Weirdhouse Cinema: Super Mario Bros. (1993)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the infamous 1993 dystopian cyberpunk adaptation of the beloved Nintendo game about magical Italian plumbers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
yes it's true. Today we're going to be talking about
the Super Mario Brothers movie. No, no, no, Not the
one currently in theaters as we record this, with Jack
Black as the voice of Bowser, the one currently on
four dollars DVDs, with Dennis Hopper as not only the voice,

(00:36):
but the body and the soul of Bowser. Though when
I first thought about this, I was calling him Bowser.
Is this before the character was called Bowser in the
Mario verse. In this movie, he's just Koopa. How did
that change happen?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think Lance Hendrickson is King Bowser in this. Oh,
I believe that's how he's credited. Which I don't know
why they made this choice, because I feel like he's
more of a Dentis Hopper is totally playing some version
of Bowser in this. Maybe they just thought like Koopa
sounded better.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
I don't know anyway. Yes, we are, of course talking
about the live action Super Mario Brothers movie from nineteen
ninety three, and I'm pretty sure. This one was a
parent's night out movie for me. So I was a kid.
I think I had a babysitter, had a kid cuisine,
frozen meal for dinner, maybe some oatmeal cookies afterwards, fresh

(01:31):
rental from the video store. And what was that rental?
It was a VHS tape of Super Mario Brothers.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah. I don't think I ever saw this as a kid.
I didn't see it until I was an adult. But
I remember seeing the promotional materials for it, perhaps a trailer,
you know, maybe an article or at least a screen
shot in Time magazine or something, and I remember thinking, well,
this is a bold choice for adapting the Mario Brothers

(01:58):
video game. But I also so was too young to
question it. I was like, yes, this is the way,
this is what we're doing. This is the cinematic Mario Brothers.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
When you're a kid, this has come up many times
on the show before. When you're a kid, you don't
really have that sense of this is not a way
that movies are supposed to be. If a movie exists,
it's like, yeah, that's what movies are like that that's legitimate.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
I mean, that's the way I was My son is
not this way. Like, he's a Pokemon fan and I've
watched some Pokemon with him. Some of it is some
weird stuff, but we watched Pokemon Detective Peak of two
together and we had a great time watching it. I
thought it was as I've mentioned on the show before,
I thought it was substantially good, especially considering it is

(02:42):
also essentially a video game adaptation. But he refuses to
acknowledge it. Now. He's like, no, the Pokemons don't look right.
They look and he has all these critiques about it,
and I'm just kind of like, you're a little young
to understand this, but you know you're going to have
to find that middle ground with other people and realize
that Pokemon Detective Pikachu is like the bridge that will
bring other people in, that will allow you to connect

(03:05):
with other people outside of like the Pokemon fandom.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Well, I haven't seen that one. But we'll have to
compare our experiences in a minute, because I think we
cannot cover the Super Mario Brothers movie without talking a
little bit more generally about the concept of video game
to movie adaptations. But I want to hold off on
that for a second because the first thing I have
to say is Now that I have gone back and
reviewed the evidence, I can say without a doubt, in

(03:30):
my opinion, this is one of the weirdest movies we
have covered on the show, and one of the weirdest
movies I have ever seen. I am truly at a
loss for words to express how bizarre Super Mario Brothers is,
both qualitatively and quantitatively. There is a dank manic luminosity

(03:54):
to the proceedings. It is a dream dreamed by a
slime mold who is also a corporate lawyer. It is
a warm garbage bag leaking black liquid onto your bed,
But the garbage bag and the liquid are made of
lawnmower man's style CGI, and the garbage bag is also poocy.

(04:16):
I don't know where you fall in this. Obviously, there
are different ways that movies can be weird, but I
I struggle to think of a movie we've covered on
our show about weird movies that is as weird as
this one.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah. I mean, they're all weird in different ways, and
it can be hard to to to compare them. The
way I kept thinking about this film is to think
of it in terms of evolution and misnomers about evolution,
as will discuss come up just throughout the film, so
that that'll be something we'll discuss in a bit. But
you know, it's it's easy to think about bad films,

(04:52):
weird films, miscalibrated films as being the result of a
whole bunch of bad decisions, but it's not not really
necessarily the case, like in this movie is the result
of a number of bad decisions, but also a lot
of solid or even great decisions. But in the same
way that evolution is a linear progression, but not one

(05:13):
of just like constant quote unquote improvement Necessarily, it's not
like an ascension towards heaven. The evolution of a film
from you know, conception and pre production to final form
to the version that goes into theaters or on vhs
and DVDs, it doesn't mean that what you're going to

(05:33):
get at the end is going to be great. Like
in this case, you can almost think of it as
sort of like terminal evolution. Evolution can produce a morphological form,
a way of life that is very niche, but is
also ultimately doomed to extinction because of how niche it is.
And that's kind of what we have here, a movie
that was created to fill a particular niche, and one

(05:57):
that may not actually exist, and as it turned out,
was also doomed.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
The creative elements in this movie do not feel like
they were selected through the process of a single cohesive
vision of what the movie should be. Instead, it kind
of feels like a catemorary domice of creative elements. So
it's just rolling up chairs and doughnuts and nails and

(06:21):
people and they're all in this ball together in the end.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, it's not even like sometimes with films, there's this
feeling of like a push and pull, like this side
wanted a comedy, this side wanted a horror movie, and
you have something, you know, mismanaged in between, or you
have just multiple genres kind of hit in a film.
We've talked about that a bit, but yeah, this one,
I guess the best way I can think about it
is you take the source material here, the Super Mario

(06:49):
Brothers video games that existed up until this point, and
to adapt them into a live action film, you're gonna
have to make some bold choices, and they definitely made
some bold choices. It just ultimately didn't take on a
form that most of us can can really connect.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
With Okay, well, this sounds like the bridge to talking
about the general concept of video game to movie adaptation,
something that actually happens a lot now, but this was
once a completely new thing. Of course, people have long
been adapting text based literature into movies. So plays, short stories, novels,

(07:27):
those all become movies, you know. Those kinds of adaptations
have been made for more than a century. And while
there are always interesting choices and changes that take place
when adapting a story from one medium to another, I
think it's safe to say that adapting a novel, or
especially adapting a play to the screen, is often a

(07:49):
fairly natural transition. And it can depend on the novel itself,
but presumably there's a narrative of some sort and that
can be embodied by actors and set designers and so
and captured on film. Now, especially for more recent video games,
the transition is also fairly natural, and I think that's
because over time a lot of big budget video games

(08:12):
have become more cinematic in style and structure. Like big
video games now often have stories and characters in plot
structure almost exactly like a movie, except you play as
one of the characters instead of just watching, but Super
Mario Brothers in the early nineties was a totally different
type of media. This is a video game where you

(08:33):
play as a little cluster of pixels, a little man
in overalls with a mustache and a hat, and you
run from left to right and you jump on fanged
mushroom monsters and malicious turtles, and you go down sewer
pipes into castles. The actual story is very thin, So
I'm really just riveted actually by the idea of what

(08:55):
it must have felt like when this was a new
thing to do. Nobody had ever really adapted a videodo
game to a movie, a feature length movie before, So, like,
how do you do it? How do you turn that
little man running across the screen and jumping on things
into a ninety minute story? If I try to go
back in a time machine, imagine it's the early nineties

(09:16):
and I've been given this as a writing project, I
really do not know what I would have thought about it,
Like where to start? What do you do?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, this is interesting. I like how you point
out just like the the initial novelty of this. And
I was reading actually Michael Weldon's writings on this, published
in nineteen ninety six, So three years after this came out,
this film came out in the Psychotronic Video Guide, and
he points out a lot about the film that we'll
be pointing out. You know, I think we have shared

(09:44):
the same general opinion, but he includes the line it
didn't stop more movies based on video games, which to
us with our modern perspective like it, I mean, we
can't imagine them having stopped, you know, but yeah, that
kind of I think for me sums up that at
the time, like this was this was a novel idea,
and they were adapting things that didn't scream for adaptation

(10:07):
because you look at something like Silent Hill. Silent Hill
has you know, their gameplay innovations there and a lot
of technical advancements, but you have things like pyramid Head,
you know, things with a definite design quality to them,
a definite setting, and even with Silent Hill, you sort
of have a story there, right, But but you know,

(10:29):
things you can latch onto and be like, yes, let's
make a pyramid Head movie. But with Mario, the true
innovations are all deeply technical, They're all deeply embedded in
game design. Like that's where Super Mario was so innovative,
and the reason it was so successful is it was
doing things that had not been done before.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, you notice a lot of modern video games have
a difficulty setting called story mode for people who are
not very interested in gameplay mechanics. They just want to
experience it as a story like a movie. That type
of mode would make no sense whatsoever for the original
Mario games. There isn't a story like. The story is
the gameplay. It's just the gameplay.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Oh man, I wish we had. We would have had
story mode back in the day. I remember I had
Castlevania for any s I didn't have Mario. Castlevania was
always too hard for me. I never made it very
far through that game. I would have loved to have
had a story mode for that, even though there's you know,
basically no story or narrative to Castlevania. Either.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
To be fair, I maybe getting terminology mixed up story
mode I think maybe also just sometimes means like not
multiplayer early. But you know what I'm talking about, that
difficulty setting. It's like the easy mode where you are
just there. You just want to experience the narrative. You
don't want to have to fight for it.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, I don't want to get frustrated with it. I
just want to ride this out.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
Okay, there's a second thing that I'd say, at least
from my perspective, I have to make clear at the
very beginning in order for you to understand what the
experience of watching Super Mario Brothers is like, and it's
that in a pure visual sense, this is, with doubt
one of the ugliest movies we have covered on a
Weird House and one of the ugliest movies I have

(12:06):
ever seen. And I don't even think that is an
oversight by the filmmakers, Like I don't think that's unintentional.
From what I've read, they were trying to create something
that was hideous to look at. It was part of
an intended esthetic that one of the producers. I was
reading an article by Karina Longworth from many years ago,

(12:27):
sort of a retrospective about the making of this film,
and she said that the producers were calling it an
aesthetic of new brutalism. I don't know what that means.
That was their term, and they said it was, you know,
it was set to be inspired by kind of perverse
urban settings and industrialism.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Ah. Now that's interesting because as we'll discuss in a bit.
I don't really love the music in this film. I
feel like the music is outside of one piece from
the soundtrack, very forgettable to bad. But imagine if it
had had a heavy industrial soundtrack, because clearly, yeah, that's
what the aesthetics are asking for it ultimately, not like

(13:10):
a traditional score, not even like some cool funk, but
just some straight up like nurse with wound or something
playing with like a sound of cacophony, get some einsters
into a new bottin in there or something.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
The Mario theme as done by Ministry.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Ye, Ministry would have been a great a great pick
for the way this film looks.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Can you imagine the Swans take on Mario? Yeah? I
would listen to that in a heartbeat.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, And I think that this is this is a
great point to make. Yeah, this idea that there are
aspects of the film that are pushing in a more
you know, creative and inventive direction. But at the other hand,
this was like what a fifty million dollar picture aimed
at a mainstream audience and presumably for children. Those are
certain things, Yeah, there are certain things that had to
be in check, like like you know, you probably can't

(14:01):
go to graphic on melting a dude in this movie,
and it's gonna end up having a traditional score, no
matter how gnarly the visuals are so. Historically speaking, no
one liked this movie. No one seems to have liked
working on it. Neither critics nor audiences found much to
love about it. It was a box office bomb. However,

(14:25):
it does seem like maybe the cheese has aged into
something more desirable, at least for some segments of the population,
or at least some individuals. I was reading that Quentin
Tarantino defended the film recently on his I believe he's
on a podcast and in hosted an enthusiastic showing on
it now. Tarantino certainly has a love of weird films,

(14:45):
although he sometimes makes some really you know, head scratching
picks for favorites. I seem to recall he loved twenty
thirteen's Lone Ranger, for example.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
That's a I don't know but yeah, but okay, I Well,
we two also have enthusiasm for out of the way picks,
kind of strange movies that nobody else would really think
were even worth revisiting. They can't and you know, what.
I can't say that I loved or even necessarily liked
Super Mario Brothers, but I'm really glad we decided to

(15:16):
cover it for the show because I think this movie
is maybe not pleasant, but it is fascinating. I think
you could write a book length work about this film,
about how it was made and what it means, and
I would read that book.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's important to know, especially with
critics like Michael Weldon and even you know, some other
contemporary reviews. Is like when this was new, when this
was the latest release, like it didn't have this historic place,
you know. So I think even the critics who really
gave it a lashing, you know, they would they probably

(15:52):
would consider a similar picture in a different light if
it were from thirty years ago to their writing. So, yeah,
it is. It's a weird film. It's it's an ugly film,
but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in
it now.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Since it was, of course ostensibly a film mostly for children,
it had toy tie ins, and you included a photo
of those action figures here in the outline. Just wretched,
wretched toys.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, they remind me. They're almost as repulsive as the
Dick Tracy toys that I definitely own several of They
look like they have similar bodies, you know.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Okay, so two of the toys are Mario and Luigi.
I get that. One toy is Dennis Hopper as King Koopa.
One is one of the movies goombas, which are getting
nasty looking. But then two of the six pictured here
are just They're just the guys from Night at the Roxbury.
They're like Fisher Stevens and the other dude from the

(16:53):
movie were in suits to go out to the club.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, like the least marketable in terms of children characters film. Meanwhile,
the goomba looks really good, Like the goomba toy actually
does look better than the goomba's in the movie. Agree,
all right, So Joe, what's the what's the elevator pitch
on this one?

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Well, it's a hymn A Mario No I do? Okay,
So it's uh, Mario and Luigi are. They're struggling plumbers
in Brooklyn. They meet Daisy, a paleontologist who happened to
have hatched from an egg. Together, the three of them
are sucked into an alternate dimension where people evolved from

(17:32):
dinosaurs and everything is gross, and an evil Dennis Hopper
wants to make our world gross like his. Can the
humans stop him?

Speaker 2 (17:41):
All right? Let's listen to that trailer audio.

Speaker 4 (17:49):
They're brothers, They're plumbers. They're on the trail of a
kidnapped princess and a mystical meteorite.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
That gives any one who possesses EXI.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
The power to rule the universe.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Get me the rocks.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
They must rescue the princess physic escaping and make.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
It safely back later, alligators.

Speaker 4 (18:29):
To our world before time runs out. Get him Super

(18:53):
Mario Brothers.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
This ain't no game all right. Now. If you're wondering
where can I watch nineteen ninety three Super Mario Brothers,
Well it's pretty much only available as physical media, so
go out and get it now on bare bones Blu ray, DVD,
LaserDisc or VHS.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
We watched it on a DVD that might as well
have been a VHS.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Oh yeah, this is I mean, I'm glad you were
on it and you ordered up a couple of these
three dollars DVDs for us. But man, this is one
of the most bare bones DVD releases of a major
motion picture I've ever seen the menu for it, Like
the onscreen menu looks like one of those template default
menus on a burn your own DVD program from like

(19:40):
fifteen years ago.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
It might literally have been something like that. And when
the menu pops up, it plays the Super Mario theme
like from the game. But I swear they modulated it somehow,
so it sounds sad. It literally sounds like the depressed
version of the Mario music. Dun dund dun dundun.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, like a busted holiday card or something.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
I don't know if the Blu ray received any more love.
I tend to doubt it. I mean, I don't think
any release for this film re release has given it
any amount of love. It's been just sort of cast
out there, like we don't want Pirates to provide the
people who are interested with this film. So okay, we'll
put it out all right. Shall we get into the

(20:35):
connections on this one? The people of note because there
are a number of fascinating folks and very talented folks
involved in the creation of this monstrosity. So first of all,
the director's chairs. We have a pair of directors. I
believe they were husband and wife at the time. Annabel
Jenkle and Rocky Morton both born in nineteen fifty five,

(20:57):
so yeah, these two were a couple. They found it
Q Cumber Studios in the late nineteen seventies and they
specialized in music videos, TV commercials, title sequences, stuff like that.
They worked with a number of notable clients and musical talents,
but what really put them on the map was Max Headroom.
Max Headroom debuted in a fifty seven minute TV film,

(21:18):
Max Headroom Twenty Minutes Into the Future in nineteen eighty five.
He was played, of course, by the talented Matt Freuher
in a cyberpunk origin story for this character that I
think a lot of us associate with later becoming a
spokesman for Coke.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
But I thought the whole point of Max Headroom is
that he is an evil, soulless, computer generated representative of
an oppressive corporate conglomerate that wants to rule the world
with an iron fist.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Well, I don't know. I think you might know more
about Max Headroom than I do. I haven't seen any
of these Max Headroom properties aside from like the Coke spots,
so all I know is that he's digital and kind
of plastic.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah. I've never actually seen this TV film or anything,
but like I've seen clips and I've read about it.
That's what I thought it was. It seems to me
like if like Dick Jones from RoboCop became the spokesperson
for coke.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah. I don't know, So maybe we have some Max
Headroom fans out there. You can set the record straight
on this, but Max was a hit. He almost immediately
got his own Channel four music video presentation show that
got aired on Cinemax in the US the Coke deal. Obviously.
Max even had his own TV show on ABC in
nineteen eighty seven, and we continue to have various cameos

(22:35):
over the years and it remains something of I guess
like an eighties odd ball cultural icon. All right, But anyway,
back to Jenkle and Morton here. Following Max Headroom, they
did a nineteen eighty eight film titled Da starring Dennis Quaid,
Meg Ryan, Charlotte Rampling, Daniel Stern, and Jane Kazmarak. Wow,
an impressive cast. I have not seen it. It was

(22:56):
apparently like a neo noir flick, and it did pretty
well clear and commercially, I understand it's actually a remake
of a nineteen forty nine film, and Michael Weldon in
his review stress that the original is definitely better. But
then came nineteen ninety three Super Mario Brothers, and you know,
there's a lot to unpack here about what didn't work,

(23:16):
and you know what a bomb it was, certainly, and
it kind of I think caused a pause in both
their careers. I believe Morton continued doing music videos. We
don't see much from him afterwards, either in terms of
film or TV credits, at least around two thousand and five,
which is also around the time that the couple having
to divorce. I think Morton's work has mostly been in

(23:39):
music videos, and Jankell has continued to direct, including the
two thousand and nine TV movies skellg The owl Man
starring Tim Roth and John sim and twenty eighteen's Tell
It to the Bees starring Billy Boyd and Anna Paquin.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Yeah, I think I can say I'm not familiar with
it either of the director's other work really, apart from
what little bit I know about Max Headroom. So that
you know, all I've got to go on here is
Super Mario Brothers. I can't get further into their heads.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
All right, the writers on this. So there's, first of all,
there are a pair here. There's Terry Runt, I believe
it is I may be mispronouncing that, are you Nte
who lived nineteen sixty through nineteen ninety four, along with
Parker Bennett dates unknown. They'd previously written nineteen ninety one's
Mystery Date. Bennett was a cartoonist and apparently was in advertising.

(24:31):
But that's all I really dug up about their professional careers.
The other credited writer is Ed Solomon born nineteen sixty.
Solomon is best known for his writing work and I
believe all the Bill and Ted films, from the Bill
and Ted franchise, the first Men in Black movie, the
Now You See Me films, and also such titles as
ninety two's Mom and Dad Saved the World, that two

(24:53):
thousand Charlie's Angels movie, and twenty twenty one's No Sudden
Move Now.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
I think one thing to stress, and this will make
a lot of sense if you see the movie, is
that the script that we ended up with being shot
and making the movie was by no means the first
attempt or the first draft to script this thing. I
don't know. I've read accounts where I lost track of

(25:19):
all the different version I think there was something like
nine different scripts or something, and it went through all
kinds of development hell or I don't know if it's
technically development hell. That might be a more specific thing.
It went through a very complicated creative process. In fact,
I was reading an article in Yahoo Entertainment about one

(25:41):
of the screenwriters who did an early draft for the movie.
And this article is by John San called the Super
Mario Brothers Movie Turns twenty five, How the Infamous Dud
was inspired by an Oscar winning film. This article claims
that the first draft of the script, again completely different
from what was actually filmed, was written by the Oscar

(26:02):
winning screenwriter Barry Morrow, who was one of the two
writers behind rain Man, and he was brought on board
because of the rain Man script because of quote his
talent for writing Brothers.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
So a few quotes from the article, Morrow says, my son,
who was very small at the time, was Mario crazy.
I said I would do it just to get Mario
games for my son. Probably. Apparently it was going to
be an origin story telling the story of how the
Mario Brothers became.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Super Don't they just step on a mushroom? Like that's
the original version.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, I think that is. But so, he says he
can't remember all of the details of his script. I've
read a few other allegations about it elsewhere that it
had a kind of mythic structure and involved like a
great journey or a quest. But he says it hinged
on quote a ring getting lost in a drain, and
that's what led Mario and Luigi into the plumbing world.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
Well, I mean makes sense. You got to start somewhere. Uh.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
He also says, quote, I didn't even finish the script.
I had the last scene I was working on when
the courier arrived and said I've been told to take
it whether you're finished or not. Off it went.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Wow. That story itself is pretty crazy, just in terms
of like a pre internet age, like there's no like
we need you to email the script. Now it's like
the courier is at the door.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, so he had to hand off the unfinished script.
Of course it was. It may have fed into subsequent scripts,
which were subsequently revised in many different ways. I've heard
that the shooting script that they ended up using, I
think the claim I read about I think this was
in the Koreana Longworth article in Grantland that I read

(27:46):
about this. That script they said by the time they
used it had no original pages in it, so you
know they would have like the color coding of the
different revision pages, and there were no white pages from
the first draft. Left.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Wow. Well, if creatively this is a train that eventually
goes off the tracks, we have to acknowledge that that
train began long ago in a station of just pure
game development. The individual that, of course this begins with
is Shagiru Miyamoto born nineteen fifty two, video game designer, producer,

(28:21):
and game director in Nintendo. His work also includes the
creation of the Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, f Zero,
and Star Fox. He has been described as the father
of modern video games.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
I don't know a lot about him personally, but yeah,
I don't know. How can you argue with that track
record that is an incredible creative and technical mind.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Yeah, all right, let's get into the cast here. Obviously,
the lead is Mario Mario. Mario is his full name
and the character's name, and Mario Mario is played by
Bob Hoskins. Who of nineteen forty two through twenty fourteen.
Hoskins was a versatile British actor, probably best known to
many out there for his role as Eddie Valiant in

(29:03):
nineteen eighty eight, who framed Roger Rabbit, But of course
he came into that role on the back of a
lot of highly regarded work, including nineteen seventy nine Pennies
from Heaven, nineteen eighty two's The Long Good Friday, playing
a gangster British gangster opposite Helen Mirren and Paul Freeman.
Nineteen eighty four is The Honorary Console, which was also

(29:24):
released under the title Beyond the Limit. On that he
acted opposite Richard Gear and Michael Caine. And then there's
nineteen eighty seven's Mona Lisa playing a criminal again opposite
Kathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane and Clark Peters. That
one was directed by Neil Jordans, so a great actor,
maybe best known for his roles outside of some of
these films, roles as heavies, you know, as kind of

(29:47):
tough guys and gangsters. But there's a lot of interesting
stuff in there too. Amid some obvious paydays I've seen
some creepy performances from him and also just some basic
authority figure roles.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Bob Hoskins was a great actor. Yeah, I love him.
He has quite famously and emphatically insisted that this was
the worst thing he ever worked on in his entire career,
and has had just venomous things to say about it
in interviews. But I was reading in that Grantland article

(30:20):
about the other actors who at some point were considering
or were considered for the role of Mario. Do you
know who these other potential Marios were.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
I am going to guess Robert de Niro.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
He's not on the list. He may have been in there,
but not here. Okay, No, first one, Karina Longworth says,
first one, Dustin Hoffman wanted to be Mario again because
his kids were Nintendo maniacs, and so he wanted to
impress his kids, apparently by being Mario on screen. But
that didn't work out. I think originally the game executive,

(30:58):
so this may have been the people at Nintendo rather
than the movie studio, wanted Danny DeVito. I mean it
seems like a very clear choice there.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean de Vito would have been
interesting in the role. Would have brought a different energy
because one thing about Hoskins Mario is that he looks
like he's ready for a brawl a lot in this film, like,
oh yeah, his intensity is a little unnerving at times.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
He looks like he could kill somebody in an argument
about football.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah, and his character frequently says that he wishes to
kill people.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yes, So this is a Mario who expresses death, which
is constantly yeah. But apparently Danny DeVito ended up not
being involved in this because he wanted to concentrate on
directing and co starring in Hafa. Okay, I think that
was starring Jack Nicholson as Jimmy Hoffer. Okay. Next thing

(31:50):
after this was that apparently Tom Hanks was considered for
the role. This would have been Tom hank right around
the time of Forrest Gump.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
I believe, No, I don't know. Hank's would have been
Luigi at Best yeah, though I honestly don't even know
how I have a strong opinion about this.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
Tom Hanks apparently wanted five million for the role, but
instead they ended up going with Bob Hoskins. And it's
weird because it's like, I can't really fault them for that.
Seems like a great choice, But then again, I don't know,
Like Hoskins ended up being so hostile about the very
idea of this film. I don't know. I mean maybe

(32:32):
I one wonders if there had been a different actor
in the role, if the whole movie could have taken
a different direction. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, yeah, hard to say. Now, you can't have Mario
without Luigi and Luigi Mario is played by John Leguizamo
born nineteen sixty. I've seen this film singled out as
the role that allowed him to rise to fame, and
maybe that's the case. But he'd certainly been putting in
the work prior to Mario Brothers and has done a
great deal since Mario Brothers to cement his legacy as

(33:01):
a comedian and an actor with both comedic and dramatic power.
His earliest credit is playing Madonna's boyfriend's friend in the
nineteen eighty four music video for Borderline, followed by small
roles in such films as Diehard Too and Regarding Henry.
But it's clearly off to the races after Mario Brothers,
and the man has worked so much that I can't

(33:22):
even hit it all like the high points. But just
to name a few films of note, there's Tu Wong
Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmart from ninety three, the
nineteen ninety six adaptation of Romeo and Juliet Oh nineteen
ninety seven Spawn, in which he plays the villainous clown character.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
Yeah, that's a role.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
I know it's probably not like up there for like
examples of Leguizamo at his best, but like that is
a role where the times raw energy that he has
as an actor is really essential. Like he's wearing God
only knows how much makeup in that to become clown,
and he's able to like shine through that in a

(34:03):
way that feels like impishly comedic and also villainous at
the same time.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
February tenth, twenty twenty three article on comicbook dot Com
features quotes from an interview with John Leguizamo. John Leguizamo
is asked of all the villains he's played in his career,
what is his favorite. Leg Guizamo says, I gotta say clown.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Awesome.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
He says he liked it because of the level of
difficulty and because of how much freedom he had like
to add lib and get crazy, and so he says, quote,
I pushed it to the max.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Well, it absolutely worked. We may eventually rewatch Spawn for
Weird House Cinema. In many ways, it's not an experience
I'm looking forward to, but his performance, actually several of
the performances would be the main thing I would want
to come back for. All Right, and I'll mention some
of their Leguizamo films in a bit, But another one
of note is twenty twenty two is the Menu. That's

(34:59):
probably one of the more recent ones that I've seen
from him, and I thought he was great in that,
playing this kind of washed up action actor that I've
seen him in interviews. Say that he kind of patterned
this character after Steven Sagal because he worked with and
he had, like many people, he has a Steven Sagall story,
many people in the industry, and so he based that
character in part on Steven Sagal.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Let me gues. Steven Sagal told him that he could
read anyone's mind just by shaking their hand, and then
leg Wasamo shook his hand and Segal passed out on
the floor something like that.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
All Right, we mentioned we mentioned our villain already, but
we have King Koopa, and this is played by Dennis Hopper,
who lived nineteen thirty six through twenty ten. This is,
weirdly enough, our first Dennis Hopper movie in our left
two plus years of weird house cinema, which is kind
of a shock because Dennis Hopper is an actor with
a long career that experiences multiple spikes and dips and

(35:56):
has a lot of weird films in there from different decades.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Yeah, he's one of those who, you know, he's done
his prestige films, but also he clearly was not above
cash in a paycheck doing some kind of weird sci
fi slop. He did that quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah. So he came up in TV in the occasional
Western during the nineteen fifties, and then in the sixties,
you know, things got weird.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Man.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
He started appearing in things like the nineteen sixty one
horror film Night Tide. He played a neo Nazi on
the nineteen sixty three episode of The Twilight Zones He's Alive,
And certainly there were more TV and westerns mixed in there.
But he also appeared in the nineteen sixty six Space
Vampire film Queen of Blood, starring John Saxon. In sixty seven,

(36:41):
he appeared in the Corman directed Jack Nicholson scripted LSD
movie The Trip, which which is certainly amusing. I have
seen The Trip. Other notable sixties films, of course, include
Cool Hand, Luke, Hang Him High, Oh in nineteen sixty
nine's Easy Rider, which he also directed and wrote the
first of nine directorial credits, which also included nineteen seventy

(37:04):
one's The Last Movie. He was in sixty nine's True Grit.
In nineteen seventy nine, of course, he played a memorable
role as the as a deranged photo journalist in Apocalypse Now.
And I think his eighties output may be classified by
some as a slump, but he's still and during that
time period he gave us a nineteen eighty one Stigmata
movie titled Reborn. And then, of course he had a

(37:26):
strong nineteen eighty six with both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
two and Blue Velvet.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
Wow. Yeah, that's a year.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Did you notice Joe in this movie? The MANI like
sort of campaign and dictator posters for King Coopa include
one where King Coopa has a big chainsaw.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
No, I didn't see that.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, I did notice until like the end sequences when
they're kind of like throwing overthrowing him and tearing the
stuff down, But there's clearly a big chainsaw in one
of the posters.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
One of my favorite sort of understated movie scenes of
all time is Dennis Hopper shopping for chainsaws at a
chainsaw store in TCM two.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one of my favorite sequences
in that movie as well. All Right, Then, in the
early nineties, his career experienced another strong villains surge with
Roles and not only ninety three's Mario but also ninety
three's True Romance Who in ninety four Speed, which of
course was pretty huge at the time. He followed it
up with nineteen ninety five's water World, and I guess

(38:25):
after that there's another slump period, but he still gave
us nineteen ninety six as Basquillot as well as Space Truckers.
Of note, he was a modern art collector and owned
an extensive collection, and I believe he owned some Basciot paintings.
But anyway, the rest of his career is pretty packed
with projects, with some standouts at least for us, like

(38:47):
George Romero's Land of the Dead from two thousand and five,
which reunited him with John Leguizama.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
He plays a similar kind of character in Land of
the Dead to his King Koopa character. Yeah, he's like,
he's sort of a post apocalyptic rich guy who lives
up in a you know, skyscraper above all the poor
people in the zombie land.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah. I remember seeing Land of the Dead when it
came out, and I remember liking it, but not like
falling in love with it. It's interesting to look at
where zombie cinema and zombie TV shows and so forth
have gone since that time period, because I feel like, take,
for instance, The Walking Dead. Clearly, you know, it owes
a huge nod to all of Romero zombie films, but

(39:32):
I feel like, if you had to compare The Walking
Dead film by film, I feel like it has more
in common with Land of the Dead and that kind
of vision of post zombie apocalypse society, you.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Know, well, Land of the when you think about the
Romero movies in order, so Night of the Living Dead
is about the night of the outbreak. Dawn of the
Dead is taking place as civilization is falling apart. Day
of the Dead is very interesting because It takes place
apparently after civilization has fallen apart, and it has a
very small, isolated cast. It's like a group of scientists

(40:06):
and military personnel living alone on a base and they're
not even sure if anybody else is left out in
the world. Land of the Dead comes along after that.
It's the fourth film, and it sort of opens back
up again. It has a social element and it's like, Okay, well,
here's what a city looks like in the zombie world.
People have reorganized. There is a social structure now, and

(40:27):
this is this is what emerges.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah, all right, all right, But back to Mario. We
have the character Daisy, who I guess is essentially like
the Princess.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
This is the princess character identifiable as the princess from
Mario only because she's named Daisy, which I guess she
is maybe in some of the games, like the maybe
the Game Boy one or something, I'm not sure, and
because they say she's a princess, but she never like
looks like the prince from the games, and she never
like flies like in Super Mario two. So I don't
know what else would tire her to that.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, that's right, Luigi, I don't know if he double jumps.
He kind of double jumps, I guess, But I don't
think Daisy ever flies.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
They all do spend a lot of time digging up turnups.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
No, they don't, all right, So Daisy's played by Samantha
Mathis born nineteen seventy. Former child actor. She appeared in
nineteen nineties Pump Up the Volume. She was a voice
actor on Fern Gully, then Mario happened. Not a lot
of video game movies after that, but more traditional dramas.
She pops Up in nineteen ninety six, Is Broken Arrow,

(41:36):
a nineteen ninety nine episode of The Outer Limits, and
she was in the cast of American Psycho in two thousand.
She was also in two thousand and fourths The Punisher,
and had a role on the TV series The Strain of.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Note in My Household. At least when Rachel saw the
cast of this movie, she was like, Oh, it's Amy.
And that's because Samantha Mathis plays the adult version of
the youngest sister Amy. I think the younger version is
Kirsten Dunst. In the nineteen ninety four film adaptation of
Little Women directed by Julian Armstrong, which is a beloved

(42:08):
film in our house. It's long been one of her favorites.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Oh, very nice. Well, I can't say much about Samantha
Mathis in this film other than it's probably not the
best representation of what she was capable of. You know,
her scenes to me anyway, they felt at times they
feel either green or disconnected, and it may not even
be anything that's a reflection on her experience level at
the time. You know. It's just like we said, this

(42:32):
is not the production that perhaps one should use to
judge everyone's acting abilities.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Yeah, it seems like she's kind of going through the motions,
but most of the actors are. I think the only
one who's not just going through the motions is Dennis Hopper,
which you know he would kind of give you something
even when he was just collecting a paycheck.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, all right, let's move on to the goons. First
of all, we have Fisher Stevens playing Iggy. This is
one of Kopa's goons. Born nineteen sixty three, a fine
actor of stage, screen and TV, who is unfortunately best
remembered by many for the ill conceived role of the
roboticist Ben on Short Circuit one and two. He was
also in nineteen ninety five's Hackers. But he's really been

(43:14):
in some solid stuff over the last ten years, including
twenty fourteen's The Grand Budapest Hotel, twenty sixteen's Hail Caesar,
twenty sixteen is The Night Of on HBO and also
the HBO series Secession. But he's just one of two goons.
These are the koop of cousins. As we later learned,
the other one is Spike, played by Richard Edson born
nineteen fifty four. This is a character actor with a

(43:36):
is a great sort of loopine look, a kind of
lean and hungry look. Best known to many out there
is the Garage Attendant in nineteen eighty six is Ferris
Bueller's Day Off. He was also in such films as
eighty six as Howard the Duck, eighty nine's Do the
Right Thing, an episode of the TV series Monster Zoh,
and then Rob Zombie's twenty nineteen film Three from Hell.

(43:56):
All right, we have another villain to sort of round
out our villain cast here, and that's the character Lena,
who I don't to my knowledge, is not based on
anything from the actual video games. But Lena is played
by the terrific Fiona Shaw born nineteen fifty eight a
tremendous Irish film and theater actor, probably best known to

(44:17):
most out there as Aunt Dursley on the Harry Potter films,
but she's far more than that. Some of her older
credits include nineteen eighty nine's My Left Foot. She was
one of the stars of that film. She's in the
nineteen nineties Mountains of the Moon, which is a film
about Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. After Mario. You can
look to such films of hers as Neil Jordan's The

(44:39):
Butcher Boy from ninety seven, that ill conceived nineteen ninety
eight Avengers movie. She had a fun witch role on
HBO's True Blood, and she has a tremendous role in
Star Wars and Or playing and Or's mother. So I
think a lot of folks a lot of folks are
probably familiar with her from and Orr as well, but
she's also up on some of their big shows like

(45:01):
Flea Bag and Killing Eve in recent years.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
Give us Lena, we love Lena. Do we agree? We
love Lena?

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Yeah? Yeah? I thought she was great in this. I mean,
she's she's smoking, she's she's very fashionable, and they have
her done up as this you know, kind of vamping villain,
which of course is you know, very different from from
Aunt Dursley. You know, Fano Shaw had a great deal
of range, and I feel like she tends to eat
up her scenes rather nicely. There's there's one scene though,

(45:29):
where she lunges and puts a knife to a princess's throat,
and I legit jumped because it felt real on Shaw's
part in a way that nothing else in the movie
had felt real up till that point. I was like, Ah,
she's got a knife.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, she's great. She's she's a lizard queen,
but with the kind of bride of Frankenstein edge. Yeah, yeah,
she's good.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Okay, we get into the smaller roles here. We're almost
done with the lineup here. But Mojo Nixon is in
Sea plays a character named Toad. This is one of
the very few screen rolls of the rockabilly psychobilly icon.
Mojo Nixon born nineteen fifty seven, probably best known for
such songs as Don Henley Must Die, Don't let Him

(46:11):
Get Back Together with Glenn Fry That's of course, and
he at one point performed that song with Don Henley,
but also such songs as you Can't Kill Me, Bring
Me the Head of David Geffen, and many more. He's
known for having this kind of like wild gonzo persona.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
If you don't have Mojo Nixon, your store could use
some fixin.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
All right, So more on Mojo Nixon in a bit.
Lance Hendrickson is in the cast here, as we alluded
to earlier, I think playing King Bowser, the deposed King Bowser.
So he's not really in this movie. This is more
or less just a cameo, and it's kind of a
crummy cameo because if you're not looking for him, you
might not realize that this is Lance Hendrickson.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
And he doesn't even have anything interesting to say. He
just like pops up and he's like, well here I
am I love plumbers.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah, He's like, love those plumbers and that's so yeah. Somehow,
we've never watched the Lance centrix In movie on Weird
House Cinema, so we're not going to get into him here.
We'll come back when we watch a proper Lance synrix
In movie if you have suggestions for what that might
be right in, But obviously he's best remembered as the
role of Bishop of the Android in nineteen eighty six,

(47:18):
is Aliens, and then finally, the music on this one
is the work of Alan Silvestrie born nineteen fifty session
guitarist who broke into Hollywood composing in the seventies and
went on to score a ton of big movies, including
Romance in the Stone in nineteen eighty four, Back to
the Future, all the Back of the Future films, eighty
seven's Predator, ninety five's Judge Dread, Forrest Gump in ninety four,

(47:41):
and some of those big marvel A Injurs movies as well.
He's a two time Oscar nominee. Nothing wrong with this
score at all, but I hate it.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yeah, yeah, solvester. He's done a lot of great stuff.
Back to the Future scores magical, I mean, yeah, yeah,
it makes the movie, it creates the feel. But I
thought the movie that I don't know. I thought the
music in the Mario movie was kind of trash, except
for the George Clinton cover of Walk the Dinosaur, which
I don't know, how could a person not love that?

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Oh? Yeah, that that is a great track. Wonderful. P
Funk cover of Walk the Dinosaur love it.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
I think it's credited to George Clinton and the goom buzz.
I don't know if that's actually p Funk or George
Clinton and some other I don't know.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
No idea.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
All right, you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Oh yeah, let's talk about the plot.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
So I wanted to note the music of the opening credits.
The first thing we get is the original Super Mario
Brothers theme song from the game you Know, D Do Do,
But there's something different. There's like a jazzy high hat
beat keeping time with it, and then a sort of
minor chord pad fills in, and then the Mario theme
gradually fades out and a traditional score comes in. I

(48:53):
think there's a sort of eerie flute melody, and that
is even that musical transition I think is emphasizing a
theme that will come through in many other design choices
about the beginning of the movie. I'll come back to
that in a minute. But so, first of all, we
see like a weird pixelated landscape, looks like it could

(49:14):
be from a Nintendo game, and a voiceover narration begins
and it says, a long, long time ago, the earth
was ruled by dinosaurs. They were big, so not a
lot of people went around Hasslinom And I immediately thought,
why does this sound like a voice from the Simpsons.
But I looked up the narrator and I immediately understood

(49:34):
why it's Dan Castellanida, the voice of Homer Simpson a
bunch of other Springfield characters.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
I like this choice. I felt like this instantly grabbed
my attention.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
Yeah. So the narrator goes on and while this is happening,
the pixelated landscape starts to reveal dinosaurs. They're eating leaves
and stuff, and the animations are i'm gonna say not strong.
They kind of look like something from a five dollars
educational CD rom you bought it com Usa in the nineties.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah, they're kind of feel like they're intentionally crunchy. All right,
I assume it was intentionally an intentional act.

Speaker 4 (50:07):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
So the narration says, actually, no people went around Hasslingam
because there weren't even people yet, just the first tiny mammals. Basically,
life was good. Then then after this, the dinosaurs they
start talking to each other and one of them is
chewing on what looks like blonde hair. By the way,
the dinosaur says, you know, it just don't get no

(50:28):
better than this, and the other dinosaur says yeah, and
I'm like, why do they have New York accents?

Speaker 2 (50:33):
I think you're about to find out that's right.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
So we cut back to the pixelaid landscape. It says
Brooklyn sixty five million years ago. Then the narrator says,
then something happened. A giant meteorite struck the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs,
and we see the impact, and the narrator says, but
what if the dinosaurs weren't all destroyed? And now we

(50:57):
start zooming through a bunch of abstract, grainy CG stuff,
And all I could think is, you know, everybody knows
Custer died at Little Bighorn, but what this movie presupposes
is maybe he didn't. So the narrator says, what if
the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension where
the dinosaurs continue to thrive and evolve into intelligent, vicious,

(51:20):
aggressive beings just like us, And hey, what if they
found a way back? And then we are slammed with
the title super Mario Brothers. I want to talk about
the title design because I feel like it's kind of
getting at the same thing that music transition was a
minute ago. What is the title suggesting with this like

(51:40):
gleaming gray metal surface and the industrial rivet font. I
think the implication is like, oh, you played this as
a video game, but playtime's over. Mario's not just an
innocent fantasy anymore. Mario's in the real world now, where
things are made of metal and held together by rivets,

(52:02):
and there is smog and acid, rain and crime and
probably a guy with a mohawk carrying a boom box.
Let's see what happens.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
I also think that the title card here for Mario Brothers,
it looks like a like it's from a commercial for
a hard hitting law firm that is ready to fight
for you.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Yeah optional, Robert Vaughn, Yeah, Robert Vaughan. Yeah, it's time
to get tough, Mario.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Tough Mario and Mario fighting for.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
You anyway, So it says a cut to Brooklyn twenty
years ago. So we're gonna get more prologued. It's like
a rainy night, woman's running around. She leaves a strange
metallic capsule on the steps of a convent. The lady
runs away, she climbs down into a manhole. I guess
into the sewer. She wanders off into some kind of

(52:51):
like tunnel, and then she bumps into Dennis Hopper. There
he is. He's lurking in the shadows wearing a military
uniform that has so many metals. I guess it's the
dictator look or you know, he looks like Patent or something.
And he says, where is the rock? And she screams
and runs away, and then the tunnel seemingly collapses. Back
at the convent, the nuns open up the capsule. There

(53:15):
is apparently an egg inside. The egg hatches and then
out comes a human baby. Yeah, all right, and then
there is a weird, jagged crystal left with the egg.
One of the nuns holds it up significantly. This means something,
and then we cut to another setting. It is Brooklyn.
Now I see buildings, I see traffic, I see a

(53:36):
billboard ad for newports that seems telling about what kind
of movie this is going to be. Again, presumably this
is for children, but one of the first things we
see in the modern world is a cigarette ad.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
So we meet our heroes, Mario played by Bob Hoskins
and Luigi played by John Leguizamo. Their plumbers, rob would
you say they are down on their luck plumbers?

Speaker 2 (53:58):
Yeah, yeah, they seem. They talked about how they're like
three bills behind on paying their rent. They're having a
tough time, and they're having a tough time just getting
anybody to hire them.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
A major source of their financial woes seems to be
that Luigi is addicted to paranormal, fringe and conspiracy media.
So he's like spending their last dime to buy copies
of some weekly world news type publication with articles about
a scientist that turns people's brains into cheese. Also in
Luigi's media diet, he's watching a TV show called Miraculous World.

(54:35):
That is this supposed to be in search of I
think so.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Yeah, definite, in search of vibes here.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
So he's like watching a segment He's like, Wow, this
guy just found out he was in another dimension. So
there are a bunch of conflicts between the characters established.
The differences are that Mario takes their dire financial situation
seriously and Luigi does not seem to worry too much.
Also conflicts between them Mario does not believe in parallel

(55:03):
dimensions and the scientist who turns people's brains into cheese,
and Luigi says, but Mario, you gotta believe in something,
love that Mario is generally just more stressed out and serious,
and Luigi's kind of happy, go lucky.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, it makes sense. He's got more spring in his step,
he can double.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
Jump, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so they have some arguing
in banter and traffic while they're driving to a job.
I think they're literally just shown like driving over garbage cans,
absolutely reckless, dangerous behavior. Once they get to the job site,
a rival plumbing company called Scapelli has taken the job. Now,
what's the deal with Scipelli. Scapelli is not a blue

(55:44):
collar plumber like Mario and Luigi. He's a rich big
wig who rides around in a limousine. And when I
saw him come out, I looked up the actor and
I was like, Oh, that's Carlo Ritzi from the Godfather.
So so yeah, it was Barzini. I guess this means
he is implied to be a mobster in addition to

(56:06):
running a plumbing company.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Oh yeah, because it's not long before we get a
scene where he like blatantly threatens our heroine and says
like it'd be a shame if you were to disappear
on the streets like these other young women have been disappearing.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
Super Mario Brothers, the movie Children.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Ye.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
So from here we move on to a sort of
news segment that I don't know what's going on with
the narrative here, Like there's no established character watching the news.
It's just suddenly a news segment. And there's a construction
site that has been controversially shut down by university students
who are digging for dinosaur bones. And there's conflict between Scappelli,

(56:46):
who wants the site open for business, and Daisy, this
character who comes out and she is the head paleontologist
at the dig site. She wants to keep the dig
going in the name of science, and this is when
Scapelli threatens her. He's like, lot of girls been going
missing in Brooklyn lately, which implies that he is responsible
for that, but we find out he's not. It's dinosaurs

(57:08):
kidnapping girls from Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Yeah, but still one of the many one of the
many points in the film where it's like this is
for kids. This seems a little little hard edged.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
Yeah, So later we see a duo of twitchy guys
dressed like they're from the movie Hackers, and they're tailing
Daisy around. This is Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson playing
Iggy and Spike, and it's first it's like, maybe these
guys are not from around here, because Spike comes back
to the car with a couple of hot dogs and

(57:38):
he's like, they said it was dog meat. And then
they throw away the buns and they eat the hot dogs,
and they identify Daisy from a description which is that
she has two legs, one head, and two arms.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
But so do they Well, it's recurring joke that there
lizards and they can't tell mammals apart, so they'll, you know,
come back to that. I will say one other thing
about Fisher Stevens character in this If there's someone in
your life that is thinking about growing sideburns and you
don't want them to grow sideburns, show them a picture

(58:13):
of Fisher Stevens from this film, and I think that's
going to take care of all your problems.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
Yeah. So the Koopagons here try to chase Daisy, but
they are foiled by running face first into plate glass. Meanwhile,
Daisy and Luigi run into each other at a pay
phone and they have a meet cute and Luigi is
just instantly in love. He's adorably awkward. He's like, wow,
I haven't heard the name Daisy around here before, or wait,
he has heard it because it's also the name of

(58:40):
a flower. And Mario and Luigi end up giving Daisy
a ride back to the dig site. Luigi asks her
out on a date and she agrees. So it's later
that night and it's a double date at an Italian restaurant.
They're having a big old mess of Spaghettian meatballs and
I was like, whoa, whoa, who is Mario's date? Yeah,

(59:01):
they're all talking and Daisy has expertise on iridium layers
and geological strata, and Mario's date is talking about how
not to get tan lines. And it's I think it's
said that they all wrote out to dinner together in
the plumbing van.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Yeah, yeah, cool, this is the I want to say.
We're like twenty minutes into the film at this point,
and it was and you're watching and you're like, wow,
this film has really given children so little to latch onto.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
This is so little, It's true. So we learn a
bit about Daisy's backstory at dinner. Here, she says she
was left at a convent as a baby, raised by nuns,
and that she has this weird crystal necklace that was
left with her and she still wears it, though she
does not mention that she hatched from an egg. I
don't know if anybody ever told her that. Now, Spike

(59:55):
and Iggy are still following Daisy around, but they get
confused and think Mario's eight is Daisy, and they throw
a bag over her head and kidnap her. They take
her to another dimension. Meanwhile, Luigi and Daisy are they're
just having more cute date stuff. They're awkwardly flirting and
they're they're hitting it off, and the dialogue in these

(01:00:15):
scenes is atrociously unnatural, but the actors are almost charming
enough to pull it off. Almost uh. They end up
going back to the dig site, and then they go
down into the underground tunnel and Daisy shows Luigi some
of the dinosaur bones they have unearthed, and she says,
so they're looking at a dinosaur. It's got big reptilian fangs,

(01:00:36):
but she says it has opposable thumbs, and she says,
it's almost as if he was a monster. Trying to
be a human being. It's beautiful, and then Luigi's like,
you're beautiful and then they kiss.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Okay, yeah, just you're you're you're kissing, kissing, saying in
the sewer.

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
But they're interrupted because Schipelli's sabotage plumbers that like his
sapper team is there and they have just sabotaged the
dig site. So they like blow up some pipes or
something and everything's flooding. Mario brothers come to the rescue.
There's an action packed plumbing scene until Daisy is kidnapped
by the Cooper brothers and Mario and Luigi they're chasing.

(01:01:15):
They're like, oh, we got to get her back. They
discover that she has been taken through some sort of portal,
a wall of solid rock that is also a dimensional rift.
Luigi jumps through it, Mario reluctantly follows because he's afraid
of heights. They tumble through a bunch of hideous CGI
before popping out on the other side unharmed.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
Yeah, so the CGI is definitely hideous, especially when they're
sticking their faces through it. There's a real help me
I am in Hell. I also have to comment on
the plumbing sequence. Because yeah, that was amazing, because it's
almost like there was a note at some point from
the producers and they're like, aren't Mario and Luigi plumbers?
Shouldn't we have a scene where they're actually plumbing, Like

(01:01:55):
this is clearly the appeal of the character to young people.
We need more plumbing, Like, well, this is right, It
just doesn't work from a character creation standpoint if we
don't see them plumbing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
Well, they have a lot more plumbing later. They have
plumbing in like the third act.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Yeah, Like this is the point that at least some
of the writers who worked on the script were like,
gotta get that plumbing in there.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
So they pop out in a kind of crowded subway station,
but it's a weird crowded subway station. There is this
fibrous gunk hanging out all over the place. We will
later learn this is the fungus. And it's hard to
describe the vibe of this place. It is sort of
it has elements of country Western, but also heavy metal

(01:02:38):
and cyberpunk. It's like they're outdoors, but it seems indoors.
It's constantly night time. There are neon lights everywhere. I
was thinking it's a little bit Vegas Strip, a little
bit Biff World, a little bit Blade Runner, I don't know.
And of course there's a big sign that says vote
for Koopa, so at least they get to vote here.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
I think all of these sequences were filmed in a
like a giant industrial space in North Carolina.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
Wait literally literally yeah, oh wow, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
So for the rest of the film, we're somewhere at
North Carolina in a big like former factory or something
or warehouse.

Speaker 3 (01:03:15):
So a lot of the attempted humor in this movie
doesn't work, But there are a few moments here on
the streets when they first arrive and I forget what
this place is called Koopa World or whatever, that are
actually kind of funny. There was one part I laughed at, like,
so there are lizards everywhere because this is you know,
Dino Manhattan sort of, and there are lizards fighting in

(01:03:36):
the streets, and there are people with sort of various
reptilian features, and then there's a lady pushing a big
egg in a stroller, and I did laugh at that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
That was good. I like how we start seeing some
dinosaur mutants in there, but not that many. It's kind
of the reverse of sometimes you know, you have like
your Star Wars Cantena scene and you have a lot
of great aliens and then you have a few humans
in the background just to sort of fill things out.
We get there, it's mostly humans that are presumed to
be evolved reptiles, and then also some reptile mutants thrown in,

(01:04:06):
but only like one or two.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
Another funny gag here, there's a brief glimpse of a
marquee outside of Grindhouse Theater and it's showing a movie
called I Was a Teenage Mammal.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Yeah, Triple X by the way, for kids.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
For the kids, yeah, exactly. And Mario and Luigi just
keep saying where are we? This is crazy, and they're
making jokes about how Manhattan got really bad since we
were last here. So finally we meet the villain and
again this is Koopa played by Dennis Hopper. My god,
what would you call his hairstyle?

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
I guess it's kind of like Dino rose something to
really allow them to lean into the reptilian vibe that
they've cultivated for him. And it's he's one of several
extreme hairstyles that we see in the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
It's like he has blonde hair, but yeah, it's styled
up into the kind of rows of like the things
on an Alligators back. Yeah, and he's hanging out with
his creepy lady friend Lena. Oh, I mean, maybe we
should go a little bit deeper on what's going on
with Lena here. She's like Jillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher,
but with the charm turned down to zero and the

(01:05:15):
body temperature dial set to room. There is a scene
later where she's being irritable and Koopa says, looks like
someone woke up on the wrong side of the nest
this morning.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
That must be an ed Solomon line that way. Oh yeah, yeah,
But anyway, I like Fiona Shaw on this. Again, this
is not a character that comes from the Games as
far as I know. This is a creation just for
ninety three's Mario. But it's a lot of fun. Anytime
Lena is on on screen, I'm interested in what she's doing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
Yes, love Lena. So Dennis Hopper gives a speech where like,
while he's doing this, he's dipped. Did you understand he's
like dipping his hands in hot wax and making whack
gloves for himself.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
Yeah, I don't. It's something. He's talking about the dangers
of fun guy. So I thought maybe it was some
sort of decontamination thing.

Speaker 3 (01:06:09):
I don't know, So he says, look at this place, pathetic.
It gets worse every day. The humans on the other
side have a world full of resources ready for the taking.
Imagine an endless supply of food, clean air, water, And
what are we stuck with this pit hole? Germs everywhere,
fungus sixty five million years, we've been exiled here after

(01:06:30):
that meteorite struck, while mammals roam free and the other dimension, well,
not for long. So he lays out his whole plot
right here in this first scene. He says, finally, when
he gets hold of the Princess Daisy and the rock,
he'll be able to finally merge our world with theirs
and get rid of the mammals. So Spike and Iggy
show up to report that they have the princess, but

(01:06:52):
they forgot to get the rock, and Koopa needs the
rock too where he can't merge the dimensions, and they say, oh, well,
a couple of plumbers took it, and so Coopa puts
out an APB on all plumbers. Now. Meanwhile, back with Mario,
and Luigi. There was another I thought actually intentionally funny
scene that works where they get mugged by a little

(01:07:13):
old lady. It's like this little old lady who's like, oh, hello, gentlemen,
you know this is a dangerous neighborhood. Are you too armed?
And they're like what no, And then she pulls out
like a laser gun and she's like, give me all
your coupa coins.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
Yeah. This felt like something out of the old like
out of an old Judge Dread comic book. If you're
not familiar with the Judge Dad comic books, they had
a pretty wacky vibe. For instance, in the comics, Judge
Dread had an elderly cleaning lady named Maria who spoke
with an exaggerated Italian accent. And this was not a
one off character.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
I like, you included a panel here, maya judge.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
Yeah, you come aback to your old Maria. Yeah. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
But also after this, it's like a fight breaks out
in this scene, and another lady, not the little old
lady who tried to rob them, a different lady in
a red dress with legion of doom spikes wearing pneumatic
rocket boots ends up stealing the meteorite chard from them.
She'll come back then. Also, I guess a few minutes later,

(01:08:16):
the Koopa police come and arrest Mojo Nixon for standing
on the sidewalk singing a satirical song about King Koopa.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Yeah, and Mojo Nixon's character Toad here has just an
extreme hairstyle. It is just something else. It's like a spiral.

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
It's good. And by the way, Mario, like this movie,
takes a stand. Mario takes great offense as an avid
defender of free speech. Mario angrily insists that you cannot
arrest a guy for singing a song. And then the
police noticed that Mario is a plumber and they arrest
him too. They arrest him in Luigi and Luigi protests
that he's not a plumber, just an apprentice.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Yeah, and Mojo Nixon's not even doing any obscene songs here.
I mean, depending where you stand on obscenity laws, I
guess a case could be made with some tracks. But
he's just criticizing the Koopa government here.

Speaker 3 (01:09:05):
Now they get in a police car and they take
them to the police station. But we should stop to
mention the cars in this movie for a second. Every
car in the Koopa world is mad maxified. They have
engines on the outside, they have all kinds of spikes
and doodads poking out all over the place. And then
they've also got they're all constantly shooting sparks out of

(01:09:27):
their roofs.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
I've seen a lot of movies with Mad Max cars
in them, you know, and you know, some are good,
some are bad. Some you see a lot of work
and some it seem a little more slapped together. A
lot of work went into these and they're.

Speaker 3 (01:09:42):
Really ugly hideous. Yeah. Now there was another thing that
I thought, I don't know, this was like almost funny.
I wasn't quite sure what was going on. But there
is an atmosphere of total chaos at the police station.
Like while Mario and Luigi are being booked and they're
doing it, they're doing the bid about how they're both
named Mario. That's their last name, so it's Mario Mario,

(01:10:02):
Luigi Mario. But while this is going on, the booking
officer is getting his back rubbed with the spike of
a high heel on a woman's foot, which is attached
to a leg that is jutting in from off screen.
At an impossible angle, and meanwhile there is just constantly
glass shattering everywhere and people jumping around.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
Yeah, like this really feels this is one of those
things that especially felt like late eighties, early nineties, you know,
it feels very MTV. It feels very in line with
the director's sensibilities.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
But Mario and Luigi get defungused at jail. They go
through a defungusing process and then they go into lock
up where Mojo Nixon gives them some exposition. He explains
history to them. He's like, Okay, you're in a parallel dimension.
By the way, I don't know how he knows all this,
but he's like, you're in a parallel dimension that was
split off by the KPg impact some somehow, you came

(01:10:59):
over here from mammal dimension into this one. Oh and
by the way, he says that the fungus that is
choking the city, he says, it's that old king. I
guess the guy who used to be in charge here.
Mojo Nixon says, he's been de evolved. So Koopa comes in.
He's trying to find out where the meteorite piece is
and he does this ploy where he pretends to be

(01:11:20):
their lawyer. That didn't really work out, so they go
into the d evolution chamber. Now, this is actually a
major theme in the film, that isn't. I don't know
how this theme became so big in the Super Mario
Brothers movie. Does this have anything to do with the
games in any way you're aware of?

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Well, just that Mario gets big and then if he
gets injured, he becomes small again. Right, he loses his powers,
and I guess you could say he's de evolving to
some extent.

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
So yeah, it's a machine with like a chair and
then the chair you sit in it, you get strapped
down and it sticks your head up in a big
hole that za aps you with blue light until you
come out having been changed. And Koopa gives a Bond
villain speech about how the machine works. He says, normally,
evolution is an upward process. Things evolved to get smarter,

(01:12:13):
achieve higher forms. This machine does the opposite, reducing you
to a primordial state. And I hate to be pedantic here,
but we got to Coopa. That is a classic rookie
mistake about evolution. Evolution does not mean things get higher
or better, just means lineages of organisms adapt to environmental pressures,

(01:12:34):
so they adapt to proliferate in their present environment. There's
no up in evolution. But unfortunately the cringe science does
not stop there, because Mario gets mad at Koopa and
he says, what single celled organism did you evolve from?
And Coopa says Tyrannosaurus rex the lizard king, thank you
very much, which I would argue as more than one cell.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
I did like that. Dennis Hopper makes the bulge choice
to act this scene out with his arms and a
t rex pose. I don't know if you noticed that
or have them kind of like little t rex arms.
I also have to point out that the devo chamber
here major set piece in the film, and they made
a toy place that of this where you like strap

(01:13:19):
in an act. It's kind of like the swine ped
I guess from Masters of the Universe. I can't tell
from the grainy image I found of the box how
it was supposed to work. And I would ask listeners
out there, Hey, if you had this toy, what was
it like? But let's not get ourselves. Nobody had this toy.

Speaker 3 (01:13:35):
They had a toy, a mass produced toy set of
the d evolution Chamber.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
I refuse to believe any child actually had this toy.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
But so what does it actually do in the movie?
Like we see it demonstrated on poor Mojo Nixon. He
gets his head stuck in it and it transforms his
Mojo Nixon head into like a tiny reptilian head.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Yeah, some great cgi there, as well as his face goes.

Speaker 3 (01:14:02):
Yeah, and we're told that this is a goomba. But
that's funny because that's not what the goombas are in
the games the game. In the games, they're like ambulatory mushrooms,
not like people with large bodies and tiny, creepy reptile heads.

Speaker 2 (01:14:16):
Yeah. Yeah, there's stitching a lot of stuff together here.

Speaker 3 (01:14:18):
Now, I will say I remember that the transformation of
people into goombas in this movie was an element that
I found unsettling when I saw it as a kid.
Something seemed to kind of perverse and wrong about it.
It didn't feel good.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
Yeah, he's not only turning them into creatures. He's turning
them into creatures that act and look stupid, So it
feels like more of a crime.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
There's a scene later where Cooper reveals his like grand
master plan is to devote all of the humans and
the mammal dimension and turn them into monkeys.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
By the way, this whole merging of the of the dimensions,
merging of the planes, I don't know if this is
truly This is not the first work of fiction to
deal with this possibility, but this I do know that
this becomes a major plot point in the later Mortal
Kombat games. So one has to wonder did they get
that from the Super Mario Brothers movie or is there

(01:15:16):
some other key bit of like Warring Dimension media that
I'm just not thinking of.

Speaker 3 (01:15:21):
Well, anyway, so they send Toad off to join the
other goombas Mario and Luigi. They sort of overpower their captors.
They beat up the guards. They throw Koopa into the
de evolution machine. So you're thinking, like, oh, is the
movie about to be over? But no, Luigi, they crank
the dial to the Jurassic setting, but he's like only
in there for a second. That sort of pokes his

(01:15:42):
head in and then he falls back out. But when
he comes back out, he has these like morphing vertical
pupils that are fading in and out.

Speaker 2 (01:15:50):
Yeah, it's one of the first of several scenes where
Koopa glitches. Dinosaur I guess you'd say.

Speaker 3 (01:15:55):
Mm hmm. There's a big action scene where they're like
fighting goombas with flamethrow and they eventually come under a car,
a police car and get out of there, and the
car chase ends with them going through a tunnel and
getting spit out in some kind of desert. After this,
there is a scene where Koopa is having a mud
bath with Lena.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
Yeah, this is a pretty solid scene. Like the set.
I don't know about the scene, but the set looks
really dope, okay, And there's something about having your villain
in the mud bath. It reminded me of the we
have a mud bath scene in twenty twenty one's Dune
with the baron in there as he's addressing his underlings.
So similar connection there. I don't know if Denise Villeneuve

(01:16:39):
was looking at this when he was putting together his
dreams for his doing adaptation.

Speaker 3 (01:16:45):
Surely, surely it was inspired by the Super Mario Brothers movie.
Dennis Hopper has a line this almost fell ad libbed.
He says, you know what I love about mud, It's
clean and it's dirty at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
Yeah, ull kids, kids.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
Oh so meanwhile, remember Daisy, Remember the paleontologist. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah,
she's been hanging out with all of the women from
the Mammal Dimension that I guess were all except her
erroneously brought here by Iggy and Spike because they thought
all of them were her. But now they're all just
still here and they're like hanging out, stuck in this room.
And Mario's date from Meatball Night is here. Nice and

(01:17:28):
Lena shows up in the room to extract Princess Daisy
from the room of the Mammal Dimension women, and Lena
dresses her up in a purple gown and jewelry and
gives some exposition. She says that Daisy is the daughter
of the former queen of this world who stole the rock.
That's what they're calling this, like Little Shard smuggled the

(01:17:51):
baby into the Mammal dimension and then died. And Daisy
wants to know about her father. Is he still living
and Lena says, depends on what you mean by living,
And later she asks Coopa about him. Coopa says, oh,
he's around again, referring we will find it, spoiler, we
will find out that all of the fungus that's just

(01:18:12):
all over everything, in every building and room in this
world is the former king. He's I guess he got
really big.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
Yeah, which in and out of itself, it's grotesquely realized
in the film, but it's it's kind of a neat idea,
this idea that the deposed king was too powerful to
really go away, and that he's like he's everywhere. I mean,
there's something kind of potent about that. You can imagine
this being used a great effect in a different work
of fiction.

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
So there's a new scene where I think Coopa is
punishing Spike and Iggy for failing many times, and Spike
gets sent into the Devo machine. But then instead of
being made to DEVO, he has made to Evo. They
so they set the dial to quote advanced. Yeah, they
pop his head in. He comes out with a vastly
improved vocabulary and he starts doing math problems. And then

(01:19:02):
they do this to the other guy as well. So
now they are both smart. But in this movie, smart
just means listing a lot of synonyms for a word.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
Somebody just said, yeah, yeah, they just book smart. They
don't actually do anything smart in the film. They just
suddenly have a different vocabulary.

Speaker 3 (01:19:20):
Though I think it does change their politics. Now they
start sort of revolting against King Cooper. Remember, they're like,
you're a fascist.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
That's right, that's right. They just have very little ability
to do anything about it because they're not plumbers.

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
That's right. That's right. Oh somewhere in here, there's a
scene where Daisy meets Yoshi.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
I remember, Oh yeah, Yoshi is one of the highlights
of the film.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
Yes, so there's a tiny theropod dinosaur, definitely not as
cute as Yoshi in the games, but he's sort of,
you know, a dog sized dinosaur, and Daisy's getting to
know him, and Koopa enters the scene and says, Yoshi
is a pet of the royal family. And Daisy is
of course amazed because here's dinosaur. She's a paleontologist, she's

(01:20:02):
always studied them, but never seen one alive of course.

Speaker 2 (01:20:05):
Yeah, yeah, so this was something I remember from the
trailers and the promotional materials when I was a kid.
I was like, yes, this this is Yoshi. This is great. This,
I mean, who doesn't want to see this movie with
a with a cute dinosaur that's your friend.

Speaker 3 (01:20:18):
Sure, but this scene really ends up taking a turn. So,
first of all, there's more exposition. There's a lot of
just explaining. Coopa explains that their dementia, well, he doesn't
explain this, it like is demonstrated with a prop that
their world is Aracus pretty much like the planet has
one big city and the rest of the planet is
an endless desert. So Coopa spins the globe around and

(01:20:41):
there's only one landmark, the city. The rest is just
flat desert. So like, if there's only one landmark on
your planet, why would you have a globe?

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
I mean, maybe it's not nothing out there, there's some landmarks.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
Yeah, So Coopa explains to her also that she's one
of them. You know, she's descended from dinah, not mammals,
and we will in later scenes see her bonding and
making friends with Yoshi. I guess not just because she's
interested in dinosaurs, but because she is one. Then the
scene takes a horrible turn and Coopa gets really creepy.

(01:21:14):
He does like a cgi snake tongue thing at Daisy
and tries to kiss her. It is absolutely disgusting, and
in a way, I guess hats off to Dennis Hopper
because I assume they probably told him. Hey, okay, time
to be the King of creeps, and he accomplishes it.
But I don't know, I do not understand how anybody
involved thought this scene was appropriate in a movie for

(01:21:37):
little kids.

Speaker 2 (01:21:38):
Yeah, because he's playing an abusive, lecherous totalitarian, but in
ways that break through the sort of simplified cartoon version
of those attributes.

Speaker 3 (01:21:48):
Yeah, it's just gross, and so like, is this a
kid's movie? And then to add more to that, so
Daisy rejects him, and then Coop Coopa sends her away
with Gumba's and he kicks Yoshi. He kicks Yoshi, cruelty
to animals. Also, I don't really blame Hopper here because
I think he's probably doing what they told him to
do and create this awful, detestable villain. But this, the

(01:22:11):
tone is just miles off the mark for what this
movie is presumably supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (01:22:16):
Absolutely. Yeah, Now, of course, where at Mario and Luigi
at this point they've been cast out into the desert
and with the fremen.

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
Yeah that's right, yes, after having given their water. I
don't know. Yeah, So they're out in the desert wandering around.
They're arguing with each other at some point that they
end up crossing paths with Iggy and Spike after Iggy
and Spike crash their dune buggy in a mud pit,
and then they fill Mario and Luigi in on the
exposition that the audience already knows all the stuff about

(01:22:54):
the world. Skoupon needs the Shard to merge the dimensions,
et cetera. This movie spends a lot of time going
over stuff that's already been covered. Character is just telling
exposition to characters of things the audience already knows, sometimes
like four or five iterations of the same information.

Speaker 2 (01:23:09):
Yeah, I don't know how much of that is. Just
like it's kind of a clunky plot, and so they
felt like they really needed a hammer at home. I
don't know, like maybe if they had one less exposition sequence,
I wouldn't have as clear of an idea about what's
going on.

Speaker 3 (01:23:24):
But they agree to work together. They say, like, Spike
and Iggy can have the shard if they help Mario
and Luigi rescue Daisy. So they make their way back
to the city by knocking out some Coopa cops at
a dump with plumbing equipment, and they steal a garbage
truck and then they go to a night club to
find the lady who stole the meteorite shard, and once again,

(01:23:44):
is this movie supposed to be for kids? This club
scene really seemed way too adult. Like there's just leather
and butts everywhere. It's a weird vibe.

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Yeah, there's a lot of underwear in this scene, and
I kept expecting the lady with three breasts from Total
Recall to show up. You know, It's like that kind
of a vibe.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
It is exactly that kind of setting. Yeah, So Mario's
plan to get the meteorite chard is to charm the
lady who beat them up and stole it earlier. Turns
out her name is Bertha, and turns out it sort
of works, like he goes up and he's like, hello, beautiful,
and she punches him at first, but then she dances
with him. Then he gets the shard back. Then then

(01:24:24):
a George Clinton cover of Walk the Dinosaur starts playing.
Then goombas arrived, commanded by Lena, and then Lena gets
hold of the shard, but Mario and Luigi managed to
escape the goombas with the help of Bertha, who is
very strong and who is now in love with Mario.
I think she like kisses him and calls him sugar
buns or something, and then she gives them pneumatic rocket boots,

(01:24:45):
which she calls stompers. And I think here is the
first time we see the Super Mario brothers actually gaining
some of their powers from the game, because now they
can jump because they have the boots from Bertha.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
Now they can do again. This is something that they
were like, well, they've got a jump. They've got a jump.
They've got to do plumbing and they have to jump.

Speaker 3 (01:25:03):
So there's another chase they escape. There is a scene
where we see Coopa taunting a big hunk of fungus
hanging over an empty throne, and again we will find out, oh,
this is the king. This is Daisy's father, the king.
And then Coopa goes and he orders a pizza on
a videophone. He wants a Coopa Special with pterodactyl tail,

(01:25:27):
dino lizard, hold the mammal, no worms, and spicy. So
the Marios after this, they sneak into Koopa tower by
doing plumbing like they like, twist some bolts and stuff
on pipes in order to turn off the heat, so
the tower turns cold and this is not good for
the dinosaurs. They also find the outfits of their actual

(01:25:48):
colors from the game. They just like find red overalls
for Mario and green for Luigi. I think it's somewhere
around here that Lena starts turning on Coopa, Like, she
starts to get jealous of his desire for Daisy. So
she's like, well, I'm gonna take the shard and I'll
merge the worlds without him.

Speaker 2 (01:26:04):
And this is great because, like I said, I'm I'm
here for Lena. I'm ready to support Lena and her
coup against Koopa. So let's see if she can pull
it off.

Speaker 3 (01:26:14):
Yeah, she tries to go to Daisy's room and kill her,
but that doesn't work because Yoshi intervenes. Yoshi bites Lena,
and Daisy escapes. Oh and meanwhile, Daisy has been making friends,
not just with Yoshi but with the Mojo Nixon Gumba.
They're friends now. I guess he's like a nice one.

Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
Yeah. They let him keep the harmonica that he played
in life, and so it's always around his neck to
identify which one he is.

Speaker 3 (01:26:39):
That's right, And it turns another thing. The Mario brothers
somehow discovered that Goomba's like to dance, so they like
get them swaying back and forth to music in order
to evade them while they're trying to sneak around through
some elevator shafts.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
Yeah, I know those sequences. Those are some great weird
scenes that also feel like they're part of a children's movie,
you know, like big dumb looking monsters or dancing with
each other. And I accept it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:04):
So eventually, I guess Daisy meets up with you men.
There's so many characters just like meeting, crossing paths, getting captured, uncaptured, escaping,
blah blah blah. Just there's a lot of plot movement
without a lot of significance really changing. But it's like
Daisy meets up with Spike and Iggy, who explained to
her that her father, the King, was the first victim
of Koopa's de evolution machine. He is the fungus that

(01:27:27):
covers the entire city. As we've said, she tries to
talk to the fungus father, then she frees Yoshi from
his chains. Then she just hacks the computer system. She
starts like getting in there.

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):
I have to drive home that the what we see
in the throne room of the former Kings as fungus.
It's just really disgusting. Looks like the failed results of
a telepod experiment from the Fly or something.

Speaker 3 (01:27:52):
Oh yeah, totally yeah. It's just a weird kind of
slime and flesh gunk. Oh but somewhere here, I guess
Mario and Luigi make it into the tower. They reunite
with Daisy. They are introduced to the fungus King. Here's somehow.
Mario gets reminded about his meatball night date, whose name
is Daniella. Okay, that's her name. She's also stuck here

(01:28:14):
in the Koopa World with all of the other women
from Brooklyn who were kidnapped, and he's like, oh yeah,
I promised to take her to WrestleMania. That means I've
got to rescue her. So he goes to rescue her.
He does it, and they all Mario and all of
the ladies from Mammal World go bob sledding down a
giant pipe pursued by goombas. I think this is another

(01:28:35):
nod of the games, like going down the pipes, and
there's some kind of Kinney Loggins music play in They
get spit out in the streets of Koopatown, where they
reunite with Daisy and Luigi, and at some point in
their Daisy and Luigi were captured, and then they got
away again. I don't know how all that happened. But
then there's more action in the streets. Koopa's down there

(01:28:58):
aiming a de evolution gun at them. There are devolution
guns now, not just the machine with the chair, So
from here it's sort of action all the way to
the end. There is a sequence where Lena is trying
to get the shard and she gets electrified somehow and
gets big hair and then runs down the tunnel to
the dimensional rift. Luigi and Daisy also run down there

(01:29:21):
after her. They return the girls from Brooklyn back to Brooklyn,
they say, tell everyone in Brooklyn about the invasion of
the goombas that's coming. Lena inserts the shard into the meteorite,
but it blasts her into the wall and she becomes
a cooked skeleton with frizzy hair. Luigi and Daisy are like, oh, yeah,

(01:29:41):
of course that happened to her, because only Daisy has
the power to insert or remove the shard.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
Okay, all right, I.

Speaker 3 (01:29:49):
Don't recall that being established before, but maybe I missed it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
Yeah, we're leaning a little bit on the Dark Crystal.
At this point, I.

Speaker 3 (01:29:55):
Think, yeah, yeah, there's a bunch of just action, like
Koopa's trying to shoot Mario and Luigi with fireballs in
the street. There's a big fight. But when the shard
is insurged into the media rite, everything gets interrupted because
they're like their bodies start dissolving. So like Coopa and
Mario are in a standoff and they're turning into pixels

(01:30:18):
and flying away, and Coopa's like, we're merging.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
Oh my god. This was a part in the movie
where I was like, oh my goodness, what is happening?
Like I was just for a minute there, just totally
thrown off. I was like, are we about to time
cop Here they're can merge together and occupy the same
mass at the same time. I don't know, but of
course it's the dimensions.

Speaker 3 (01:30:40):
Yeah. Yeah, So the merging dissolves Koopa and Mario. It
sends them to the mammal dimension Brooklyn, where they pop
out on the the dig site of the Scipelli dig.
We see the dissolving of the World Trade Center, like
the towers dissolve, and somebody comments, those guys will do
any thing for publicity.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
Yikes.

Speaker 3 (01:31:05):
Coopa gets there and he shoots the de evolution gun
at Schipelli, who turns into a chimpanzee. Once again, humans
did not evolve from chimpanzees. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:15):
Yeah, also did not evolve from mushrooms.

Speaker 3 (01:31:17):
Also true. So Coopa then says he's going to make
a monkey out of Mario. He aims the de evolution
gun at him, but then Mario remembers Luigi earlier said hey,
we should trust the fungus. So Mario says, trust the fungus,
and he holds up a piece of fungus as a
human shield or a fungus shield, and the de evolution

(01:31:39):
gun hits it and it gets bigger, and then Daisy
and Luigi managed to get the shard out of the
media orite. So Coopa and Mario dissolve back to Iracush
and then, hey, all of your friends are back here,
and let's do a payoff of everything that happened earlier.
So remember how the goombas like to dance, Welljo Nixon Gumba,

(01:32:01):
he starts playing the harmonica and they start dancing, so
they're not fighting. And hey, remember Bertha with her rocket boots,
Well she's here with rocket boots. Luigi puts them on
and starts zooming around. Hey, remember those devo guns. Mario
and Luigi get them and they use them on Koopa
to turn him into a velociraptor. Remember, oh, we've seen

(01:32:21):
remember bob bombs from the Mario game, the little like
walking bombs, like from a cartoon. They keep popping up
in the game because the Fungus is like trying to
hand them to Mario. There was one that was ignited earlier.
I skipped over that during the big action scene in
the streets. It walks back over to Koopa, blows up,
launches him sky high. He falls back down, roars. He's

(01:32:43):
still dinosaurish. Mario and Luigi they keep shooting him with
the de evolution gun until he turns into primordial Ooze,
and then the people of Coopaville celebrate. I guess they
didn't like Koopa, but we were given no indication of that.
Then everybody hugs the fungus. King turns back into Lance
Henrickson and says I'm back. Love those plumbers, and then

(01:33:06):
we never see him again. Daisy uses the shard to
magically open the portal, you know, but it's like, Oh,
but I can't leave. This is my world. You know,
I haven't even met Lance Hendrickson yet. So the Marios
go back to their world, Daisy stays here, and so
then we get a little epilogue. So back home in Brooklyn,

(01:33:27):
the Mario brothers, they're hanging out with Daniella. They're eating
spaghetti and meatballs. They're watching that Unsolved Mysteries show and hey, look,
look we're on the show. Now there's a segment about
the time that we saved this dimension from the ruthless
dinosaur Dictator, and then they high five about being on
TV until Daisy comes to the door. She is wearing scorched,

(01:33:50):
tattered clothing. She's holding a de evolution gun. She says,
I need your help, Mario Brothers. You're never gonna believe this,
and then Mario says, oh, I believe That's that's the
moral of the movie. Now when somebody says something, he
is no longer skeptical. He just believes it.

Speaker 2 (01:34:10):
This is a great moment where they're setting up a
sequel that absolutely would never happen. But it made me wonder,
is this the coming of Wart the villain from the
main villain from Super Mario Brothers too. That's like invading
the world of Dreams or whatever was going on in
that game.

Speaker 3 (01:34:24):
The second live action Super Mario Brothers movie would, as
we said, involve a lot of turnip digging, you know,
pulling things up, throwing them, getting on top of blocks,
the good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:34:34):
That's that's the one I actually owned. That was the
one that I have the most experienced with. Still never
made it to wart was not good at these games.

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
Well that was a marathon. I knew this one was
going to go long, and as we said, there's a
lot of stuff about this we didn't even get into.
This is like, I really meant it when I said
a I think a book length work could be devoted
to Super Mario Brothers the movie, what it is and
what it means and why it's so strange.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
Did you stick around for the post credit sequence?

Speaker 3 (01:35:03):
Is there actually one?

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
There actually is one? Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:35:06):
Oh wow, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
It's real dumb. It's where you have a couple of
representatives of a Japanese video game company, presumably Nintendo or
maybe they even say they're from Nintendo, and there they
show up and they're like, we're here, we hear we've
heard about your adventures, and we would love to turn
them into a video game. We think audiences would love this.
And then it's revealed it's not Mario and Luigi they're
talking to. It's the Koopa cousins and they and they,

(01:35:31):
they go back and forth about what the game might
be called. And there's some like you know, bad humor there,
But luckily it only lasts a few seconds and that's it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:41):
Totally missed it. But so they're living in our dimension now.

Speaker 2 (01:35:45):
I think so, yes, Okay, yeah, unless they are now
splinter dimensions. I don't know there. If you, if you
think too long and hard about this movie, there you
know a lot of a lot of possibilities emerge, possibilities
that could have been explored in various ways in the
sequel that you, I guess, can only view in an
alternate dimension.

Speaker 3 (01:36:05):
Okay, we've got to end it there. This has been
ridiculously long.

Speaker 2 (01:36:09):
All right, we shall end it there. But we'd love
to hear from everyone out there. Oh, especially if you
have experiences with the release of this movie. Did you
see it in a theater? What was your level of
excitement for it? As like a video game player, I
don't need I'd like I say, I refuse to believe
anybody owned any of these toys, but if you did,
right in, we'd love to hear from. You. Might need

(01:36:30):
to include photographic evidence though, to convince me. And yeah,
we'll be back next week. On Weird House Cinema, we're
primarily a science podcast and the Stuff to Blow Remind
podcast feed core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on
Friday's we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film. But as we if you've seen
in this episode, we're still not going to let particularly
bad science takes go by without some comment.

Speaker 3 (01:36:54):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just a salo, you can email
us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:37:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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