Super Mario Brothers: Pixels to Silver Salts

Written by Emmanuel Gundran

​People all across the globe will recognize Nintendo's trademark Italian plumber anywhere, but not quite like this. On May 28, 1993, the live-action adaptation of the popular Super Mario Bros. game series was released and garnered mostly negative responses from audiences and critics alike. Many changes to the original source material turned off Mario fans from the film. However, in recent times, it has gained a small cult following that appreciates not only the unique, alternative interpretation of the Super Mario Bros. world but also the intricately developed world that it created. Nevertheless, this film was the first of many video game-based films that demonstrated the challenging yet doable feat of taking an interactive property and adapting it to a non-interactive medium.

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo play Mario and Luigi Mario, two New York plumbers transported into a bizarre, parallel dimension to save a princess of a fallen kingdom.

If there’s one major roadblock to bringing a video game’s story to film it’s that, typically, a video game’s story is primarily focused on fun gameplay for the player. Unless a game’s primary draw is the story, like The Last of Us (2013) or Heavy Rain (2010), for example, most people wouldn’t play a video game for in-depth story or character development. People would usually play Super Mario Bros. for jumping on platforms and enemies, not trying to glean life lessons or character development from the story. Trying to replicate this same sort of enjoyment would not translate to a film. So, to make a movie like a Super Mario Bros. movie work, the writing team would have to create a three act story out of a thin game story that ultimately comes down to two heroes saving a princess from an evil villain.

The challenge pitted to the team making Super Mario Bros. was to follow this simple story while figuring out what kind of story content to write to fill up the approximate hour-and-a-half needed to fill up the slot in the theatre. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Super Mario Bros., in a translated interview with Next Generation says that, “the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. videogames were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a videogame, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself."

The set of Dinohattan, the main setting of the film, contains homages to elements of the Mario games such as the Hammer Bros. and Boom Boom enemies.

​If the film had focused more on taking Mario and Luigi on their journey and developing their characters rather than making blatant nods to the source material, the film would have had a better flow. Throughout the film, there are scenes devoted to reimagining elements from the game such as Mario’s dinosaur sidekick Yoshi, who was reimagined as a baby T-Rex, and the Princess Peach’s mushroom-headed assistant named Toad, who was oddly reimagined as a government-hating, guitar-playing rebel played by former psychobilly artist Mojo Nixon. Although these scenes serve to build the depth of the world, they don’t move the plot forward by much and make fans of the Super Mario Bros. games even more aware that this was not the Super Mario Bros. movie they were expecting.

This was not the only problem that bogged the film down, unfortunately; weak comedic gags were also sprinkled throughout that tried to lighten the overall gritty tone but ultimately felt awkward, out of place and showed how uncooperative the filmmaking team was behind the scenes. Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jenkel had their own vision for the film to be a serious and sophisticated political satire, while the studio, the now defunct Lightmotive-Allied Filmmakers, expected a light-hearted kids film akin to the games. “I wanted parents to really get into it” says Morton, reflecting on the film. “At that time, there was a very hardcore movement against video games, and a lot of anti-video games sentiment. I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents interested in video games.” The uneasy tensions between the directors’ and studio’s individual visions especially show through the inclusion of nightclub scenes alongside comedic slapstick.

Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson's characters were primarily used for comedic relief to offset the dark tone of the film.

For better or for worse, the Super Mario Bros. movie is the first demonstration of what to and what not to do for a video game movie. A good videogame movie is one that is a good movie first. Translating every detail of the source material into a visual medium should not be the main focus of making a video game film, especially if said source material does not have enough narrative to fit a three act, hour-and-a-half film. Though it reimagines the colorful characters of the games through its own dystopian lenses, Super Mario Bros. tries to fit many details of the games into a three-act film yet forgets to further develop its titular protagonists and make their journey to save the captured princess meaningful and character-changing. Furthermore, as with any movie, the production team should be confident in developing a central idea for a film. The disparity between the crew and studio’s vision for Super Mario Bros. resulted in an awkward conflict between a light-hearted versus dark-hearted tone. With the highly talented and experienced writers and directors today, there is room for hope that a good video game movie will hurdle the major obstacles, into which Super Mario Bros. and other video game movies have run.

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​​​Sources:

Kuchera, Ben. "Miyamoto remembers the troubled Mario Bros. movie." Arstechnica. 29 Nov. 2007.  Web. 7 Oct. 2015.

Reeves, Ben. "Mario’s Film Folly: The True Story Behind Hollywood’s Biggest Gaming Blunder." Game Informer. 28 May 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.