It’s time to drop the notion that movie adaptations have to be accurate to be good.
When the husband-and-wife director duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel sat down to bring the Super Mario Bros. video games to life in the early 1990s, they didn’t have much to go on. There had only been a few flagship games starring Nintendo’s Italian plumber mascot released at that point. Plus, nobody had ever turned a video game into a live action movie before — there wasn’t a blueprint to follow. They were pioneers.
And sometimes pioneers mess up.
1993’s Super Mario Bros. is not a great movie. It’s not even really a good movie, at least not by conventional standards. It has next to nothing to do with any of the Mario games, is full of bizarre casting choices (Dennis Hopper as the equivalent of Bowser), and it looked real janky next to Jurassic Park, which stomped into theaters two weeks later. Yet despite all of that, it’s the only Super Mario Bros. movie I want.
You can keep your sanitized, corporate-approved Chris Pratt vehicle. Give me chaos instead, every time.
A huge ‘L’ for Dustin Hoffman
If you’re younger than 30 or so, there’s a decent chance you might not even be aware that there was a live action Super Mario Bros. movie in 1993. Critics hated it (Roger Ebert called it « a huge waste of time »), the poor box office returns failed to recoup its estimated $48 million budget, and, as a result, Nintendo shied away from official movie adaptations of its popular games for more than 25 years afterward. That run is over now thanks to 2019’s Detective Pikachu and the upcoming Chris Pratt-starring Super Mario Bros. animated feature from the people who made Minions.
For the live-action movie, a couple of Hollywood legends stepped into the Goomba-stomping shoes of Mario and Luigi. Bob Hoskins, an Englishman, and John Leguizamo, a Colombian-American, were cast as Italian plumbers in Brooklyn, and the production was reportedly such a nightmare that the two allegedly chugged scotch between takes. Samantha Mathis as the young archaeologist Daisy (they affix “Princess” to her name before the movie ends) and Dennis Hopper as the villainous King Koopa round out the brain-bending cast.
(Fun fact: Dustin Hoffman apparently lobbied to play Mario himself, but the studio declined because they wanted Danny DeVito instead. That, obviously, didn’t happen, so they went with Hoskins who was fresh off of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.)
The whole thing kind of feels like a prank right from the start. Mario and Luigi live in the real world, which is already totally unlike anything in the games. A bunch of hijinks (including Luigi challenging Daisy to a foot race on their first date, which is totally normal) ensue, and eventually our heroes find themselves in Dinohattan, an alternate dimension version of New York that was created when the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago.
Dinohattan is easily the number one reason why people hate this movie and those people are wrong. The setting truly does not resemble any Mario game world at all. Instead, we find Mario and Luigi dropped into a way dumber version of Blade Runner. The two plumbers’ first taste of Dinohattan includes a glance at a bombed-out-looking Empire State Building set against a blackened sky. You know, like in the Mario games!
King Koopa isn’t a giant turtle here. In the Morton-Jankel universe, he’s just Dennis Hopper with…weird hair and a forked reptile tongue. Toad is a guy with a guitar who gets arrested for singing anti-government songs in public. Goombas aren’t little brown, mushroom-shaped blobs that Mario jumps on; they’re 10-foot-tall, broad-shouldered henchmen with not much going on intellectually.
Oh, and Yoshi is basically just a velociraptor who straight up murders someone at the end of the movie.
Accuracy is not always a virtue
If you went into 1993’s Super Mario Bros. expecting something like the games, of course you would come away disappointed. Morton and Jankel had really thin source material to work with and Nintendo encouraged them to experiment. So that’s what they did. The result is a movie that is fun, pretty funny at times, and beautifully distinct from any other video game to movie adaptation.
I adore the decision to turn Mario, the Mickey Mouse of video games, into a middle-aged balding guy who knows a lot about plumbing and at least claims to know a lot about sweet-talking women. As a nice tease of the set design to come, his modest Brooklyn apartment has three plungers hanging horizontally on the wall kind of like how a samurai would hang katanas for display.
You can keep your sanitized, corporate-approved Chris Pratt vehicle. Give me chaos instead, every time.
That makes way for the darkened skies, fog machines, and neon lights that constitute Dinohattan. The movie is a remarkable relic from the age of real sets and practical effects, way before Marvel put actors in front of green screens all day. You can really appreciate the manpower that went into building all the varied sets. And while that will certainly be true of the upcoming animated film, it just isn’t the same as seeing physical backdrops and tactile costumes in front of real cameras.
Some of the sets are grungy in a really gorgeous way, like the glass-and-chrome dance club where Mario and Luigi participate in a preposterous “Walk the Dinosaur” dance number, and the menacing, obsidian palace inside King Koopa’s version of the World Trade Center. It’s so inaccurate to the games that it almost feels blasphemous… like you’d get in trouble if Nintendo found out you were looking at it. I love it.
And most importantly, it makes me laugh!
Early on, a flustered and immature Luigi asks Daisy if she eats dinner before asking her on a date. When King Koopa places a citywide bounty on the two plumbers, the alert approves the use of “unnecessary force.” And anytime anything explodes (and a lot of cars explode), like five more things explode next to it. There is no subtlety or restraint here.
I’m sure the animated Super Mario Bros. movie will be a fun time at the theater for parents and kids alike. Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind Minions, has nailed the specific formula for making children smile and not even the controversial casting of Chris Pratt can stop the new Mario movie from making a billion dollars. It’s being made in close cooperation with series creator and Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, so unlike the 1993 movie, it’ll probably be a lot like the games.
But “safe” doesn’t always equal “good.” The joy of the 1993 film is that it’s as risky as an adaptation of Super Mario Bros. can be. Morton and Jankel went all out, creating something that has no visible remnants of Nintendo corporate approval. I don’t need to see the Mario games I’ve already played rendered with loving accuracy on the big screen. For that matter, I also don’t care if an adaptation of a novel changes things (one of my favorites, Nobody’s Fool, excises a massive affair subplot that was in the book) because, again, if I wanted 100 percent accuracy, I’d just read the book. Or, in this case, play the game.
Super Mario Bros. is the most imperfect video game to movie adaptation of all time and, in that sense, it’s actually the most perfect one. It stands completely on its own merits, even if those merits don’t offer much to begin with.
As the motley cast of Dinohattan characters say several times throughout the movie: “Trust the fungus.”
