Special Features - The Super Mario Bros Movie – 20 Years On

Can you believe it’s been twenty years since the Super Mario Bros movie was released?

I remember it so vividly being talked about in every magazine, comic and TV show that I watched. Even though I was a Sega kid through and through (Mega Drive Till I Die), I was fascinated by the competition. My friend had a NES which we used to play Super Mario Bros. 3 on and my cousin had the SNES pack that came with Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario World. So I knew what the games were all about. On top of that, it was the first big screen adaptation of a video game and this was something that excited me as a gamer. It may not have been the live action Sonic The Hedgehog movie I wanted (and still want), but it was still cool to be seeing Nintendo’s heroes up on the silver screen.

When the movie was released, I remember going round to my friend’s house the day after he’d seen it. As he was plugging in Micro Machines for me to beat him at, I asked him excitedly what the film was like. He didn't have much of a response.

When I finally saw the movie, I had a similar reaction. I didn't really know what to make of it. While it seemed cool that it was a darker and more adult version of Super Mario Bros than I was expecting, it also didn't really feel like a Mario Bros movie at all. It had the characters sure, but it didn't have... much of anything else.

So here we are twenty years on. I've owned the movie on VHS as well as DVD and have always enjoyed talking to people about it because it’s such an interesting specimen. And even though it has been two decades, I still find myself torn between how I feel about it. Part of my thinks the movie is a complete mess that should be labelled as one of the worst video game adaptations of all time, but the other part of me thinks it’s got a lot of genius about it.

Much in the same way I feel about the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, I feel that the filmmakers took the right direction by taking it seriously as opposed to focusing on the kid friendly aspect of the source material. While I understand that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a name that was serious in tone in the early Laird and Eastman comics, you've got to consider that for most people, our only clue to the Turtles franchise was the cartoon series that played on Saturday mornings. If you compare the live action movie to that cartoon (brilliant though it is), it’s a completely different beast. The same goes for Super Mario Bros. It’s dark, gritty, grimy and often feels very adult.

Can you imagine being a screenwriter and being handed an 8-bit game about a plumber who jumps on turtles to rescue a princess from a dinosaur and be told to make a feature length film out of it? Of course you are going to take liberties from it. And, for the most part, they got the basic gist of it down. The story of the movie involves Mario and Luigi going off to a parallel universe called Dinohatten where archaeologist Daisy (who is later revealed to be Princes Daisy) has been captured by the dreaded Koopa because he wants a rock from her necklace to merge the two dimensions together so that he may rule. Now if you take out the guff with parallel universes and meteorite rocks, that is the basic story of Super Mario Bros (albeit it they're rescuing Princess Toadstool from Bowser).

From there, the movie gives us a very Blade Runner-esque world with apocalyptic scenery and interesting visuals of a species that has evolved from dinosaurs as opposed to apes. This again for me is where the genius of the movie lies. It takes the source material down a different direction from what we were expecting and, to its credit, it does a good job. The story, while pretty clichéd, is certainly entertaining and it moves along at a good pace with some thrilling action – even if it does lose its way slightly during the middle act.

And this, for me, is where the movie falls down. Although I praised it earlier for taking a more adult approach to the source material, it does take time to remind us that this is a movie made for kids. We get some wacky scenes with dancing goombas, a dance club playing Walk The Dinosaur, the fungus spreading around town helping the Mario Bros out, Koopa trying to order a pizza etc etc. Going back to my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comparison once again, that movie also had a lot of kid-friendly comedy moments but it worked because the main characters themselves are kids (well, teenagers). In Super Mario Bros, it feels more like a studio decision rather than the directors. As if they had a vision in mind but Allied Filmmakers were breathing down their necks saying, “put a monkey in the next scene – kids love monkeys”. Overall, it makes the film feel unbalanced which just adds to the frustration of the viewer.

I'm not going to knock the film for the liberties it takes with the characters, but it does feel like Super Mario Bros was a completely different film that then had the names thrown in their for marquee value. Why do we have Daisy instead of Princess Toadstool? Why is she an archaeologist orphan? Why is Luigi the main love interest? Why is Bowser called Koopa? Why isn't Koopa a dinosaur? Who is this girl Mario is dating? Why is Toad a homeless bum who gets turned into a goomba? Why do the goombas look the way they do? Why is the king a giant snot ball? Why is Yoshi Koopa’s pet? Why is he so small?

Please bear in mind; I do know the answers to a lot of these questions. I'm just asking the questions that the 8 year old version of me was asking at the time. To be honest, even the 28 year old version of me is still asking these questions because some of them just don’t make sense.

What I will give the movie credit for though are the little nods to the franchise and Nintendo brand, like the Super Scopes as the Devolution guns, the brand of rocket boots being made by Thwomp, the bouncer is called Big Bertha, a neon sign for Bullet Bills, Koopa riding a Clown Car type contraction, the bob-omb, and the Koopa Tower having similar wall designs to Bowser’s castle. These are just a few game references made by characters or set design. It rewards the game’s fans for being eagle eyed  and want to try and find all of the little nods. Commonplace now you might argue, but I don't think any live action version of a video game has gone to these lengths to add in so many references.

So, with all that said, surely I've made my mind up on whether Super Mario Bros is a work of genius or a complete mess?

Well, no. To this day I still can’t work it out. Despite all the praise I can give it, the acting is lousy (because the cast didn't care), the script is half baked, the plot is placed second behind clever set design and for the most part, it's beyond stupid, even for a kids film. For all the good the movie does, it’s undone by a whole load of bad.

To help find my answer, I asked some of the writers of the Flickering Myth team whether they thought it was genius or a mess and here’s what they had to say:

Rob Ghag: [It’s] a hot mess

Jack Morris:  I don't know where I stand with it - sometimes I love it and other times I have to turn it off after a couple of minutes. I own a copy - which I bought whilst very drunk one night off play.com - it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Ozzy Armstrong: Awful, awful movie. Didn't like it as a kid (and I enjoyed a lot of guff movies) and now I'm older I think it's even worse. I would quite happily rate it as the worst game to movie crossover ever and that includes films like Battleship

Chris Cooper: Oh I'd rather watch it than have to sit through Battleship again any day. At least Super Mario Bros references the source. Not just 'f*** it lets put a grid up for 5 minutes'.

Tom Jolliffe: Hearing interviews with Bob Hoskins about the movie is far more entertaining than the movie itself.

Villordsutch: Mess, mess, mess, mess, mess, mess, mess.

So there you have it – twenty years later and it’s still dividing opinions. My friend Jon thinks it should be called a "genimess" while my other friend Benji thinks it's a flat out failure. But which ever way you look at it, Super Mario Bros is a landmark movie.

Not only was Super Mario Bros the first of its kind, it's also the only one from that era of video game movies that people still talk talk about today. Honestly, when was the last time someone mentioned Double Dragon, Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat to you? Super Mario Bros has become part of movie history and has something about that makes it so fascinating to look at. I’d also say that it’s a lot better than the movies just mentioned, and it’s also better than Tomb Raider, Hitman, Max Payne, all the Resident Evil movies, Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li, Silent Hill, Tekken and the multitude of Uwe Boll films.

But it’s not better than DOA: Dead or Alive– that film is ace.

Who knows, maybe I'll have worked it out by it's 40th birthday.