Super Mario Bros. (1993)

The Super Mario series was at the height of its success and it seemed like the sky was the limit for the franchise to the point where people would be confident enough to put 42 million USD into creating a live action movie based on the series in the form of Super Mario Bros the movie.

The film put this fairly impressive budget to good use and went all in on the use of cutting edge animatronics and special effects. The movie’s tagline is “This ain’t no game”. The run time of the movie is 1hr 44 minutes.

Ever seen the trailer from the Mario Bros Movie? Personally, even though I saw this movie when it came out, I didn’t see the trailer til 2014… here it is for your viewing err.. pleasure.

Super Mario Bros. (1993): official trailer

The start of the film is animated briefly showing us that a meteorite struck earth 65 million years ago which ended dinosaur life making them extinct. We are then in Brooklyn 20 years ago where a frightened mysterious woman in a red cloak is running through the street where she places something on a doorstep and frantically runs away. A nun opens the door and picks up the mysterious item and takes it inside to the other nuns who all look concerned and apprehensive about what they are about to uncover… a large egg hatches and the gentle sound of a baby crying is all that is heard.

Brooklyn now… two guys in an apartment named Mario and Luigi who are not only business partners in plumbing but also brothers. They have an emergency call out job but unfortunately the van breaks down on the way. Luigi sees a very pretty lady who he can’t take his eyes off, not only because of her beauty but also because of the distress across her face. He helps her out by lending her a quarter for the phone and after the call she desperately needed to make she thanks him. He compliments her unusual name… Daisy.

Daisy is a palaeontologist who is digging on a site in town to uncover fossils of extinct dinosaurs. The reason she is distressed is because her job is being made very difficult for her by Anthony Scapelli who is a hot shot business man in town who is waiting to build on the land Daisy is digging on with her team of uni students. Unknown to Daisy she is also being followed by two men called Iggy and Spike who have been instructed to kidnap her. Luckily for Daisy, Mario and Luigi offer her a lift back to the site. Luigi is a shy cute character and somehow manages to pluck up the courage to awkwardly ask Daisy out on a date (with tips from his big bro Mario). Much to Luigi’s amazement Daisy accepts the dinner date.

The dinner date goes well for Luigi as he has the company of his brother Mario and his girlfriend Daniella as support. He awkwardly makes small talk with Daisy and compliments her on her unusual necklace. After the date Luigi offers to walk Daisy home and they stop at the site so Daisy can show Luigi her work. As they are walking down the creepy underground tunnel there is a huge gush of water and two men run away who have obviously tampered with the pipes to try and destroy Daisy’s work. Mario and Luigi to the rescue! As the best plumbers in town they just about manage to stop the water when there is a huge thud as two men hit both Mario and Luigi over the head leaving them unconscious. A frightened Daisy is then dragged away by the two men… The same two men who were following her earlier called Iggy and Spike. Mario and Luigi regain consciousness and try to find Daisy by following the sound of her voice. When they find her they are surprised to see the same beautiful face but distorted in a whirlwind wall. They reach out for her trying to drag her back but she’s too far to reach… all they end up pulling back is her necklace. Daisy then disappears into the wall still screaming. Luigi instantly jumps through encouraging his brother Mario to follow. As they both fall through the wall and land hard onto the sidewalk they look around in disbelief.

Mario and Luigi are in what appears to be Manhattan however not in the civilised world they are used to. It’s a jungle of noise, violence and destruction. The world they have landed in is a parallel dimension which was split into two 65 million years ago when the meteorite struck. Over all the madness surrounding them Daisy’s scream is heard as the two men drag her into a car. Unknown to Mario and Luigi the necklace they accidentally pulled from Daisy’s neck is the reason for her kidnap. As Mario and Luigi are looking at the necklace a frightening woman named Big Bertha steals the necklace from Mario and Luigi… none of them knowing the importance of the necklace.

When Daisy is imprisoned by Iggy and Spike under the orders of King Koopa it then becomes obvious that Daisy does not have the necklace which leads to Mario and Luigi being captured! The importance of Daisy’s necklace is because it is a piece of the meteorite from over 65 million years ago. When connected back with meteorite it would combine the parallel world with the real world which can only lead to the madness and destruction their world currently lives in.

Mario and Luigi aren’t in Koopa’s prison long as they launch their escape with all the other prisoners cheering them on. Unknown to Mario, one of the other prisoners is his girlfriend Daniella who was secretly kidnapped from her home not long after the double date. Signs are put up all around the mad Manhattan for Mario and Luigi’s capture branding them as “aliens”.

The Great Koopa then demands for Princess Daisy as he refers to her, to be brought immediately to him and well presented as a princess should be, much to Lena’s jealousy. Lena works for Koopa but also appears to be his girlfriend/mistress. He then makes skin crawling remarks to her asking her if she has ever been kissed by a lizard?! He also insinuates that Daisy’s father is still with them but not as she would remember. Daisy is an actual princess as her father was once the ruler of the parallel dimension. Daisy is then tied back up alongside with the family pet called Yoshi, who is a small friendly dinosaur.

When Koopa hears of Mario and Luigi’s escape he lashes out at Iggy and Spike blaming it on their stupidity and lack of intelligence. Koopa has a unique machine which could either de evolve a human (shrinking the brain to make stupid) or evolving a human (enlarging brain to make intelligent). Therefore it makes perfect sense to evolve Iggy and Spike’s brains to help capture Mario and Luigi, much to their protest. They are both evolved however it helps them no more as when they try to again capture Mario and Luigi they end up getting tied up themselves by the brothers!

Mario and Luigi realise the importance of the necklace therefore must retrieve it back from Big Bertha and head to a local night club in the hope to find her. Mario and Luigi are in luck as they see Big Bertha in the club and Mario approaches her, unfortunately for Mario Big Bertha is as frightening as she first appeared as she punches him in the face for no apparent reason. That doesn’t put Mario off at all as he follows her to the dance floor and compliments her punching skills! Bertha aggressively orders Mario to dance with her which Mario accepts as Bertha is wearing the necklace! After failing a couple of times Mario finally secretly steals the necklace, spins Bertha around and disappears. Mario and Luigi’s luck is running out as Koopa’s guards and Lena arrive in the club. They try to use rugby tactics and toss the necklace back and forth between themselves but unfortunately the necklace falls down a vent.. however is just about hanging on as it dangles downwards, which Lena is the only one to notice as she grins mischievously.

Back in the prison Princess Daisy and Yoshi are still tied up when one of the de evolved guards enter with some food for her and Yoshi. Lena soon enters and orders the friendly giant away and grabs Daisy with a knife to her neck in a jealous rage. Yoshi to the rescue as he extends his tongue around Lena’s ankles making her fall down giving Daisy the opportunity to escape. Poor Yoshi is then stabbed in his side by Lena!

Mario and Luigi are back in Koopa’s Kingdom to try and rescue Daisy and Daniella. In Daisy’s escape she finds a fungus which is spread around the entire kingdom. Daisy’s father who once ruled this parallel dimension is now a fungus as King Koopa de evolved him too much so he could take over! His spread of fungus however has been helpful to Mario and Luigi by giving them signs like mushrooms and stopped them from falling down a huge hole by bouncing them back upwards.

Mario and Luigi find the prison where Daniella is being kept captive along with many other women from Brooklyn. It is a cold dreary room and all the women are freezing as the large pipe is frosted over. This gives Mario a great idea… they place the mattress at the top of the icy pipe and all sit on it ready for the best rollercoaster ever! They are chased by Koopa’s de evolved guards and eventually they all come out the other end of the pipe screaming into the mad Manhattan at astonished onlookers. Surprisingly the guards don’t attack, instead they dance to the sound of the music being heard through the street. Earlier in the story Luigi had secretly made them all dance when music was playing, therefore as they are de evolved and have the tiniest brains ever they now think they must dance when music is played!

Mario tricks Koopa by making him think that he has the necklace. Unknown to all Lena has the necklace! Luigi and Daisy hurry and find her at the meteorite about to connect the missing piece… the necklace. They are too late Lena has already connected the missing piece of the meteorite. The parallel dimension begins to combine with the real world and all are transported to the real Brooklyn. Koopa blasts his de-evolver gun at Mario but misses and gets Scapelli! Much to everyone’s amusement as Scapelli is not a popular man and has now been de evolved into a monkey!

Luigi and Daisy are still at the meteorite where Luigi is using his tools to dig to try and retrieve the necklace… he succeeds! The parallel dimension is again formed. Much to Koopa’s anger he blasts the de evolver gun at Mario and Luigi but they reflect the blast back at King Koopa who is then de evolved into a dinosaur! Koopa and his family were descended from dinosaurs therefore when de evolved this is what they become. When us mere humans are de evolved like Scapelli was we would become a monkey.

Koopa is now scarier than ever as a huge roaring tyrannosaurus rex! The Mario brothers grab the de evolver gun and blast it at Koopa and de evolve him that much he’s destroyed into green gooey slime! Everyone cheers as Mario and Luigi fly away (with flying boots given by Big Bertha). Luigi and Daisy are reunited and finally kiss! Happy ending… nearly as Daisy breaks Luigi’s heart by telling him she must stay in the parallel dimension until she’s decided where she needs to be. Her father is no longer a fungus and she is after all Princess Daisy here.

Mario and Luigi return to the real world without Princess Daisy. It’s a normal day for Mario and Luigi as they are in their apartment, it’s been 3 weeks since Luigi had to leave Daisy and he is still sulking… until she bursts in the apartment with some exciting news asking for their help? The End.

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo star as Mario and Luigi, two Brooklyn plumbers who are given the family name Mario, so the hero is literally Mario Mario. When their friend Daisy (Samantha Mathis) is snatched away into a parallel world, they follow her into Dinohattan, a sprawling, fungus-covered city descended from the dinosaurs. Dennis Hopper plays its ruler, President Koopa, who needs the meteorite fragment Daisy wears around her neck to merge the two dimensions.

Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson play Koopa’s dim-witted cousins Iggy and Spike, Fiona Shaw is his scheming companion Lena, and rock musician Mojo Nixon plays Toad as a protest singer, because the producers wanted a real performer in the part. Lance Henriksen appears as the deposed King, and Frank Welker supplies the noises of both Yoshi and the Goombas.

The casting could have looked very different. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Mario with Danny DeVito as Luigi, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton both turned down Koopa, and Hoskins only agreed after Roland Joffé kept sending him revised scripts.

Producer Jake Eberts secured the film rights, and Roland Joffé pitched a live-action Mario to Nintendo of America and to Hiroshi Yamauchi in Kyoto. Under a $2 million agreement, Joffé’s company Lightmotive was given temporary control of the character, while Nintendo kept the merchandising rights and largely let the filmmakers get on with it. Early drafts ranged from Barry Morrow’s road movie, so close to Rain Man that it was nicknamed “Drain Man”, to a fairy-tale script in the mould of The Wizard of Oz.

After Greg Beeman was dropped and Harold Ramis turned it down, the job went to Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, a directing duo with roots in animation and comics who wanted a darker tone inspired by Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The script went through several more hands, including Parker Bennett and Terry Runté, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and a late family-friendly rewrite by Ed Solomon and Ryan Rowe, which was commissioned without the directors or cast being told.

Principal photography ran from 6 May to 27 July 1992 in Wilmington, North Carolina, where production designer David L. Snyder built Dinohattan inside the derelict Ideal Cement plant. Patrick Tatopoulos designed deliberately cartoonish dinosaurs, and the Yoshi puppet alone cost $500,000. The shoot was chaotic. Disney came on board weeks before cameras rolled and asked for more rewrites, Morton said he was later locked out of the edit, and Hoskins later admitted that he and Leguizamo drank between takes. Hoskins also broke a finger when Leguizamo braked a van too hard and its door slammed on his hand.

Behind the scenes

Check out this article from Nintendo Power Magazine Vol. 48 which went behind the scenes with the stars and also took a look at the use of the animatronics which were used for Yoshi!

Hollywood Pictures released Super Mario Bros. in the United States on 28 May 1993. It opened in fourth place with about $8.5 million and finished with roughly $20.9 million in the US and Canada. Another $18 million overseas brought the worldwide total to about $38.9 million, well short of a budget reported at $42–48 million.

The film reached Japan on 3 July 1993 as Super Mario: Makai Teikoku no Megami and earned ¥300 million in distribution rentals there. In Britain, Entertainment Film Distributors opened it on 9 July 1993 and it took £2.82 million.

The marketing push was huge for its time. Capitol Records released the soundtrack on 10 May 1993, led by Roxette’s single “Almost Unreal” alongside tracks such as George Clinton and The Goombas’ “Walk the Dinosaur”. Todd Strasser wrote a novelisation, a Japanese manga carried the same title as the Japanese release, and ERTL made figures of Mario, Luigi, Koopa, Iggy, Spike and a Goomba, while other merchandise ranged from trading cards to a toy Devolution Gun.

Reviews were mostly poor. The film holds 27% on Rotten Tomatoes from 44 reviews and 35 out of 100 on Metacritic, although cinema audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a more forgiving B+. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs down and put it on their list of the worst films of 1993.

Some critics were kinder. The Los Angeles Times admired the effects and production design but not the writing, Janet Maslin praised Hoskins and the visuals while feeling the spirit of the game had gone missing, and Hal Hinson in The Washington Post had a genuinely good time. The film was also shortlisted for Best Visual Effects at the 66th Academy Awards.

The people who made it were harsher. Hoskins repeatedly called it the worst job of his career, though Leguizamo later said he was proud of it looking back, and Hopper complained that a five-week booking turned into 17 weeks. At Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto reflected that the film had tried to stick too closely to the games, and Reggie Fils-Aimé said in 2017 that it had left a bad taste with the company’s developers.

How the critics scored it (July 2014)

Here are some of the scores it received, correct as of 19/07/2014:-

• Rotten Tomatoes scored it 16% across 32 reviews with 27 stating it truly rotten!
• IMDb scores the movie at 4/10 after 31,895 votes.
• EMPIRE scores the film 2 stars out of 5 – “Poor” on their rating scale
• Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Tribune & Sun-Times newspapers rated the film with two thumbs firmly pointing down in 1993 and on their television program Siskel & Ebert at the movies added the Super Mario Bros movie to the worst films of 1993 list.

There were a few positive reviews too, just not so many.

• Washington Post reviewer Hal Hinson said he admired the movie’s spirit and said “In short, it’s a blast”
• Another positive review was from Janet Maslin of the New York Times who said “the film doesn’t have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes – ahem – its inspiration.”

In the parallel dimension in which Koopa has turned Daisy’s father into fungus and taken over rule there is both a shop called Thwomp’s (after the classic Super Mario Bros enemy featured in Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart etc) and also a bar called Bullet Bills another enemy which has also been seen more than a few times from the game series.

Another reference to the games would be that the fungus kept giving Mario & Luigi Bob-ombs, which are also classic enemies from the games.

More nods to the games

For all its dystopian grime, the film is full of names and ideas taken from the games. The brothers run Mario Brothers Plumbing, the heroine is Princess Daisy, who debuted in Super Mario Land in 1989, rather than Peach, and Koopa is a reptilian dictator descended from the dinosaurs. The dinosaur theme owes much to Dinosaur Land in Super Mario World, which had arrived in North America less than two years earlier.

Look out for the Goombas, reimagined as lumbering soldiers devolved from humans; a Bob-omb that waddles along on its own wind-up key; the spring-loaded Thwomp Stomper boots; Snifits working as rubbish-truck crew; Toad as a street singer; and Yoshi as a small, chained, raptor-like dinosaur. Even the fungus that smothers Dinohattan is a nod to the Mushroom Kingdom, and Luigi’s video game experience comes in handy on a police computer.

Nintendo did not license another Mario film for 30 years. The next was Illumination’s animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, released on 5 April 2023, which grossed about $1.36 billion. Mario’s real cinema debut, however, came seven years before Hoskins, with the 1986 anime Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!.

Here is the track list for the Super Mario Bros. movie soundtrack, which was released in 1993 by Capitol Records.

1. “Almost Unreal” – Roxette
2. “Love Is the Drug” – Divinyls (cover of a song by Roxy Music)
3. “Walk the Dinosaur” – The Goombas (cover of a song by Was (Not Was))
4. “I Would Stop the World” – Charles & Eddie
5. “I Want You” – Marky Mark
6. “Where Are You Going?” – Extreme
7. “Speed of Light” – Joe Satriani
8. “Breakpoint” – Megadeth
9. “Tie Your Mother Down” – Queen
10. “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” – Us3
11. “Don’t Slip Away” – Tracie Spencer
12. “2 Cinnamon Street” – Roxette

A collection of screenshots from the Mario Movie including a rather endearing looking Goomba (endearing compared to most super villains usual henchmen at least), a shot of Daisy before she got kidnapped, various shots of Mario and Luigi together and of course a couple featuring Koopa taking aim at them.

In May 2019 a VHS tape labelled as a cut-footage version turned up in an eBay sale linked to Roland Joffé’s estate. It held an early workprint containing around 20 minutes of material missing from the theatrical cut. The tape was acquired and digitised, and Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive, run by Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, brought in editor Garrett Gilchrist to restore the badly worn footage frame by frame.

The result, an extended edition called The Morton Jankel Cut after the original directors, appeared free on the Internet Archive on 1 June 2021. It runs about 125 minutes against the theatrical 104 and restores a rivalry with the Scapelli plumbing firm, Koopa disposing of an underling in slime, and Iggy and Spike’s rap. The Archive stresses that it is a proof of concept rather than the directors’ finished vision, since Morton and Jankel never completed their own edit.

Official restorations followed. Umbrella Entertainment’s October 2021 Blu-ray in Australia added the raw workprint as an extra. In Japan, a new 4K restoration was screened in cinemas from 15 September 2023 for the film’s 30th anniversary, and in early 2024 Umbrella released its 30th anniversary 4K UHD sets, restored from the original camera negative. The Trust the Fungus Collector’s Edition includes the upscaled “Lasagna Workprint”, deleted scenes, the 2014 documentary This Ain’t No Video Game and a commentary by Hoss and Applebaum.

• Guinness World Records lists Super Mario Bros. as the first live-action film based on a video game.
• The Yoshi animatronic needed 70 cables and nine puppeteers to operate, and cost $500,000.
• Dinohattan was built inside a disused cement works in Wilmington, North Carolina, while Jurassic Park was in production at the same time.
• Leguizamo accidentally broke Hoskins’s finger by braking too hard while Hoskins was holding on to a van; the crew painted his cast pink to hide it on camera.
• Dennis Hopper said he signed on for five weeks of filming and ended up staying for 17.
• Mojo Nixon was cast as Toad because the producers wanted a real musician in the role.
• Todd Strasser’s novelisation, published on 1 May 1993, still calls the villain King Bowser, a hangover from an earlier draft.
• Barry Morrow’s first screenplay was so similar to his Rain Man that it was jokingly nicknamed “Drain Man”.
• The original ending, with the brothers back in Brooklyn, was filmed but cut.
• The film was shortlisted, though not nominated, for Best Visual Effects at the 66th Academy Awards.
• In 2013 Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive launched a webcomic sequel, Super Mario Bros. 2, with input from screenwriter Parker Bennett.
• Seth Rogen, the voice of Donkey Kong in the 2023 film, has called the 1993 film one of the worst ever made.

Few films have been reappraised as much as this one. Jankel has said it gradually gained cult status, Mathis says it is the film she gets asked about most, and Hoskins’s son Jack became a fan of both the games and his father’s performance. Its catchphrase, “Trust the fungus”, has even been likened to Star Wars’ “May the Force be with you”.

Much of that revival comes from Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive, the fan site founded by Ryan Hoss and joined by editor-in-chief Steven Applebaum in 2010. The Archive has gathered props, scripts and interviews with the crew, partnered with Second Sight on its 2014 UK Blu-ray, hosted a 25th anniversary reunion screening in Raleigh in 2018, and in 2023 was involved in an exhibit at the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. Fan screenings also brought the film back to cinemas in 2012 and 2013.

On home video, a US LaserDisc arrived on 8 December 1993 and a rental VHS followed in January 1994. The US DVD came out on 3 June 2003 and was reissued in 2010. Second Sight’s UK DVD and Blu-ray (3 November 2014) brought a 2K transfer and the This Ain’t No Video Game documentary, followed by a Zavvi-exclusive SteelBook on 13 February 2017 and a Japanese Blu-ray on 22 December 2017. For the extended cut and 4K editions, see above.

• Wikipedia (cited statements): Super Mario Bros. (film): box office, reception, production dates
• Mario Wiki: Super Mario Bros. (film): release dates, cast, restorations