Hi everyone. I’m doing this partly to test out titling, and see how well that works, and partly to tell you all about two films I recently watched.
Super Mario Bros. (1993)
For years, Super Mario Bros. has been something of a bad joke, arguably the start of the “video game movie curse” that every video game adaptation has tried to avoid. And even despite gathering a cult following, the virulent distaste towards the movie expressed by stars Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper provides ample ammunition for the people who hate this movie, and believe me, people loathe this movie.
What do I think? Honestly… I unironically love this film? I went in thinking that it was going to be so-bad-it’s-good, but after finishing it I was genuinely confused as to why the movie got so much hate when it first came out. Like, sure it’s not the most accurate adaptation of the games, but let’s be honest, the first Mario game with a story deeper than “collect these things” wouldn’t come out for another three years after this movie, and the central conceit of Mario and Luigi being Brooklyn plumbers sent to another dimension was commonly accepted lore at the time. As for Daisy, given how pretty much all her backstory, even to this day, comes from a single Game Boy game, there’s nothing to say that she isn’t a cyberpunk princess in the games. Indeed, I think this is the very first piece of Mario media to establish Luigi and Daisy as love interests, with them being suitably adorable and sweet.