I still get flashes of memory sitting in the theater that summer at the MacDade Mall in suburban Philadelphia (future filming location of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones) to see it. After the lights dimmed, the opening scene wasted no time establishing with just a few lines of dialogue how dinosaurs were alive in the 20th century. I was intrigued so far, but still unaware that this experience was about to change the way I perceived cinema for the rest of my life.
As much as I would love to say that I’m describing a certain Steven Spielberg masterpiece, we were still a few short weeks away from all that. I am unfortunately referring to that other 1993 dinosaur movie we still can’t seem to stop thinking about: Super Mario Bros.
Oh, Mario. As Nintendo’s flagship property, you were about as incorruptible in my eyes as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You already had several video games, a television show, trading cards, and a ton of merchandise at this point. Everything that featured your chubby, mustachioed face, I wanted. We all did. You could do no wrong. Even the shortcomings were still enjoyable (I’m looking at you Captain Lou Albano). The idea of a feature-length live-action Super Mario movie shot my excitement sky high. There could be no greater joy than watching my two favorite plumbers jump and stomp their way to victory in a feature-length film.
At least, that’s what I thought until I sat in the theater that day.
As most people are aware by now, Sumer Mario Bros. didn’t quite live up to our expectations. It ignored the source material regarding the setting, most of the character design, and the overall tone. Countless reviews over the last three decades have described it as Super Mario meets Blade Runner and I’m saying it here too because, well, they aren’t wrong.
But eleven-year-old kids didn’t want Blade Runner. We wanted upbeat theme songs that delight us. We wanted short sidekicks in giant mushroom caps pointing the hero towards another castle. We wanted Bowser (still commonly referred to as Koopa at this time) to be a despotic turtle monster. What we got was a dystopian cyberpunk fever dream filled with corrupt cops, political propaganda, and themes that border on eugenics.
With so much source material to draw from and so much popularity behind Mario to surely secure a budget required to achieve a faithful adaptation of the video games, I must ask two questions: What the hell happened? And was it really a misguided mess, or was there more going on here that we just didn’t catch onto initially?
On paper, it seemed as though the initially stars aligned to make Super Mario Bros. a mega hit. Besides being one of the most popular franchises on the planet at the time, the idea of making it was originally championed by accomplished filmmaker Roland Joffé. Joffé, best known for directing 1984’s The Killing Fields and 1986’s The Mission, had raked in a considerable number of major award nominations and wins between the two films. After landing Mario’s film rights from Nintendo, he brought on the Oscar-winning writer of Rain Man to create the first draft of the script. At some point along the way, Disney got involved to secure distribution rights through its Hollywood Pictures brand. The creative powers behind this movie were impressive.
It’s around this point when things may have started going wrong. A film often is only as good as its director. Recent films like Avengers: Endgame and Everything Everywhere All At Once suggest that if you use two good directors, you might even create a film that doubles a film’s expected success.
But what happens when you use two directors who get in over their heads?
After an initial director was hired then subsequently let go, it remains a mystery to me why Joffé, with all the resources available to him, turned to the relatively unproven directing team of Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. From what I can tell, their biggest claim to fame at that point was creating Max Headroom. Don’t get me wrong: Max Headroom was cool! He was hip, he was edgy, he was an avant-garde Johnny Carson from the not-too-distant future. But it didn’t make sense. Perhaps they pitched themselves as the right people to do Mario justice, perhaps nobody else stepped up, or it’s possible that Joffé wanted someone the entire time who can breathe weird cyberpunk life into the world of Super Mario. Either way, it was around this point when things started to go wrong.
The directors brought in some new writers to re-tool the script in their own vision. This pass brought in the grittier darker elements that we eventually saw, which objectively should never have been the direction for Super Mario Bros. Disney disagreed with their choices – and you don’t upset the mouse – so Joffé brought in another writer to change the script yet again to lighten things up. The problem there is that production was already underway, and the directors claimed to be unaware. A dark movie had already begun shooting and a light-hearted rewrite shows up.
Not wanting to abandon the work they had already begun, the directors continued to cobble things together rather than quit mid-production, convinced they had a vision which nobody else could continue. While that is admirable given the circumstances, the actors primarily were at odds with Jankel and Morton for refusing to work with them. Hoskins and Hopper both had separate incidents that culminated in screaming matches due to the directors’ inability to manage the production. They seemed ill-equipped to handle the stressors of such a massive undertaking, and the film as well as the entire cast and crew, all suffered as a result.
At this point, there were so many opposing forces at play, a disjointed script that barely resembled Super Mario, a directing team too inexperienced to handle a production in constant flux, actors who had no idea what kind of movie were making, and a producer in Joffé who should have stepped in at this point to right the ship but seemingly never did. Production continued like this through its completion.
It makes sense why we got the movie that we got. What happened was a series of steps (or missteps, depending on who you ask) culminating in a movie which is so bizarrely unique that I’m sure in another 30 years, we’ll still argue over its place in cinema history as much as we do today.
As for me, I left that theater a changed person. It was the first time I realized that movies aimed at me could disappoint. I was way too young and fragile to deal with becoming a cynic already. But this wasn’t just some random movie. This was Mario. He could do no wrong. I don’t think I am being dramatic when I say I felt betrayed by this. Imagine finding out Mickey Mouse sold weed to preschoolers. That’s what this betrayal felt like, and yeah, that’s a hill I’m prepared to die on.
But there’s something to be said about three decades worth of personal growth – you can learn to appreciate things, or at least try to understand them better. You can also learn to have fun with even the worst films. Mystery Science Theater 3000 taught me that. It also taught me that maybe this particular movie wasn’t really that bad, not by a Brooklyn mile. I also think the MST3K element helped me approach Super Mario Bros. again without such a chip on my shoulder. I laughed a lot more watching it as an adult. Most of my laughter still was at the expense of its failings. But rewatching it with this perspective helped me see through my childhood irritation and to better appreciate its successes as well.
Again, it was released very shortly before that other dinosaur movie, so our standards for special effects were still very much in a 1980s mindset. By those standards, the effects in Super Mario Bros. are a masterclass on good filmmaking. While the set-design was campy, this Mushroom Kingdom known as Dinohattan never once looked cheap. Say what you will about the production problems of this film, but the people who built those sets and sewed those costumes treated it as a labor of love. And speaking of dinosaurs, Yoshi was incredibly impressive. In a pre-Jurassic Park mindset, that puppet may have been the most realistic dinosaur to appear on screen to-date. He may look more reptilian and scarier than I would have wanted in Yoshi, but what we got was a convincing, actual dinosaur. As I mentioned above, the practical effects with the burgeoning CGI came together in a way that feels way ahead-of-its time – dare I say, watching them push those early-90s boundaries reminds me of what it must have been like for the newly-formed Industrial Light & Magic in the mid-1970s while making Star Wars.
Another truly positive aspect was the cast and their performances. Bob Hoskins was an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe winning actor. Dennis Hopper remains one of the most accomplished American actors in history. John Leguizamo was only getting started at the time, but his career and talents have continued to grow exponentially over the years. Samantha Mathis, while perhaps not having as many accolades to her name, still has an impressive résumé. Hell, even Toad, who was played by rockabilly weirdo Mojo Nixon – mainly because Tom Waits was too expensive – was basically just portrayed as Mojo Nixon calling himself Toad, which oddly works somehow. Fisher Stevens? Well…okay, not everyone was great. Stevens’ performance in this movie was still pretty cringeworthy. But hey, at least he wasn’t in brownface this time!
Hoskins and Leguizamo both have spoken out over the years about this film and its failures. Leguizamo even went on record in his autobiography admitting that the two of them got drunk for a lot of the performances which made it to the final cut. It was the only way they could stand being there through the filming process. Were they winning any awards for those performances? Not a chance – but I’m still impressed they were able to at least convince me they were sober there.
Dennis Hopper was no stranger to being a total ham on camera throughout his career, especially when playing the villain. But he really went for it as Koopa. He was maniacal and devious and awful and fun all at once. And how on earth did he know when filming in 1992 to model his President Koopa performance after President Trump? Those stuffy business suits, those angry outbursts, those insincere-looking campaign posters, that hair!
All things considered; Super Mario Bros. brought more to the table than I originally gave it credit for. Though if you’re expecting me to make an argument that this is a good movie, that’s not going to happen. It’s still objectively terrible. There’s no hidden subtext or artistic angle to justify what audiences were given. It’s a mostly garbage movie that was crushed under the weight of its own expectations. Nintendo handed over total creative control to outsiders because they believed the IP alone was enough to generate a gratifying movie, or even a just profitable one. It accomplished neither. But I can say now that it at least has moments in which it shines – sometimes it shines especially bright, just never for very long.