom Waits apparently came this close to landing the role of Toad as well). My wife and I had both heard a lot about how execrable this adaptation was, with Hoskins himself claiming it was the biggest mistake of his career.
But you know what? Super Mario Bros: The Movie is an infinitely more interesting movie than the Illumination version. It takes big creative swings in adapting the property for another medium. The directors created Max Headroom and so the entire film has this techno-dystopian patina, where Mario’s jumping powers come from bionic boots, Koopa is a malevolent half-dino corpo-fascist, and Princess Toadstool’s father has been genetically devolved into an all-encompassing rhizome of ever spreading mushrooms.
No, this isn’t the Mario we all know and love… but, of course, thirty years ago, Mario as a property was a lot less rigidly defined, which is why a director could take big swings. However, it does feel like what a Mario movie should be: the aforementioned hallucinogenic fever-dream. It’s unique, and has confidence in its weird creative texture. That’s a hell of a lot more interesting to me than a movie that has no intrinsic creative texture at all.