The 1993 Super Mario Bros. Movie Is Better Than The New Film In Every Conceivable Way
When Rocky Morton's and Annabel Jankel's 1993 film "Super Mario Bros." first hit theaters in May of 1993, it was immediately greeted with skepticism by Nintendo fans. The live-action adventure took characters and some of the more notable iconography from Shigeru Miyamoto's popular video game series and repurposed them into a bizarre, dystopian tale about a parallel universe, the evolutionary fate of dinosaurs, and fascism. The whimsical, cartoonish fairy tale elements of the 1985 game were absent, replaced by something steely, dank, and coated in athlete's foot-style fungus. Fans were concerned that the movie wasn't a faithful adaptation of the game, and it was rejected on this basis for many, many years.
Reviews weren't kind either. The film currently holds a mere 28% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Gene Siskel called it one of the worst movies of 1993. It didn't help that "Super Mario Bros." was also a notoriously troubled production and numerous oral histories have emerged in recent years describing the debacle in detail. Many of these histories only cemented the film's "blunder" status in the popular consciousness, with many holding it up as the key example of why adapting video games to film remains, even at this late date, something of a fraught exercise.
In 2023 — 30 years later — directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic ("Teen Titans Go! To the Movies") had the courage to approach a cinematic Mario again, now in an animated form that guarantees more stringent visual fidelity to the source games. Miyamoto serves as producer on the new movie, and the game's characters and iconography (along with Koji Kondo's famous game music) are kept wholly intact. In the new film, the fairy tale whimsy remains. The new film is called "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."
The 1993 film remains vastly superior.
Working with what you have
It should be mentioned that there are a great deal of 1993 "Super Mario" fans and apologists in the world. This author is one of them. The dank strangeness of the movie, paired with a very particular brand of clunky Hollywood artificiality makes "Super Mario Bros." a fascinating creative exercise. Given the technological advances of film visual effects in 1993, any attempts to make a live-action movie that resembled the Mario games would have emerged looking like a bad acid trip. The filmmakers, then, had to invent their own story out of some admittedly surreal and nonsensical video games that, really, had no story to crib from.
The premise of "Super Mario Bros." is strange, but creative: it seems the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs actually split Earth into two separate dimensions. In one of them, humans evolved to be the dominant species. In the other, the dinosaurs survived, and evolved into human-looking beings. Thanks to a rift between the worlds, a dinosaur princess is abandoned back on Earth as a baby. Years later, the princess (Samantha Mathis) is kidnapped back into the dinosaur dimension by the evil King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), who intends to unite his dimension with Earth's. It seems that he, a vicious fascist, has consumed his planet's resources to the point where only one major city remains. He needs to sap Earth in order to survive. Only a pair of Brooklyn plumbers (Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo) can save the day.
The Mario Bros. are sassy, confused New Yorkers with their own voices and their own characters. This is fair play, as Mario was previously a mere video game sprite, more a cipher and a mascot than a character. Turning Mario into Bob Hoskins was a fine idea.
Who cares about Mario's life?
An easy question: who on Earth cares about Mario's life? Mario is not a character with a backstory, his own motivations, or his own dreams. Mario is a colorful, visually appealing, human-shaped figure invented for manipulation. Mario's character is dictated entirely by whoever is controlling him. If Mario makes it to the end of the game without dying, he is a determined and skilled hero. If I push him off a cliff, Mario is suicidal. If he leaps off of a dinosaur's back while the dinosaur is in midair over a chasm, and the dinosaur plunges to its death merely so Mario can grab a drugged-up mushroom, then Mario is a cruel a-hole.
The new Mario movie assigns the character with no personality beyond a bland, utterly generic form of determined action movie heroism. He wants a goal and will face challenges. Snore. In 1993, Mario was annoyed, baffled, skilled at plumbing, and had a love-hate relationship with his brother. He had a sassy Brooklyn girlfriend, and wore a yellow tuxedo well. Luigi, meanwhile, was a dim bulb, but knew Brooklyn well, and was a little shiftless but adapted to extreme scenarios. He was a youthful, more motivated character. The 2023 Luigi is merely afraid, and he loves his brother in a vague sense. He's skittish about their new plumbing business. There's so much less to work with.
The 1993 Mario and Luigi were hardly Hamlet, but they at least had human qualities. The 2023 Mario and Luigi are avatars like their video game antecedents. While this does give the new movie a great deal more fidelity to its source, it leaves viewers with character-free characters.
It's also worth saying that the 1993 movie was actually about something.
Anticapitalism vs. Hypercapitalism
The reason why King Koopa wants to infiltrate Earth is that he has squandered all of his planet's resources. Koopa is a Nazi-like fascist who hangs propaganda posters all over his one remaining city, and promises to save his people with supernatural conquest. He's also germ-phobic and uses a special machine to devolve dissidents into mindless goombahs (something he does to Mojo Nixon early in the film). Mario and Luigi are nearly mugged by a woman who needs a great deal of Koopa coins. Poverty is rampant, and citizens distract themselves with fashion and dance clubs. It's a strange dystopia of all-consuming capitalism run amok.
As pointed out in a Paste article by Madeline Blondeau, the new "Super Mario Bros. Movie" is most certainly a corporate entity, a product used to sell a very specific brand of anti-reality "magic" to a mass audience. The 1993 film may have been anticapitalist in its construct, but the new film is merely an example of capitalism. "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" exists as the kind of distraction King Koopa would have used to placate the masses in 1993. The new film is, in its very existence, corporate propaganda. Even younger audience members will sense the vomitous odor of commercialism lurking in every scene. Leave the theater and buy Mario merch. Like a Koopa with a green shell, march off the precipice.
It's sad to think that a commercial tie-in movie from 1993 — and one produced by Disney, no less — can now stand as something with thought and integrity when compared to the bland nothingness of the new film. Is the 2023 film colorful and easy? Yes. Does it look like the games? Yes. Is it better than the 1993 film? Certainly not.