Perf Damage
Perf Damage
Adam Takeover : Super Mario Brothers | Episode 27
Charlotte is out of town this week, so Adam invites his colleague David to co-host. David is an animator and video game enthusiast, so they tackle both movie adaptations of Super Mario Brothers. They discuss the weird delights and groans of the 1993 live-action version and compare it with everything that they got right in the new animated version from 2023.
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Mario Brothers
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Adam: Welcome back everybody to another edition of Perf Damage.
Adam: Charlotte is out this week, so I have another co-host with me, my friend David. We work together in the industry. David wanted you say hi to everybody. Hello
David: everyone. I am very happy to be here, especially for this episode.
Adam: Yeah. David is also an animator.
David: , unlike you with your upbringing with movies, my entire upbringing was video games, which is why I'm so excited to be a part of an adaptation of video games in movies.
Adam: Yeah.
Adam: That's why we chose this topic. For you,
David: I have a whole lot of notes about video games, a lot of notes about video games and some of the movies, which you were gracious enough to show me. It was a learning experience to say the least. It's
Adam: definitely a unique experience.
Adam: The movie that we're referring to is the original Mario Brothers movie from 1993. It's a hard movie to find right now.
David: I would imagine that Nintendo's trying to bury it. Yeah, it kind of feels that
Adam: way. It's not available on any streaming format.
Adam: Yeah. Right now you can't even rent it on iTunes the DVD's long outer print here in the United States. It's never been released in high def here . So I had to get an Australian copy in on Blu-ray, which was
David: spectacular. Yeah, the sound mixing was
Adam: really nice.
Adam: In defense of that version, we actually watched a compiled director's cut that had 20 extra minutes in it. So they took things from VHS sources and a bunch of other sources in order to make that version of the film. It's not an official version, it's never been released that way.
David: It was fun to watch, and I don't know what the New Mario Brothers movie doing as well as it is that it might resurface. There might be more people looking for it now. I'm
Adam: sure that they're thinking of ways to cash in on it. Oh, yeah. That you would think, cuz they certainly didn't make their money back when it
David: came out.
David: No, but there's so many references in the new movie, the animated movie about it. Clearly they're hinting that it's around, so people start looking. I'm thinking,
Adam: David, why don't you, as the video game guru, give us a little history on the character of Mario Guru
David: is a very nice term. I like that. I'm definitely not an expert by any means,
David: mario first appeared in Donkey Kong, which came out in 1981, and he did not get his own standalone game until 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The creator, sh Shigru Miyamoto originally wanted Popeye as the protagonist for his. But he couldn't get the licensing rights
Adam: Interesting that like an actor , he appears as a minor character in a movie before He's the star.
Adam: It's fantastic, isn't it?
David: Whatever the case Mario obviously exploded in popularity originally.
David: His name was Mr. Video, when he first came out.
David: He was renamed Mario after Mario Sali, who was an American businessman who was renting a warehouse to Nintendo at the time.
David: Hey,
Adam: do you know that in the background of the 1993 Mario film, they pass a Mr Video?
David: Oh, do they like a rental store type
Adam: thing? Yes. It's when they're driving the plumbing truck.
Adam: Oh. Down the street and it starts to stall. There's a Mr video in the background. I totally
David: missed that. Yeah, that's amazing. I gotta say the animated one again, cuz I feel like there were so many things. Things, oh, there's so many Easter eggs in Yeah, maybe that might have been in there too somewhere.
David: His characteristics and clothing were modeled after the setting of Donkey Kong because they basically made the character for that game. So that's where we got our, our well-known plumbers outfit, I guess because,
David: it
Adam: had to be something bright to stand out. Something bright to stand out. You had the orange girders. You had the brown barrels.
David: Yeah. So I wonder if originally he was more of a construction type guy and it just evolved over time.
Adam: there's no,
Adam: There's no illusion to him being a plumber
David: in that.
David: Yeah. There's no pipes or anything in that game. So it was basically just a work outfit
Adam: pretty much. Yeah. He was wearing overalls. Yeah. But they just made 'em bright. So he'd stand out against the black
David: background course. Yeah. In 1992, Mario started being voiced by Charles Martin et. kind of became the voice of Mario. He actually went to a trade show and there were casting directors that were already putting away equipment.
David: They were looking for a voice for this character, and he didn't know what it was at the time, but as they were putting his equipment away, he basically ran up and said, Hey, I heard about this part. I really wanna read for it. So they decided to, give him a shot. They just told him, read this as an Italian plumber from Brooklyn.
David: He thought that, what went through everybody else's head that read for the part at the time, originally thought, stereotypical, deep raspy, Hey, forget like,
Adam: like a Brooklyn accent, like a good
David: fella or something like that.
David: Yeah. But he thought that it was gonna be too harsh for children so he decided to go with the the well known voice to me. Yes. Yeah. This voice that we all know and love now is apparently because he thought that it would just fit the character better.
David: So Martin started voicing Mario in 91. He became the voice of Mario. They started using 'em at trade shows to advertise their games.
David: In 92, they were released. The Super Mario Brothers Pinball Arcade Machine. And that's when his voice, I think, was starting to come out of a recorded game.
Adam: Yeah. So it's starting to be associated with the character
David: at Point, that point. So he's starting to be what we know as Mario this day and age. Yeah.
Adam: Two consumers for
David: the first time.
David: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then just due to the popularity of Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 in general, a lot of kids were exposed to Mario for the first time that way, but that wasn't until 1996.
David: So with Super Smash Brothers, ultimate, the Guinness Book of World Records recognize Martin Ette of having the voiced the same character a hundred times, which is the most of any video game character. Wow. Just straight up, and then of course, he appeared in. The new Super Mario Brothers movie as Giuseppe, which is a character playing Donkey Kong at an arcade cabinet at the very beginning of the movie. He doesn't play Mario, but, which a lot of people are still confused by, it was nice that they at least put 'em in there somewhere I think Chris Pratt did a fine job. He did a fine job. I was on the same plane as a lot of people when the movie first got announced. And I was like, why would you have anybody voice Mario besides Mario?
David: Everybody just knows that voice at this point. Even people who don't play video games know that voice.
Adam: Yeah. It's like when they made the Transformers movie and they got the guy that did Optimist Prime in the cartoons to Voice Optimist Prime. Yeah. Everybody just lost their minds.
Adam: They're
David: so happy. Which is, it's a fan service movie, so if you get the people that the fans want to see, it's basically a slam dunk. Yeah. Mario has appeared in over 200 video games since its creation. The basic idea is usually the. Mushroom Kingdom is invaded by Coopers, usually led by Bowser, and Mario has to stop them and save a princess, be it Peach or Daisy, and then in or Toad stool.
David: Toad Soul, of course, yeah. Is a recurring character. And then there's one called the Rosalina, but there's various, damsels in Distress. Bunch of
Adam: Yeah. There's a bunch of
David: princesses that, and there's always all need to be saved.
David: Yeah. And the plumber's
Adam: gotta save him. And he's, he's specialized in it for, decades now. So who do they call? They call Mario. Exactly.
David: Built up a resume. Yeah, exactly. His brother tried to get into the
Adam: family business. Him and Luigi are pretty much on speed dial whenever a princess is.
Adam: Pretty much That's
David: what it ba that's basically what it turned into. I just love that Nintendo has such a simple concept for all of their games. It's, there's a hero who barely says a word, and there's a princess that needs to be saved, and
Adam: that's all you need. But I think therein lies the problem of adaptation into a film
Adam: sure. Because you have to have some sort of framework to, to hand it on. And then you also need a character. I think that's why Halo was such a hard adaptation as
David: well. Halo was definitely difficult. The games were great story-wise.
Adam: You need a character to hang the movie on. If you're gonna follow a character around, he has to be someone you, first of all enjoy spending time with. Yeah. And someone that has some sort of characteristics that an actor can actually emote to not just a guy in a helmet. And that's what makes it super hard.
David: You don't wanna just have a guy going around very silently, except every once in a while he just goes, no.
Adam: Yeah. I think that's why first person shooters, all of them are difficult to adapt. Yeah. They've been trying to do bioshock for years, halflife for years. Yeah. And despite having kind of a cool concept, both of those, they're difficult because you have no central character to hang the movie
David: on.
David: It's an interesting time right now because the people that grew up loving video games from the, early eighties until now are old enough that they're in charge, they're making the movies. So I feel like we're gonna see a lot more quality when it comes to making these things.
David: That's what we're seeing in television. That's what we're seeing in, the most recent movies, that kind of thing. I've heard of a couple of movies coming out that are based on video games. Uncharted was a fun one. I like that one a lot. And then I know that they are making borderlands into a movie. Yeah. I think it's actually
Adam: being shot now with real acting talent attached to it too.
Adam: I think
David: that's gonna be a good one, because there's just, there's a comedic element to those games that is just gonna play so well if they do it right. It's not the same thing, but Dungeons and Dragons did a really good job with the comedy while also being true to the source material.
David: When you have people that are genuinely interested in the ip, who actually play the games, who actually enjoy what they're doing, you get good stuff. I think
Adam: with Dungeons and Dragons though, it was a lot easier because everybody makes up their own character. True. So as long as you have the classes Yeah.
Adam: That you need to have if they're represented correctly than you have a framework to hang, character
David: on. Yeah.
Adam: All right I think this is probably a good transition since we're talking about adaptations and how people used to not get it right. Yeah. There's a lot
David: of those. The 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie.
David: What a ride, what an amazing and confusing ride that was.
Adam: Yeah. It's just an experience, right? Like you have to just kinda let it wash
David: over you. I went in. Completely blind. You knew of
Adam: the existence of the, I know the existence.
Adam: But you had never seen any advertising
David: or anything? Nothing. I don't wanna date myself here, but I was two Yes. When it came out. So this was well before my time. And I knew nothing. And what I was given was art of the highest caliber, in my opinion. It was, yeah.
David: I really enjoyed it. I really did. It's nonsense.
Adam: It's before we get into it, I'm gonna read the synopsis here. Basically you, everybody knows what it's about. It's Super Mario Brothers, the movie 1993. It's an hour. 44 minutes. Although we watched a two hour and five minute version of it, thank God.
Adam: Yep. Two Brooklyn plumbers. Mario and Luigi must travel to another dimension to rescue a princess from the evil dictator King Coupa and stop him from taking over the world.
David: Directed by Rocky Morton and Anabel Jankel, who are a husband and wife team.
Adam: Rocky Morton and Anabel Jankel are responsible for creating Max Headroom, which was a big thing in the eighties. And then they came over to the US based on the popularity of that character. It was a UK based And they were given d o a to direct the remake with Meg Ryan and Dennis Quay.
Adam: That was their first film, and then they were looking for a new project and Super Mario Brothers came to them.
David: That's quite a transition. Yeah.
Adam: It's weird. You got Max Headroom, which is I would say probably in this same kind of vein as the Super Mario Brothers movie, but d o a is an erotic neo noir film.
David: At this point in time, the IP was blowing up with Mario, the fact that they got the licensing rights to it. Nintendo at this time thought Mario was too big to fail, so they let them do whatever they wanted with the
Adam: movie.
Adam: Yeah. They didn't really want anything to do with the film, the actual production of it. Film was one thing. They had nothing Yeah. To do with it. They said, Hey, take this project and do what you want to with it. And they did.
David: Yeah. And they just took the money. They took the money and they did ex they did whatever they wanted.
David: Yeah.
Adam: So this is an interesting story too. The way that the rights were actually gotten by Roland Joffee. Roland Joffee was an independent producer and director who had been nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Ended up outbidding, both Disney and Paramount pictures. They were trying to get Mario.
Adam: They were trying to get Mario. Oh my God. Because it was big ip, what he ended up doing was he pitched to Nintendo America. They liked his pitch so much. They sent him over to Japan and he met with the head of Nintendo. And the head of Nintendo is like, why should I give this to you?
Adam: You're not offering me as much money as these other guys would, and he said I'm here tho. Where are those guys? And he loved that. It's a good sell. So he said, Hey let you have it for $5 million. And Roland Joffe, he's look, that's a little rich for me. I'm a little independent. I'll give you 2 million for it.
Adam: And so not only did he get the rights, but he got 'em for half of what anybody else would've gotten 'em for. He bartered them
down.
David: Yes. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing.
Adam: Yeah. They, he really liked that he went over to Japan to meet with him and ask him for the rights. And nobody else, no other company did that.
Adam: That personal connection goes
David: a long way, right? That personal connection makes all the difference in the world.
David: It really does. It's still wild, that these massive companies wanted this ip, especially Disney.
Adam: Disney ends up getting to release the film ultimately. Oh. Through their, through Hollywood pictures. Okay. Yeah. They came on when the production ran into some financial trouble because it basically, this was a gigantic scale independent film.
Adam: Yes. Until Disney had to come and bail them out because they ran outta money and then they got to distribute. But it came with all its own problems when, I'm not surprised why Disney came in. They wanted to change everything, make it more kid friendly. And this was about, halfway through the actual
David: shoot.
David: I was gonna say, making it more kid friendly. And the, what I saw on screen that it does not look like it was made for children at all. All the,
Adam: in, in their defense, all of the sets had been built, the special effects were already done. It's not as if you can pivot mid shoot and go, no.
Adam: Okay, now it's gonna be more kid friendly. Those
David: sets were pretty incredible.
Adam: The production designer, David Snyder. Was the guy that did Blade Runner.
Adam: And he also did PeeWee's Big Adventure. So two kind of fantasy esque
David: worlds. Yeah. Lot of construction.
Adam: They ended up shooting this in North Carolina.
Adam: They rented out an abandoned cement factory. And that offered David Steiner a scale that he couldn't build on a sound stage. They did Blade Runner on the back, lot of Universal. But this offered him a much larger canvas to work with. So he said he, they walked into one room and that room was 50 feet tall and 200 feet long.
Adam: Perfect spot for, yeah.
David: And also help with all the Mario Carton nonsense that goes on in this movie too, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. Just, driving through the city street scenes, all that, because there's just a one open space. Yeah. You have a lot more to work with. Yeah. Can't do that in a sound
Adam: stage.
Adam: It's crazy. How busy this film is. There's just so many people packed into those streets.
David: There's a lot going on for sure.
Adam: I think it's because they wanted to mimic how Manhattan is.
David: The whole premise of the movie Essent. Is basically a stranger thing's upside down, where it's like the same city, but in an alternate universe that's what I got out of it.
Adam: Yeah. I think at the beginning there's a description that says that when the comment hit earth and dinosaurs were wiped out, some of them were shunted over and lived in an alternate dimension. And that dimension grew up along ours. So everybody evolved parallel to us.
Adam: I think that was the initial concept, whether or not it actually comes out in the film is another story.
David: It's not made super clear. It was funny to me when they introduced our main heroine in the movie, our dam zone in distress, who was actually Princess Daisy, not Princess Peach, because super Mario Brothers two had Princess Daisy in it.
David: There is an alternate universe esque type thing with these games though. With the war pipes and everything. You're going to different worlds since the first game. Our main heroine is Princess Daisy, who is the love interest of Luigi,
Adam: When she's introduced, she's not a princess.
Adam: She doesn't know about her ancestry, right? Yeah. Yet at that point, she is an archeologist and she's digging up bones in the sewer. ,
David: right?
Adam: And then there's this weird side story. So our heroes, Luigi and Mario, Are down on their luck plumbers and their main competition is this gangster named Scarelli who keeps stealing all the jobs from them.
Adam: And Scarelli is threatening Daisy that he's gonna knock her off because she's stopping a build site because of her excavation. And then he disappears.
Adam: The odd thing is that between this film, the 93 film and the new film, there are a lot of similarities in the plot.
David: There's a lot of similarities in the plot.
David: The same, they go to almost an identical underground sewer passage system just with all of the piping work for the entire city. Yeah. For some
Adam: reason it's where it all kind of convenes into one area. It's all
David: convened into this one gigantic elevator shaft looking area. That has multiple level, it's way deeper than it would be in real life.
David: It's the pipe vortex. It's nonsense. Yeah. And then of course they have, one massive pipe that's a warp portal to another world because of course, because
Adam: yeah. No one ever
David: discovered that before. Yeah, exactly. That's just been there for who knows how long since the city was built in.
David: Nobody ever questioned that because these two plumbers who are just trying to get their foot in the door and are not the city, guys. Just happened upon it when they were working
Adam: another job. They're trying to make a name for themselves, and they get sucked into the pipe.
Adam: And in this one they find themselves not in the mushroom kingdom. Definitely not the mushroom kingdom. No. They find themselves in Dino Hatton. Yeah. Dino Hatton. Which is a play on Manhattan because, but with dinosaurs we evolve, we evolved as men. Exactly. And to men, they were dinosaurs
David: to begin with.
David: Yeah. Which is, it's such a bad pun. It's so bad, man. And all the street names are named after different Coupa. Play on Coupa, like Copa Street, Copa this, Copa that it's all Yeah. Cuz of King
Adam: coa. He's this Cooper's running evil dictator that's removed their former
David: king. Yeah. Very Biff, the fungus king.
David: Yeah. He remind me a lot of Biff from back to the Future. Oh yeah. Especially in two when he takes over,
Adam: Dennis Hopper plays King Coupa in this. Yes. And he's fantastic here. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. He's really committing to the role. He walks around with his hands like, like a
David: T-Rex, like a T-Rex. It's like really close to him. Really tight and stuff.
Adam: Yeah. And he's got these weird cornrows and his hair.
Adam: It's and then like he has this weird germ thing, right?
David: Explain that. So in the second Super Mario game the main batty who's in, in that game, his name is Wart, he has this whole hatred of vegetables. They introduce a mechanic in the game where you pull beets and carrots out of the ground and you throw them at your enemies.
David: So I'm guessing that's where they got the idea of him being a germophobe, I guess maybe. Yeah, they never
Adam: explained that. It's super weird. Yeah. They never really explained why, but they have him doing all this stuff with his hands. Yeah. He's always like wiping them down. He puts them in wax to remove
David: something, some stuff.
David: And maybe they just needed a character trait, at the time when they were making this, the people involved with making it, I don't think they ever sat down and played through the games. I think they just read the synopsis for the games that were out at the
Adam: time. I'm sure, and honestly, the whole plots to those games could be
David: summed up in a paragraph pretty well.
David: They pretty much were.
Adam: So anyway this movie was troubled from the very beginning, from all the rewrites. I think they said that the producers had over 10 million in the film before it ever shot a single frame of film because of all of the different writers that they brought on to develop it at one point, it was a diehard clone.
Adam: Which would've been
David: fantastic.
Adam: At one point they brought on the writer of Rainman and it was a two-hander road movie where Luigi's like Rainman and Mario and him are on this big road odyssey. Luigi
David: always gets the shaft in.
David: He does, man. It's he poor Luigi. Poor Luigi.
David: His one standalone game. Luigi's mansion. Even then he's like scared shit all the time, basically All the time. Yeah. Yeah. He's always afraid. Always terrified. Which I, I didn't really put together until you showed me the animated show just now.
David: He was just afraid of everything. I mean they did it in the new movie too, so that's probably something that comes up often enough that it's a main character.
Adam: At one point, Dustin Hoffman was actually interested in playing Get Out. Really? Yeah. I didn't hear about that one. Yeah. But ultimately ended up passing, then they went out to Danny DeVito. They wanted Danny DeVito to be Mario. And they offered him the director chair too, so he would've really directed and starred in it.
Adam: That would've been a very different film. That would've been a
David: very different film. Yeah.
Adam: And then ultimately he ended up passing, cuz he started working on another project and then they went to Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks was interested in playing it, but then they got afraid that he wasn't gonna open the film. Gotcha. And so they ultimately settled on Bob Hoskins, who he's an amazing fit physically for the character.
David: I feel like it was really good casting and the story just didn't match what they managed to get for the characters.
Adam: Yeah. He famously hates this movie.
David: Yeah. You were telling me he, there's
Adam: an incredible quote I'm gonna read a little bit later about how he felt about his entire experience on the shoot. Yeah. Wasn't
David: good. Yeah. But originally he ended up signing onto it because his kids were obsessed with the
Adam: games. Exactly. Yeah. He wanted to do something
David: for his kids.
David: Yeah. Which how often do you hear
that
Adam: in Harlem? He was really worried about being typecast though, because he had done Who framed Roger Rabbit.
David: It's a kid movie, but there's a lot of non kid friendly things that happen in that movie.
David: But I love that movie. It's a fantastic movie and I love Bob Hoskins in that movie. So I can see the similarities there, especially all the times
Adam: you pulled my ears
David: all the times I pull Jesus.
Adam: I love it. It went through a lot of growing pains.
Adam: In fact, 10 days before they started shooting, they got a brand new script. The producers had hired a new writer to come in and make it a little more kid friendly. And they did not tell the directors, that's the crazy thing. They didn't tell the director, they
David: didn't tell the directors they already rewrote the movie.
David: No.
Adam: That they rewrote the movie. So 10 days before the directors had already storyboarded everything and they were all ready to go into production. And 10 days before they have to accommodate all these changes that the producers made to the film. Wow. Yeah. That's so bad. Yeah, it was funny.
Adam: Rocky Morton in an interview says he famously threw a temper tantrum and walked outside, threw all his storyboards in a barrel and set them on fire and watched them burn.
David: That's amazing. Yeah. You can't get away with that these days. every time I hear a story about like old Hollywood and how people used to act, it's.
David: Man, that sounds terrifying, but also what a thing to witness. I'm sure you just see this man walk out and set a dumpster on fire.
Adam: Yeah. So basically they went into production with a brand new script no one had signed off on. And then Daley just started rewriting the film. So every day new pages would come out in the morning, and it got to the point where Dennis Hopper just lost his mind one day.
Adam: He walked on set. He was so tired of getting new pages after he had memorized a monologue the night before. And he just lost it. And he started screaming at the directors for 45 minutes on set in front of 200 extras and all the other principles, calling them unprofessional and saying that this is the worst shoot he'd ever been on.
Adam: And that these people couldn't direct their way out of a paper bag just really crazy and just dressed him down for 45 minutes until he ran outta steam. And then they're like what do you wanna do? And he's like, well, I'm not a writer. Don't ask me. I don't write things.
Adam: And they're like we'll do whatever you wanna do. And he is I'll just do what's on the page. I'm done. Like I, at that point he
David: just started phoning it in. Just phoned it in.
Adam: Yeah. Apparently it got so bad that Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo would take little breaks in their trailers where they'd go and take a few shots.
Adam: Can't say I blame 'em in between scenes because they would get on set and they'd be like, do you know what you're supposed to do? Cuz I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. And then the directors would just leave it up for them to make up what they were gonna do. And so a lot of the film was improvd because the dialogue was rewritten and rewritten so many times.
Adam: Nobody knew what was happening and they just had to shoot. So they left it up to them to actually do stuff. Which is amazing cuz both of them are actually
David: really good in the film. Yeah, they were, I did not hate either one of them playing the characters that they got cast as, the writing was a little weird.
David: But as you're saying, it was all over the place. But their characters in the way that they played them, I had no problem with it. They were decent. Is
Adam: he? And Spike too. They would throw their pages away. They were fun. Yep. They were fun characters every day. And they would just improv and they liked each other so much that they just played off of each other and did
David: fun little bits.
David: Honestly, they probably ended up better because of
Adam: that. I think so. Yeah. I think the directors were happy with what they were doing, so they just let 'em go nuts. Yeah. I gotta
David: say in the extended version that you showed me, the rap they do in the bar. Yeah. It's, ugh, I hope if this movie, it's so freaking painful.
David: It's so painful, but it's so good. I hope if this movie resurfaces and gets super popular because of the new movie that gets included in there and special features are something because Yeah. It's worth seeing.
Adam: It's definitely worth seeing. This film was also plagued with a lot of problems on set. Bob Hoskins ended up breaking his hand john Lu Zamo was actually driving the van and he accidentally accelerated too fast and the door slid shut and closed on Bob Hoskins hand.
Adam: Oh, God. Broke his hand. And he had to wear a flesh colored cast for the rest of the chute. Ouch.
David: Yeah. The rest of the chute. Yeah. Oh man. They didn't even let him recover.
Adam: Huh?
David: So
Adam: let's talk about Yoshi.
David: Yeah, let's talk about Yoshi. Yoshi hurt me. Yoshi was cool though. It
Adam: was, he looked really good. So for what was, it was a weird conception
David: of Yoshi. So for the people who haven't seen this movie, basically what they did is they took Yoshi, the lovable green dinosaur companion of Mario that I'm sure most people know, they just turned him into a Velossa Raptor with the Warism.
David: Yeah. A very
Adam: Realistic
David: looking dinosaur. It was dinosaur, very realistic looking dinosaur. I couldn't, it was a puppet, right?
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, that Yoshi cost $500,000 to create, oh my God. It took nine operators and had 70 cables attached to it. Sheesh. Yeah. It was at that time it was probably one of the most advanced puppets that had ever been created.
David: Like you said, the rig is very good. It moves well, it, it came to life, that's for sure.
Adam: Yeah. It's just a weird take on Yoshi, he's like the palace dog. Yeah. The unevolved dinosaur.
Adam: This is a reminder to King Coopera of where they came from.
David: There's a lot of that kind of, Back and forth in the movie about reverting people to their prehistoric state thing is like the main Yeah, like the
Adam: de evolution gun that they had.
Adam: And
David: the de evolution devolver chamber? Yeah. Yeah. The chamber, the devolver, they, strapped people into a chair. Human beings put them in this machine that only covers their head and then turns their head into a weird dino hybrid faced thing,
Adam: which is their version of a Coupa trooper, which
David: is apparently their version of a Coupa.
David: And Yeah. What?
Adam: I don't know. I think they're cute
David: though. They smile all the time. Oh, yeah. Because they're dumb as a bag of rocks. They got no brain cells. I like the one that
Adam: walks around with a harmonica. Yeah, toad.
David: Yeah. Yeah. Toad. Yeah. Let's talk about Toad. Oh
Adam: my God. Toad. Toad. Instead of Toad being like a three foot mushroom guy, he's just a normal guy with a musician, a
David: guitar.
David: Yeah. He's a musician. Yeah, he's a musician. The shrink his head, they make him a quote unquote Coupa.
Adam: Yeah. He gets in trouble for singing anti coopera songs out on the street. Yeah. And so he's arrested and devolved,
David: They wanna make sure that you know who he is for the rest of the movie.
David: So they hang a harmonica around his neck, which he never
Adam: uses, he never use, by the way, you never see him actually use this harmonica. It's just
David: There. I think at one point I heard a harmonica sound bite. He was not actually playing it, there was just a harmonic thing.
David: I don't think he once actually.
Adam: Would've been, he played the harmonica. It would've been funny though if he made harmonica sounds when he walked around or something like that. Oh yeah. I feel like they missed an opportunity there. They
David: might have. Yeah. That, that, that would've been, that would've been real funny actually.
David: Yeah. Like they, they did my boy dirty,
Adam: Yeah. Toad all the characters. felt, It's like they felt obligated to include them, but did not want to include them in the way that people wanted to see them.
David: Yeah. And then there was Bowser, which you would never even know he was in the movie.
David: The way he just turned into this giant, I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a, it's like a stag type with a hole in the bottom that a mushroom pokes out of basically, it looks
Adam: like a slimy hanging testicle,
David: basically. Yeah. That's what it is.
David: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah. That's pretty much it. It's basically a, honestly, if you wanna know what it looks like,
David: that's what it looks like. It's really uncomfortable to look at, honestly. It's very strange. And it robs it's very bizarre. Yeah. The whole premise behind that quote unquote character is his, mushroom ness.
David: What did they call it that was spreading throughout the city? The fungus. The fungus, yeah. Was spreading throughout the city and throughout the movie, I guess he's trying to help Mario and Luigi oh, look, there's mushrooms growing on the wall. Oh, look, there's a, and they have a miniature bomb on.
David: Yeah. One of the things that you use in the video games is it's literally just a bomb with ice and legs and they, either you get blown up by it or you throw it to blow something else up and there's a very small, fits in the palm of your hand version of this thing.
Adam: Yeah. This is a weirder aspect of the film, in a movie that's already super freaking weird. Yeah. The sentient fungus that's helping them along, it points them in the right direction. Like you said, there's there's mushrooms, right? But they never, ever eat a mushroom in this film.
Adam: Yeah. They don't eat
David: any of the mushrooms or use them.
Adam: They call attention to them. John Le Guano goes, Hey look, it's a mushroom. And he points like multiple times. Yeah. Multiple times in the movie. But they never pick it. They never eat it. They never are affected by the mushrooms in any way. Not even,
yeah.
Adam: Nothing. No. Interact. It just seems like something like they included that so specifically that it wouldn't have been hard for them to, they could have just popped one. Yeah. Yeah.
David: Eating a mushroom. It looked like candy. Maybe it wasn't, it's, they could have just grabbed one and thrown it in and then, been able to jump higher or something.
David: Who
Adam: knows. Yeah. It would've just, it would've been an easy way for them to include more elements from the game into the film.
David: Yeah. I got the sense that The small amount that they did involve from the games in this film, they twisted it in some way that it was basically unrecognizable.
Adam: Yeah. You never even got them in their costumes until the last third, right? Yeah. It was at, they weren't in the jump until the very end of the movie. Yeah. They weren't in their jumpsuits until the, they got the rocket boots,
David: right? Yeah. They got yeah, the rocket boots were another thing too.
David: It's I guess that was just how they decided to make it look like they can jump, jump higher hired. Cuz that was like a main transportation in the city for some reason. Cuz there were normal people with rocket boots. With rocket boots. Yeah. People just, jump across skyscrapers or something.
David: I don't know. They looked cool and that they looked really? Yeah. They were very like moon shoes looking. Yeah.
Adam: They were very big and cumbersome looking.
David: I think they only really used them one time though
Adam: they used it to escape the nightclub. That's right. Yeah. Because Big Bertha helps
David: them out. Big Bertha enemy first seen in Super Mario Brothers three. She's the big puffer fish, right? She's a giant puffer fish.
Adam: Yes. Big Bertha is not a giant puffer fish in
David: this film. No, she is not. She is a very helpful, nice big black lady
Adam: that Mario has like a little budding romance thing with for a minute.
Adam: They share a tango. It was
David: very, yeah.
Adam: That was strange. He was trying to steal the meteorite back from her
David: the meteorite was a main component of the movie, why did they need the media Right. to
Adam: To merge our two worlds together.
David: Gotcha. Okay. So that was the, that was like the key between, that was the
Adam: key. Okay. Yeah. But he also needed Daisy, because we find out that she's the only one that can use the key to merge the two
David: worlds.
Adam: Lance Henrickson pops up as the fungus king, he comes
David: in as King Bowser, right? Yeah. King Bowser, which was the mushroom in the throne room. The, the giant testicle thing.
David: Yeah. Who, after they defeat King Coupa, the citizens of mushroom kingdom start turning back into human beings. So like the coupa's, are shrunken headed friends start, they get their heads back. And then Bowser was apparently the fungus. Fungus, this whole time. Yeah.
Adam: And they got Lance Hendrickson, I guess he was on his way to do another movie for Roland Joffey.
Adam: And Roland Joffey gave him a call and he said, Hey I need a favor. Help me out. Yeah. Can you just come in for one day and be in this film? And he said, sure. He didn't have any clue who he was, what he was doing there. Nope. Or whatever. But he is oh, I was sentient fungus, so give me a handful of rice crispies.
Adam: When they do the morphine, he emerges as the king. He coughs and he coughs out what he thought were spars. Oh God. Throat. And they were all rice crispies. They come shooting out of his hand. Gnarly. Super
David: weird. Yeah. But did he even have lines?
Adam: He had one line, I think it was, Hey, we need to thank those plumbers, or something like that. Something super generic Yeah. Stupid. Yeah. But he met his wife on the set. On the set of this movie. Of this movie. Yes. Lance Hendrickson's, future wife, he met on the set of this film. It was all meant to be.
Adam: Yeah. He was like I think fondly back on super
David: Mario Brothers. Oh yeah. He only had by one day. One day by
Adam: one day on there and I got to meet my wife.
David: None of the nightmare stuff. He just found the love of his life. Yeah. He lucked out pretty hard. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me, probably the only person who lucked out in the
Adam: long run.
Adam: Yeah. John, was Ammo actually thinks Well the film, he was given an opportunity, he said as a Latino man in the mid nineties, you were not often thrust into a major role
David: like this. His role was major.
Adam: Major. Yeah. He was the second banana to Mario. Like actually
David: probably he was the love interest of all of the main lady of the movie.
David: Like absolutely. It wasn't even Mario. Right. Luigi was the one who was trying to savor her the whole time. Luigi got the girl.
Adam: Yeah. In real life too. He and Samantha Mathis ended up dating after this. That's fantastic.
David: Speaking of Daisy,
David: remember at the very beginning of the movie we see a baby born from an egg? From an egg, yes. Daisy is the princess of, Dino Hatton or whatever it's called. Yeah. Princess Daisy Hatch from an egg and is directly descended from the dinosaur people that they, are of in the movie, which was very strange.
Adam: Yeah. That whole opening scene is so roughly edited. It's
David: yeah, there's just like
Adam: quick cuts from Yeah. That lady leaves the baby who is a giant egg at first the egg hatches and then that lady is captured in a catacomb by King Cooper and then, and then the ceiling falls in and they kill her.
Adam: So in the first, 60 seconds of the film, they've already killed somebody on screen. Yeah. In a kid's movie. Sounds about right. Yeah, that's about right.
David: Yeah. And then, kids movie, the fact that this is regarded as a kid's movie is amazing to me.
Adam: The movie cost 42 to $48 million to make.
Adam: It only grossed 38.9 million. Worldwide. Worldwide. Yeah. That's
David: rough. Yeah. That's that's a heavy loss. And I'm sure Nintendo was not happy about that.
David: Just reputation wise, if this is your, first big introduction with Mario as especially a live action character, cuz they had the show before, but the
Adam: show being the Super Mario Brothers super show.
David: Yeah. Which they had a live action component, but it was mostly animated. Yeah. And then, you have a Hollywood blockbuster movie that just completely fell on its face basically. It
Adam: put such a bad taste in their mouth that they would not let anybody touch Mario for years.
David: Yeah. Up until now, basically.
David: I'm just baffled that it's just so bad. It's just it flopped so hard. I guess the things that were heavily criticized was basically just the plot because people said that the acting, the art direction, the special. All of that was fantastic. Yeah. Which it was.
Adam: Those characters are all them working really hard to make a character.
David: think the
Adam: World that they created was cool. I don't think it's very Mario esque, but it was really cool
David: looking. Yeah. It was a, like you said, it's it's Mad Max meets
Adam: Batman I think was really hot at the time. Batman came out in
David: 89.
Adam: That's why they went all dark with it
David: everything
Adam: that they did was to separate themselves from the video game. Yeah. And I think that
David: was a mistake. I think the tagline was literally, this isn't a game.
David: Right. It's like, But it's supposed to be like, it's based on
Adam: one. It should have been.
David: This was the first movie that Autodesk Flame, which was a c compositing and visual effects program released in 93, this was the first movie to use this program and it was still in beta. They were still testing it. Oh, wow. So all the effects and everything that they managed to get out of this beta program were
Adam: phenomenal. Yeah. They did 700 composite
David: shots in it. Yeah.
David: And it basically springboarded Autodesk into. The movie industry,
Adam: This was the very first movie to ever have a digital intermediate made, so that made that c composing much easier because they digitized the whole film.
Adam: You're going digital to digital for the first time it created a whole new process that we use today. Another thing this had going against it is that it was released only two weeks before Jurassic Park just buried everything for the rest of the year. Ouch. Yeah. Jurassic Park was the number one film of 1993. Highest grossing box office. So this movie only had two weeks to perform
David: no wonder it got crushed. Yeah. Everybody who saw this movie and then saw Jurassic Park, they're going to recommend Jurassic Park. Right.
David: This film was the only live action Nintendo property that existed until 2019. When Detective Pikachu came out, Nintendo basically said, Nope,
Adam: never again. Yep. They would not let anybody have rights
David: to anything. Nothing. Yeah. It was the standard for 30 years.
David: It's crazy to think
Adam: that, huh? It's wild. Especially after seeing the Super Mario Brothers super show and how shoddy the live action stuff was on that.
David: Yeah. It was a little rough.
Adam: This is Bob Hoskins in a 2007 interview with the Guardian in the uk.
Adam: This is his response when asked about Super Mario Brothers, he said, it's the worst thing I ever did. Super Mario Brothers. It was a fucking nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband and wife team directing who's arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks, their own agent told them to get off the set fucking nightmare, fucking idiots.
David: At least he was nice to the people about it.
Adam: And then in a 2011 interview, when asked what the worst job he'd ever done was, he said that if he could edit his past, he would edit Super Mario Brothers out of it.
David: And yet it still has a cult following to this day, .
Adam: Hey, it's still Mario Brothers, no matter how twisted
David: and weird.
David: The Super Mario Brothers movie 2023. While working underground to fix a water main Brooklyn, plumbers Mario, and Brother Luigi, .
David: Are transported down to mysterious pipe and wander into a magical new world. But when the brothers are separated, Mario embarks on an epic quest to find Luigi. Normally Princess Peach would be the one in distress, but in this one, Luigi is the one that gets.
David: And ends up being the one that needs to be saved. Yeah. They flipped the rolls on that. They flipped the script a little bit, which I didn't hate because it led to a dynamic with Mario and Princess Peach that I think was just fun. I gotta start by saying I adore this movie.
David: I loved it. I'm obsessed with how it is not going to win an Oscar. Nope. Absolutely not. But I had so much fun with it. I do not care. When I saw this
Adam: movie, I knew that you
David: would love this movie. Yeah. It's like a movie that was Taylor made for me. I mean, It's a major video game character.
David: It's animated it's filled with tons of Easter eggs. It's filled with Easter eggs. It's, again, it's a fan service movie. And I feel like even though, critics are, doing critic things, look at how much money it's making. It's insane. As
Adam: of this recording, it's made 721 million worldwide, and that was on a $100 million budget.
Adam: It's definitely on the trajectory to a
David: billion.
David: Yeah, I think it's gonna get there easy. Oh, me too.
Adam: Yeah, me too. Especially when
David: Japan opens. So this movie was directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Gillick. There's a lot of movies that don't ever want to be touched, because they're classics.
David: They're perfect exactly how they are. You wouldn't want to try to redo it. Some people still do.
Adam: Yeah. Super. Mario Brothers was not one of those movies. No.
David: It was not one of those movies that movie needed to be remade in. Thank God they did. Yeah, because this was just, it was just a fun, nonsensical time.
David: Basically the same premise
Adam: where it's, yeah that's one of the things we need to talk about actually the plot is almost exactly the same.
David: It's borderline identical. Like the whole movie starts out the same way. They have their they have a plumbing commercial with the rap from the animated show, which was brilliant.
Adam: Yep.
David: It's so good. I love
Adam: it so much. Tonally, you're in the right hands when that comes on. I love the opening sequence with Bowser two and the Castle and the Little Penguin guys. So good. It's hilarious. But they had already released that, so I'd seen it. Yeah, that was their teaser trailer.
Adam: But when that commercial comes on, I'm like, oh, wow, they nailed this tonally. Yeah. This is exactly what
we
David: all wanted to see. It was funny too because for that commercial that they shot, Mario had his high-pitched it's Ya Mario. Yeah. And then they make a whole joke out of it for the first part of the movie where he's talking to his family and I was like, oh, is the accent too much?
Adam: I feel like that's in direct response to all those fans that were, it feels crazy. Yeah. But that first trailer came out, they were all mad that Chris Pratt wasn't doing the accent. Yeah. And so it was just the explanation for it.
David: It was, yeah. It's funny that They just directly integrated it.
David: So Chris Pratt plays Mario. We had Anya Taylor Joy as Princess Peach. Charlie Day as Luigi Jack Black as Bowser. Talk about a home run. I was so happy.
Adam: Brilliance when I, absolute
David: brilliance. Jack Black created peaches. He pitched the idea that Bowser should have a love song in the movie. Jack Black did so Of course he did. Of course he did. So we got, if you got Jack Black in your movie,
Adam: you know you're getting a song. Yeah.
David: Jack Black Made of Live Action music video dressed ala Bowser with. Giant, feather hat and rolling all over the floor as Jack Black Does. It's pure poetry. When it released, it appeared as number 61 on iTunes within hours.
David: And by the next day it was in the top 15.
David: I still can't get it outta my head. And it's circulating TikTok like wildfire right now. It is everywhere.
David: Preach is Preach S pictures and I feel like it was a great balance that he had in the movie too, because he had all of his Jack blackness his goofy, mannerisms that he put into this character.
David: But it was also a very serious role too with what was at risk, the fact that he was pursuing Peach as a love interest, as a villain.
Adam: I love how emotionally vulnerable the character is. Yeah. He's putting himself out there emotionally
David: with a little wizard guy.
David: He has practice sessions on how he's gonna ask Princess Peach to when
Adam: he has the Wizard guy. He dressed up as peach. As Peach. Oh my God. My gosh. It's so funny.
David: It was hysterical. I loved every second that this character was on screen. It was so good.
David: Keegan, Michael Key is Toad. Toad was a great character in this movie, cuz he was just, played as like a badass sidekick who is just, fearless,
Adam: I love how he insinuates that he's Mario's best friend, like immediately. Oh, yeah. After Medium, by way. Yeah. We're best friends. It's the, oh, you
David: know my best friend Mario. Yeah. He's oh, this guy's gonna go on an adventure. I'm absolutely going with him.
David: This is just how life is
Adam: now. It's interesting too, how this film opens almost exactly like the other film. It's almost identical. Yeah. They're down on their luck. Plumbers just trying to get into the business, and their major rival is a much more established person.
Adam: In this case, it's Spike. In the other movie, it was Scarelli. Spike in this movie it works for a company called The Wrecking Crew. And apparently Spike first appeared in a video game called The Wrecking Crew, where Mario and Luigi worked for him, and he was the foreman, and he would keep trying to knock Mario off of
David: platforms.
Adam: You said you had a story about Spike.
David: The character of Spike has been around for a long time. His name has not always been Spike, apparently, when Spike was introduced in the Mario franchise, his name originally was Blackie.
David: Ooh. Which does not work in the year of our Lord. 2023.
Adam: That's actually a very common Irish nickname, Blackie.
David: That could be it.
Adam: Because yeah, it was like a big thing in the twenties and thirties. A lot of Irish people their nicknames were Blackie. And it's cuz that comes from black Irish Irish people born with dark hair.
Adam: That's where it stems from. You'd have a nickname, Blackie, and it wasn't disparaging in any way. It was just Yeah. But now it just sounds
David: bad. Yeah. You can't get away with that. Yeah.
Adam: Back in the day, Irish and Italian immigrants would fight. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. So that's why he's a dick to them.
Adam: And it's trying to push him down because he's Irish and Italian.
Adam: So
David: the opening of the movie almost completely identical. Brooklyn has a, pipe break under the city streets, and it starts to flood the streets. mario and Luigi, who are trying to make a name as plumbers, get this brilliant idea, oh, we'll fix it and we'll be the town heroes.
David: It's super basic concept. So they go to the underground, sewer system, which is multiple levels deep, it's almost the same visual too. It's almost the same exact visual thing. Yeah. It's crazy. And in the process of trying to fix the pipe drains Luigi just disappears.
Adam: I also read this in the sewers, the brothers, when they break through the wall there's a sign that says Levels one to two. Yes. That's based on a famous glitch from the original Super Mario Brothers game from 1985 that if you jumped through a wall, it would put you into what they called minus world, which was really just an improperly loaded environment.
Adam: Huh. That you could not escape from. Oh God. Yeah. So it was like a glitch that ended the game. Yeah. Wow.
David: How about that?
Adam: And they included that as an
David: Easter egg there's so much in this movie. It's impossible to talk about all of them. Layers and layers.
David: Layers of layers. It's great. Yeah. Which is I think why I got so much out of it,
David: luigi gets sent to the dark lands, which is basically bowsers, land, it has his castle and. Luigi's mansion, music playing while he's, entering the spooky castle,
David: and the, I gotta say, when he escapes all the bones and gets into the castle and he thinks he's safe, and then the shy guys appear in a lightning flash behind him. Oh my God I laugh so hard. I thought that was great. It was fantastic.
Adam: Great visual.
David: It was so good. And then we get to see Mario land in the mushroom kingdom, and I'm so thankful they did this, because it ended up being such a funny bit. Mario hates mushrooms in this movie.
Adam: Oh yeah. At the dinner we find that out at the dinner with his
David: family, it's having dinner with his family.
David: They have mushrooms on the pasta sauce, and he's like, Ugh, I hate mushrooms, hate mushrooms. And it starts, it, he starts picking 'em off. It, it plays for the rest of the movie. Mario and mushrooms are directly associated to each other. .
David: And then they integrated the entire, power up system later on where he had to eat one after another later. Yeah. Yeah. It was a whole thing. It was so
Adam: funny. I love the first time when Peach actually just grabs the mushroom and pound it down his throat.
David: Yeah.
David: He's hyster. And then after the whole montage, he's had so many of 'em that he he literally throws up over the side and turns back into the smaller version of him himself because he loses the power up. It was so good. Seth Rogan is Donkey Kong. Yeah,
Adam: he's awesome.
David: It was an interesting choice, I thought.
David: And I didn't know how it was gonna play. I really liked it. Yeah, me too. He's a blow
Adam: hard, he's really full of himself. Totally. Yeah. And that laugh just really
David: works with that character.
David: And we only got it, we only got it once in this movie. It's, it wasn't egregious. It was, we got some Seth Rogan.
.
David: The way Donkey Kong and Mario interacted in the movie was interesting that they team up together. Mario and Peach are trying to get the Kong Army to help fight Bowser, which is, not any of the games.
David: There was a Kong army, but it was cool. It's basically
Adam: just a bunch of Kongs and souped
David: up just a bunch of donkey Kongs. Yeah. That was basically the Mario Kart element was Donkey Kong and all of the Kongs just get around in go-karts.
David: That's just how they live their life. It's just transportation. Yeah.
Adam: And you get your Rainbow Bridge sequence.
David: I thought that the way that they built the cars too, the system they had in the movie with the panels where they Oh yeah. That was directly picked the body, they picked the tires directly from the video game Mario Cart eight. Yeah. That's cool. Do they just happen to have one with Mario's emblem on it? No, he made it. Yeah. Yeah. That works. Sure. That makes it works for me. Yeah. I thought was cool,
Adam: whatever. I love too that they incorporated the shortcut from the rainbow bridge where he has to jump off to the lower one. Yeah. Yeah.
Adam: That. The major shortcut in the game. Exactly,
David: yeah. And if you miss you go the water, you go into the water.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah.
David: They did a great job integrating video game elements.
Adam: We can't go through every reference in this, but we can through room. There are a lot fun references at the beginning with the punch out pizzeria with all of the people on the walls, like Glass Ja Joe and Bear Hug and all those guys.
Adam: He's playing Kid s in his room.
David: He's playing Kid S on a Nintendo. Nintendo Nintendo. I
Adam: thought that was really cool. That restaurant, the Chas Do Kenard. That's Duck Hunt.
David: Yeah, I saw the duck on that one.
David: My favorite, though is the fact that they have the original voice of Mario playing Donkey Kong on an arcade cabinet in the pizzeria and
Adam: The arcade cabinet's called Jumpman.
Adam: It's called Jumpman. Yeah. They just go so deep with the lore,
David: The other fun thing is that the same actor Charles Martin also played Mario Luigi's father, which, oh, that's cool. The father, he was also the voice of Luigi when he was cast as the original Mario.
David: Oh really? played, He played a few of the characters, actually. I think he was Mario, Luigi, Wario and Waluigi. He gave them all their own distinct flavor, you think we're gonna
Adam: get them in the sequel?
David: I would hope so, because I would love to see Wario.
David: I would love to see Waro. Yeah. It just gives them more villains to work with. Yeah. Like this universe is broad at this point. Cuz we didn't really get to see Yoshi in the movie either. There was a quick reference to Yoshi's island. Like you see the Yoshi's running in the background kind of cut from Super Smash Brothers when they're introduced. But you never see like the Yoshi and you never see 'em interact
Adam: with Mario. Yeah. And whole thing is that
David: interaction. Yeah. In the scene that has Luigi's in a cage with, a couple of other characters, the penguins, there's that star.
David: Oh, I love that star. The suicidal star. Yes. He's so amazing. That is a character. I
Adam: knew he was gonna be one of your
David: absolute favorite characters. He's so funny. He's associated with another princess from the Mario Universe Princess Rosalina. She has this magic wand where she controls this star character and uses him as a weapon, at least in Super Smash Brothers.
David: So Rosalina appears in a couple of Mario games and is actually a character that helps Mario and Luigi helps save Princess Peach, and that little star character is called a Luma, and they're a Starlight creature that appeared in a game called Super Mario Galaxy. And they come in a bunch of different colors.
David: They just happen to pick blue for this movie, I think, because he's a downer. So he is blue. He is also, yeah, a downer.
Adam: I love when he's like, oh, soon we'll feel the cool Embrace of death.
Adam: He's so funny. Just how it's hysterical. Just how everything, anybody will say, he'll twist it and make it super negative and all about death.
David: Towards the end of the movie when they're being lowered into the.
David: And then, donkey Kong stops it and starts to hoist him back up. And he's all disappointed that he didn't die. He's like laying in his cage like, oh man.
Adam: That was definitely for adults, not for,
David: Oh hundred percent. Not for the kids.
Adam: I love the disparity in that. He's so cute too. And yet everything he says is so dark.
Adam: Okay, let's talk about the ending then a little bit, how it relates back to the 93 film. They're almost identical endings too, with the two worlds
David: colliding, they're pretty close.
David: Yeah. In, in the first one, do they end up fully combining the two worlds together? Or Briefly? Briefly. Briefly. But they stay separated for the most
Adam: part. Yeah. The whole point of the 93 film is to combine the worlds. Whereas in this one, it is a side effect of him trying to be bowser.
Adam: And then the two worlds collide, basically.
David: Yeah. And they just bring elements Yeah. Across the way. Yeah.
Adam: And then , the new one, alludes to the fact that breach stays open. That people can travel back and.
David: Freely. It seems that way because Mario Luigi, still use a warp pipe to get between the two worlds, but they end up in the mushroom kingdom, jumping across blocks and whatnot, right at the end of the movie.
Adam: You see 'em wake up and they're getting ready for their day, and then they walk out and they're in the mushroom kingdom as opposed to being right in Brooklyn.
David: Maybe they moved.
Adam: Are they staying in the mushroom kingdom though?
David: Their herald is, heroes in the mushroom kingdom and they're just kinda popular in Brooklyn now. Yeah. But they did say Brooklyn yeah. Although, I don't know, Mario would wanna stay around 24 7 given that all they have to eat around there is mushrooms.
David: Something that they didn't really acknowledge after they brought it up, is the fact that Peach is from another universe. She's found. She's from Brooklyn. They never say for sure they introduce her as a baby to the, she's a human though, right?
David: It's never really confirmed that they're from the same universe. And I'm wondering, because there's other games with different, princesses and whatnot.
David: Maybe it's not. Earth in Brooklyn, maybe there's other, human races in different universes that exist we have other heroes that we can meet with any kind of, sequels,
Adam: I think what you're talking about is introducing the Galaxy concept.
Adam: Yeah. They did it with Kong already, so you could basically mix Link or any other
David: character from Oh, wouldn't that
Adam: be fun? Or Kid ICARs, which they gave us a little, Hey, he's playing
David: Kid ICARs, now that we have a Mario Cinematic universe, maybe we'll have an endgame Super Smash Brothers movie.
Adam: When Super Mario Brothers 2023 opened it was the biggest worldwide opening weekend for an animated film of all time beating Frozen two from
David: 2019. Yep. 377 million versus frozen twos, 358 million. And it
Adam: was also the highest grossing film based on a video game
David: so far.
Adam: It is
David: now currently the highest grossing film of 2023.
Adam:
Adam: This is gonna be the hard animated movie to beat this year. I don't know if it'll win an Academy Award.
Adam: Because of how badly it's been reviewed, but I think those people are missing the point, honestly. That's the
David: thing is I feel like animation as a medium in general is so misunderstood. Guillermo Deltoro is my freaking hero because he always goes to bat for animation.
David: He loves animation and he understands animation is cinema. There's artistic value in making animated feature films. And His Pinocchio is a Yeah. Easy way to sell Academy Award
Adam: winner for last year.
Adam: Yeah. Exactly mean. There was no other film that was
David: even close to that. Not even close. It was artistically just
Adam: gorgeous. Yeah. And that's a guy that could do anything. He could be directing. Yeah. A 300 million movie for Marvel right now. But he chose to spend his last two or three years on Pinocchio instead because he loves
David: animation.
David: Gotta love that animation, man. We gotta do an animation episode of Oh, for sure. We'll do one. Oh, absolutely. I could talk about animation all day, but I won't. It's fun. Yeah. And
Adam: this movie is beautifully animated. It's a beautifully animated movie.
David: It's just eye candy. And something that was focused on in the development of this movie was the fact that gamers win the Mario Games by not giving up in spite of mistakes made.
David: Which is why the whole movie, they say, oh, you just don't know when to give up. They're constantly saying that to Mario and Peach, says, oh, that's a good thing. So it becomes like his whole thing is what his mantra basically. Yeah. Every time he is knocked down, he gets back up.
David: Because in the old games, there was no saving. The whole premise of the movie was, never give up, always get back on your feet. Always keep trying.
Adam: Nintendo was directly involved with this film from the very beginning.
Adam: Yes. It was. They were not gonna let this happen, development them being so hands off, you got that monstrosity in 93, they were
David: never gonna let that happen again. They were never gonna let it happen again.
Adam: No, man. This time they kept tight reigns on it. And look, they delivered a thing that appeases the fans and the players and also delivered a really fun film at the same time.
David: This is exactly the kind of movie that Critically acclaimed. No, but for the fans of the franchise I'm all
Adam: about it. Yeah. Honestly I don't think that matters to me. Like as long as the film delivers on the promise of a good time, then it's
David: a good movie, when Donkey Kong is introduced, the first time you see him, you get the DK rap.
David: Yes. You remember the DK rap that's from Donkey Kong Country. One of the worst raps of all time, 1964. It's a classic thing. Shut your mouth. It's amazing. And the composer of the DK rap, his name is Grant Kirk, hope he was not credited in the film. Really? And he's mentioned that doesn't sit well with them.
David: Yeah. Because it's the Donkey Kong rap. Oh, absolutely. It's it's just straight up the song. Yeah. And they didn't even mention it in the credits, that
Adam: sucks. Yeah. But yeah, I think they did a really good job though, using the themes and the music from all the various games throughout.
Adam: You'll get the underwater
David: theme briefly. Yeah. They got, they had like almost everything in there. mean, Even Luigi's ringtone at the beginning of the movie was the Game Cube startup. I know. That
Adam: was really cool. I think they were able to weave those in really well.
Adam: Yeah. If you're really listening hard, you can hear an element of this and or an element of that.
David: And a lot of times they didn't make you listen hard at all. It was just straight up the theme from the song.
Adam: Sometimes it's
David: just the DK rap. Yeah. Sometimes it's just the DK rap,
Adam: do
David: donkey Call Me? oh
Adam: yeah. Can we talk about all the people that come to these screenings dressed up as Mario?
David: When I
Adam: went to see it, there was a whole group of people that came as Mario, Luigi, wa, Luigi princess Peach, somebody came as Yoshi.
Adam: It was pretty awesome.
David: You're gonna see that any movie associated with. Quote unquote nerd culture. Yeah. Going forward, cosplay are out in mass. What
Adam: blew my mind though, when I went to go see air, everybody was wearing their Nike shoes, Nike gear, everybody was all Nike up.
Adam: It was awesome.
David: It's funny. That to me is weirder than people dressed up as video game characters.
Adam: They came out on the same weekend. So it was all these Nike people and all of these Nintendo people.
David: That'd be a great cross collaboration right there. Super Mario shoes.
David: They help you jump higher. There you go. You pump '
Adam: em up like the old,
David: Nikes, oh my God. The, you remember the, I remember those with them. Pump ones. Yeah, the air pumps. Oh, totally. Made you jump higher. Must have been so good for your back, I'm sure.
Adam: Anyway, thanks for joining us here.
David: Pretty much. Thanks for having me. This was really fun to do the research for sure. And watching the 93 movie, was it a treat?
Adam: That's my favorite part of doing this, honestly. Yeah it's a good time. And I was very happy to revisit the 93 film. It has a, soft spot in my heart, even though it is a total disaster.
David: Yeah, it's. It's special, that's for sure. I'll never forget it.
Adam: I remember when we were watching it together, I jumped up a couple times going, Dave, what the heck is even happening right
David: now? It's a, it's a Special, special film. It's a special film.
David: All right.
Adam: All right. Thanks for joining us this week. I'll probably call Charlotte and have her put in the details of how to contact us, cuz I can never remember them.
David: Oh, hang on, I got your address right here.
Adam: Thanks for joining us this week. We had a really fun time talking about Super Mario Brothers. So until next. Thanks for joining us here on, on Perf Damage,