Some films are indisputable classics. Others are a matter of taste
or preference. And some are just awful, but there are those of us who
love them anyway. One such film is
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. was
released in 1993 to cash in on the hugely popular Super Mario games
series, which could easily be the subject of one of these essays
itself. I'm guessing nobody reading this needs an introduction to the
Super Mario games, and if you do, you've had a terrible, neglectful
childhood and must start playing these things now to make up for it.
I didn't get to see the movie on release, but it was released on
video the following year, when I was ten, and I recall picking it up
pretty much as soon as it was out. In fact, we rented it first,
because that was the financially sensible thing to do in those days,
when tapes were expensive. We weren't a game-playing family for a
long time. We didn't have a vast amount of free income at the time,
and games consoles were an extravagance. However, we did eventually
get a household Gameboy, followed by, one wonderful summer, a
second-hand Super NES. Oh, such a joyous summer.
Back then, you were either a
Nintendo household or a Sega one. We were Nintendo through and
through. We bought the official magazine (back when it was the
Nintendo Magazine System,
or NMS, and was actually bloody good). We loved Mario, and Yoshi, and
Donkey Kong and Zelda. Next door were a Sega crowd, and while it was
perfectly permissible to go play Sonic on their Mega Drive, it was
Nintendo only in our house. It was like supporting a football team,
only important.
By 1993, we'd moved to a pokey
little shithole with no Sega playing neighbours, but we had
Super
Mario World and
Mario
Kart on the SNES, so it wasn't
so bad. In fact, by the time we got the video,
Yoshi's
Island might even have been
released by the time we owned a copy of the video. While the first
Super Mario Bros. game
had been released way back in 1985, it had begun a long and sprawling
series of games of various formats, with the classic platformers at
its core. There were cartoon series already,
The Super
Mario Bros. Super Show and
Super
Mario World, which weren't
exactly what you'd call good, or even watchable, but were
entertaining enough for small people who loved fat Italian plumbers.
A movie series was the next obvious idea, and it's not surprise that
a big budget blockbuster was planned. It didn't really turn out that
way.
Super Mario Bros. tanked
completely. It was a critical and financial failure, and its stars
panned it even as it was being released.
The thing is, the writers and
producers of this thing have clearly thought about it. One of the
writers, the only one who seems to have done anything else, was Ed
Solomon, who co-wrote
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
and, later,
Men in
Black. He knows how to craft a
sci-fi comedy film. He and his co-writers have genuinely thought
about how the utterly bizarre world of Mario and Luigi could be
translated to a live-action film. Some things are logical, if odd:
they're the Mario Brothers, so their surname must be Mario.
Therefore, their names are Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, and they are
orphans, Mario having raised his baby bro. Others are frankly
bizarre, but it's understandable why they came to the conclusions
they did. The original game was set in the Mushroom Kingdom. Well, a
kingdom full of mushrooms would be disgusting, wouldn't it? The
brothers are plumbers, so day-to-day plumbing has to be a significant
part of the adventure. Princess Daisy is from the Mushroom Kingdom,
so she's part of that world, but we need to involve her in this
world... Oh, and
Super Mario World was
set in Dinosaur Land, so we need to combine that in there somehow.
How to juggle these disparate elements?
What we ended up with was an
utterly baffling story in which two realities exist side by side, the
universe having split when a meteorite hit sixty-five million years
ago. (In reality, it hit what is now Mexico, not Brooklyn, but
anyway.) In one reality, the dinosaurs were wiped out, and the
mammals took over and evolved into us. On the other, ecologically
damaged Earth, the dinosaurs survived, and evolved into a
civilisation of oddly human-looking intelligent reptiles. Why the
dinosaur people are so humanoid that they have hair and tits and
stuff, is unexplained, but they do lay eggs, because Daisy was
abandoned in hers, when her mother escaped across the dimensional
divide. For some reason, only she can reunite the dimensions safely,
with her little chip of space rock.
It's mental. Mario is played by
Bob Hoskins, who described it as the worst role of his career. Luigi
is played by John Leguizamo, and frankly, I find it hard to believe
that those two are brothers. They are two Italian American plumbers
struggling to make a living in the face of the Scapelli Corporation.
Neither Hoskins or Leguizamo appear to be enjoying the movie very
much. Samantha Mathis plays Daisy, who, despite being a destitute
orphan raised by a convent and only twenty years old, is already
senior enough at her university that she has been put in charge of a
major fossil excavation in the middle of New York. You see, Scapelli
has blasted open the rift between realities. Oh, and now King Koopa
is after Daisy and her meteorite piece, so has sent his cousins Iggy
and Spike (a pretty damned good Fisher Stevens and Richard Edsons)
through to find her.
God, yes, King Koopa. You can
tell that Dennis Hopper isn't enthused; it's actually one of his more
sedate performances. He was second only to Hoskins in complaining
about the production of the movie. But god, he's great. A sinister
corporate overlord, who boasts of being descended from the
Tyrannosaurus rex, and
has seized power using a de-evolution machine. It's mental. He takes
mudbaths between his evil schemes. He keeps poor, cute little Yoshi
(a pretty good bit of animatronics, it must be said) chained up.
Fiona Shaw, for some reason, plays his bit of stuff, Lena, who has
her own plans of conquest. Mario and Luigi must rescue Daisy, and
Mario's girlfriend Danielle, who's there too, and stop Koopa uniting
the worlds and taking over. But there's still time for a dance at the
Boom Boom Bar, to 'Everybody Walk the Dinosaur.' It's... words fail
me.
The brightly-coloured world of
the Super Mario games has been replaced by a grungy, seedy
alternative New York (Dinohattan, natch), yet several of the ideas
are quite literal translations of elements in the games. Yoshi comes
good when he grabs Lena with his super-elongated tongue. The deposed
King (Lance Henriksson, in a brief, random cameo) has been de-evolved
into fungus, allowing a bizarre homage to
Super Mario Bros.
3, when he is returned to his
natural form. You know, like when you get to the end of a world and
beat the boss, and the King has been turned into a walrus or something
and you turn him back. Exactly like that, but with more mucus.
There's a chase through a pipe, and a brilliant extended joke with a
wind-up Bob-omb.
Some of the decisions are odder.
Koopa's shock troops are called Goombas, which, in the games, were
little mushroom-like creatures with huge heads and not much else. In
the movie, they are poor unfortunates and political prisoners who
have been de-evolved into hulking reptilian beasts with tiny heads.
Koopa Troopers would have been a more logical thing to call them,
surely? Not that they're much like them, either. The Goombas come in
two strains, Jurassic and Cretaceous, and I'm quite certain that they
resemble nothing in the fossil record. Also, why is Mario's
girlfriend called Danielle, and not Pauline? There's value to be had
in obscure references.
Frankly, it's easy to see why it
has such a poor reputation. The script is mostly witless, it bears
only the most cursory resemblance to the source material, none of the
cast can be bothered (except Frank Welker, providing amazing voice
work as usual), it's sloppily directed, it looks cheaper than it
should on its budget and it turned Bertha the fish into a huge black
dominatrix in red rubber. But on the other hand, I was ten when I
first saw it, and it really is a joyously ridiculous waste of time.
There are also three very good reasons to love it:
- Roxette provide the credits
song, 'Almost Unreal.' It's gorgeous. It was intended for the movie
Hocus Pocus, which
makes a lot more sense of the lyrics, but it ended up on this thing,
much to the band's chagrin. But it really is a classic song.
- The Goomba dancing scene.
- Koopa ceases to be a blond
maniac at the end, when Mario and Luigi de-evolve him into a big
green T. rex. Really,
it has to be seen to be believed. Not quite Jurassic Park
standard, but still awesome.
Super Mario Bros. is my
favourite crap film. Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins may have hated it,
but it's what I will remember them for the most. It's about time we
had a sequel (actually, there is an unofficial one
here). Wario
should be in it. In fact, I'll write it. Who says there can only be
two dimensions?
One last thing: apparently, they
looked at getting Danny de Vito or Tom Hanks to play Mario, and Big
Arnie to play Koopa. So, this movie could have been even weirder...
