This month I’m going to cover a very particular set of movies I’ve already seen before. These are some of the movies I saw for the first time shortly before beginning the blog, and had opinions about. They’re movies that are in many ways responsible for the concept of Yesterday’s Movies as a project.
Super Mario Bros.was maybe the first movie I rented on Netflix for myself. It was infamous on the internet and I decided to see what the fuss was about. And it’s definitely an extremely weird movie.
Millions of years ago, the meteor that struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs created a pocket universe the size of New York where the dinosaurs lived and evolved into people who look exactly like humans with extreme hair gel effects and a taste for spiky clothes. Twenty years ago, Koopa led a coup to replace the benevolent ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom as dictator “President”, but the queen managed to escape to the outside world and hide her daughter along with a piece of the meteorite that opens the gateway between worlds. Now, Mario Mario and his kid brother Luigi Mario run Mario Bros. Plumbing in Brooklyn, but are losing business to Scapelli Construction, which is currently being stymied in a big development project by the local university trying to study and protect an extraordinary fossil collection unearthed by the project blasting. After giving Daisy, the leader of the study, a ride, Mario suggests that Luigi take her on a double date with him and his girlfriend Daniella, and when Daisy takes Luigi to the site after dinner, they find Scapelli goons trying to flood the place, leading Luigi to call Mario to help. While fixing the sabotaged pipes, Koopa minions Spike and Iggy grab Daisy and drag her through a portal between the worlds, with Mario and Luigi, who managed to grab the stone necklace that has been Daisy’s only tie to her mother her whole life, following to the rescue. And then things really get weird.
Whenever I think about the lore of this movie, I try very hard to keep in mind that this movie came out a year before Charles Martinet’s very first time playing Mario, so basically the only way anyone had interpreted Mario beyond a collection of pixels that went beep when you press jump was The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. That at least makes the casting and costuming of the heroes make a little more sense. I still can’t get past how somebody seems to have given the designers the instruction to completely ignore anything from the existing games and cartoon show and just go nuts with spikes and leather and hair gel and wrought iron. This movie looks like it wants to be Blade Runner or Demolition Man (I could swear they’re using the same stage for the city streets) and is trying very hard not to be a cartoon. Mario and Luigi don’t even wear their iconic colors until almost exactly the one-hour mark. In fact, Luigi spends most of the movie in red and Mario spends a lot of the movie in green. I feel like it helps a lot that now, thirty years later, there is a movie based on the franchise we now know. But when I’m watching this, I still can’t help but question every single choice made, and how it actually relates to the world of Mario circa 1993.
I was always confused why they used Daisy and not Peach for the Princess, but maybe it’s because they decided the Princess character worked best as a Luigi love interest and Peach is more associated with Mario. It’s still totally out of nowhere that Mario has a totally normal Brooklynite girlfriend named Daniella. I suppose if they made this movie now, they would have drawn from the game lore and used Pauline, the damsel from the original Donkey Kong who was brought back in stylish fashion as the mayor of New Donk City in a recent game, but nobody was doing that deep a read on the franchise in 1993. Maybe the most bizarre departure from expectations is that the Mushroom Kingdom name and prevalence of mushrooms in the game is interpreted as a slime mold infesting the whole city that turns out to be, in its own way, acting against Koopa too. Maybe there was a mistranslation involved.
I have to admit that Bob Hoskins plays a great Bronx plumber. It doesn’t seem appropriate that he spends most of the movie following behind Luigi, cleaning up after his mistakes, and dismissing his ideas that turn out to be correct like the helpful fungus (again, Luigi is the one in red for the first two acts), but there comes a moment when Mario goes from reacting to taking action, and then he feels like a hero. Whatever Dennis Hopper is doing, it’s nothing like Bowser/Koopa, but he’s a very entertaining villain who leaves no scenery unchewed. John Leguizamo is as charming as can be and I might in some ways like his take on Luigi more than some of the more flat interpretations of the character as voiced by Martinet. And Daisy is that special kind of late 80s/early 90s girl character who’s tough and capable and feels well-rounded and still spends most of the movie captured and waiting for the heroes to rescue her.
I can’t deny this is a really fun movie, sometimes even beyond its own expense. Once you let go of what you expect Mario Bros. to be post-Mario 64 and try to accept it for what it’s trying to do, it’s a bit nostalgic in its own way. I may not have seen it until after 2009, but there’s a kind of tone here that reminds me of other movies made in its day that I did see at the time. This is best watched with friends to mock it with you, a beer or similar if you partake, and plenty of popcorn that you might at some points throw at the screen, but a good time will be had, if you’re ready to take the movie as unseriously as it takes the source material.
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