How The Super Mario Bros. Movie's Post-Credits Scene Sets Up A Sequel
This article contains spoilers for "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."
At the beginning of the second act of Aaron Horvath's and Michael Jelenic's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," Mario (Chris Pratt) has been invited to join Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to leave the Mushroom Kingdom and trek to the faraway Donkey Kong country to ask their leader for military assistance. In a nod to the many video games that inspired the film, Mario, Peach, and the stalwart Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) traverse a wide variety of landscapes on their way. They climb mountains, walk across grasslands, and avoid flying fish through a land of 10,000 lakes. One of the lands the trio travels through is an island populated by hundreds of friendly-looking, colorful dinosaurs that any video game fan will recognize as Yoshis.
Yoshi, of course, was a character that first appeared in the 1990 game "Super Mario World." A player could mount Yoshi and ride him into dangerous territory. Yoshi's long tongue and insatiable appetite allowed a player to eat any number of enemy characters in a single bite. Yoshi was also perhaps the most maligned character in the Mario games, as few players felt any remorse as they leaped off of Yoshi's back in midair, saving themselves and condemning Yoshi to death in the chasm below.
Just as the sequel to "Super Mario World" was called "Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island" (1995), so too it seems that the sequel to "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" will feature Yoshi in a more intimate capacity. A post-credits stinger reveals that a single Yoshi egg somehow made its way from the fantasy world of the Mushroom Kingdom into the sewers of Brooklyn. The egg cracks open ...
Seeing as Yoshis already appeared earlier in the film, the possibility of meeting another Yoshi isn't so unique. But this Yoshi is special.
Yoshi!
It seems that humans from Earth and magical creatures from the Mushroom Kingdom can now pass back and forth between dimensions, willy-nilly. The film's climax took place in the street of Brooklyn, with the evil turtle dragon Bowser (Jack Black) battling the Mario Bros. for a magical star. All the talking animals and mutant creatures were there to witness the conflagration. After the fight was settled, everyone was sucked back into their appropriate dimensions. The Mario Bros. themselves elected to return to the Mushroom Kingdom, as they now seemed more at home there.
The part of the story audiences didn't see was what it would look like with a Mushroom Kingdom character lost on Earth without a guide. It seems a sequel to "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" would involve an introductory sequence of Yoshi hatching and running amok in Brooklyn before the titular Bros unite to catch it.
It's worth noting that the 1995 game "Yoshi's Island" was a prequel. Yoshi cared for an infant Mario, accidentally dropped on the Island by a clumsy stork. "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" did feature a flashback scene to Mario and Luigi as toddlers ... will the sequel feature more baby Mario? And if it does, will he be just as annoying as he is in the game? Will there be time travel involved?
It's possible. Deep-cut Nintendo nerds might be able to point to the 1993 MS-DOS game "Mario's Time Machine" as precedent. That game would eventually make its way to the NES and the SNES, and featured Mario traveling through human history, retrieving notable artifacts Bowser — also using a time machine — had stolen. It was an educational game, but if Universal wants to keep us on our toes, then "Mario's Time Machine" would be the way to go.