Trivia / Super Mario Bros. (1993)

• Acting for Two: Though credited for her role as Daisy, Samantha Mathis also played her mother in the film's prologue. Likewise, Frank Welker is Yoshi, the Goombas and the two dinosaurs in the animated opening (credited as "Creature Voices")
• Actor-Inspired Element: When The King turns back into a human, it was Lance Henriksen's idea for him to cough up fungus. Henriksen used Rice Krispies in his hand to achieve the effect.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $42 million (not counting marketing costs), $48 million (counting them). Box office, $20,915,465.
• Breakaway Pop Hit:
  • Featuring the hit single "Almost Unreal" by Roxette. It was going to be used for the soundtrack for Hocus Pocus initially, but was moved to SMB instead.
  • George Clinton's cover of Was (Not Was)' "Walk the Dinosaur" (with the Goombas as backing vocalists, no less), later Covered Up by Queen Latifah for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which coincidentally also featured John Leguizamo.
• Cast the Expert: Mojo Nixon, who played Toad, has stated in interviews that "...I'm not really an actor. I was a drunk musician playing a drunk musician."
• Creator's Apathy:
  • Despite being given creative control by Lightmotive, Nintendo had no interest in overseeing the film's production. To them, the Super Mario brand was too big to fail and this was more or less an experiment to test the strength of the franchise. Nintendo would quickly learn from this after the film's release, with them becoming far more involved and strict in adaptations since.
  • After the script they had initially seen (and loved enough to sign on) had been revised again and again, often in the middle of filming, the cast eventually gave up on trying to make a good film. The script was getting several revisions a week (often more than one a day) so the actors gave up on reading the new versions, except just before having to act out the scene, and focused more on just getting through the day.
• Creator Backlash: Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo disliked the film, though the latter seems to have eventually warmed up to the film, per this video. The experience getting through the film was extremely difficult due to on-set accidents and the directors constantly changing things as filming went on. Leguizamo stated he and Hoskins required a lot of alcohol to go through production, and that marijuana was also very common among the cast as well.
  • Being the film that ruined his career, as well as the onset turmoil and conflicts with the producers over the script and editing, Rocky Morton once stated in an interview that his most prominent memory of the film is "humiliation."
  • This was John Leguizamo's first leading film role, and he joined his costars in railing on the experience, though he's far less negative about the movie nowadays. Though he admits the movie isn't very good, he nonetheless has fond memories of working on it, says they all had a blast and was thrilled to get to work with Hoskins and Hopper. Leguizamo also points out that even though the film wasn't great, the fact that people remember it decades later means it certainly left its mark for better or worse. At the very least, he much more prefers this movie to the later adaption by Illumination Entertainment, finding that for all of the original's faults, he was pleased that the studio was willing to take a risk on casting a Latino actor as one of the leads, refusing to watch the new one altogether because he disliked that neither Mario nor Luigi was voiced by a Latino actor.^note The film itself has two Latino actors in its supporting cast; Anya Taylor-Joy, who voiced Princess Peach, is of Argentinian and Spanish descent, and Fred Armisen, who voiced Cranky Kong, is half-Venezuelan. Nonetheless, he hasn't ruled out participating in a sequel to said adaptation, on the condition that Illumination makes a greater effort at diversifying the cast.
  • Conversely, many of the non-leads have stated it was one of their favorite movies to work on. Some even say it is their favorite movie. This also rings true with the effects crew, with Makeup Effects Lab founder Al Apone in particular enjoying his time on the film.
  • The film was this for Bob Hoskins, who stated he only took the role of Mario for the sake of one of his sons who was a huge Mario fan. Unfortunately, the film ended up being an unpleasant experience for Hoskins, as he clashed with Morton and Jankel and grew exasperated by the script's frequent rewrites, which prevented him from getting a handle on his character. His only positive memories involved some of his costars, with whom he would share alcohol (and occasionally marijuana) during days off from shooting. Hoskins remained bitter about the experience for the rest of his life, as shown by an interview with The Guardian's Rosanna Greenstreet in 2011:
    Rosanna Greenstreet: What is the worst job you've done?
    Bob Hoskins: Super Mario Brothers.
    Rosanna Greenstreet: What has been your biggest disappointment?
    Bob Hoskins: Super Mario Brothers.
    Rosanna Greenstreet: If you could edit your past, what would you change?
    Bob Hoskins: I wouldn't do Super Mario Brothers.
  • Dennis Hopper often admitted his regret in working on the film before dying of prostate cancer in May 2010, and claimed he only did it for the money. He famously claimed that his son Henry, after seeing the film, asked why he'd done it. When Dennis jokingly replied that he used the money to buy Henry shoes, Henry quipped "Dad, I didn't need shoes that badly."
  • In the infamous LA Times article that covered the movie during its production, nearly everyone interviewed didn't even bother to hide their contempt for the production or their lack of faith in the film. Likewise, despite the article coming out less a nine months before the film's release, no one had any issues with spoiling the film's story and its plot twists such as the fungus engulfing the city being the de-evolved King.
• Creator Killer:
  • Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields), the producer, never really recovered from the film's failure, though the similarly In Name Only adaptation of The Scarlet Letter he directed that was released two years later certainly didn't help.
  • Rocky Morton has yet to direct another feature-length film since Super Mario Bros., with or without his ex-wife. He has even admitted in interviews that most of his projects stop dead in their tracks once his potential producers learn he directed this film.
  • Annabel Jankel (now going by AJ Jankel) did not direct another theatrically released feature film until 2018's Tell It to the Bees, 25 years later.
  • For Nintendo's interest in films as a whole. It would be another 30 years before another Mario film was made.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Shigeru Miyamoto admitted that he liked how the movie took creative liberties, preferring it to the anime The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach! which he felt was too close to the games.
• Deleted Scene: Nearly a half-hour of footage was cut to give the movie a proper running time. Deleted scenes include:
  • An extended sequence of Koopa chasing Daisy's mother in New York, which featured him gazing admiringly at the buildings which would later inspire his warped construction projects in Dinohattan.
  • Mario and Luigi actually confronting the "Scapelli brothers", Mike and Doug, in the River Front Café. They threaten the café's owner, Pascal, by invoking their boss' name. Pascal takes Mario aside and offers him and Luigi a free lunch to make it up to them, which leads to:
  • An alternate scene of Mario and Luigi eating. Daisy enters the café and uses the payphone inside, slipping on a wet floor as she leaves. Luigi catches her and the movie continues that way.
  • Mario and Luigi getting ready for their dinner date, during which Luigi expresses embarrassment at being a plumber. Mario chastises him and tells him he has no "family pride."
  • An extended sequence in the de-evolution chamber, during which one of the devo technicians is de-evolved into slime. A puddle can still be seen on the floor in the final film.
  • Iggy and Spike getting drunk at the Boom Boom Bar and rapping an anti-Koopa song, which Lena cites later to Koopa as them "preaching your overthrow."
  • Various assorted scenes, including additional sequences from the cut "family pride" subplot.
• Development Hell: Went through a rapid version of this, with over a half-dozen different writers, three sets of directors, and both Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman expressed interest in playing Mario before executives rejected them. In the end, the script was almost entirely rewritten on set with mutual silence between the cast, director, producers, and Nintendo brass, leading to postponed release dates and shooting schedules way over the promised time.
• Directed by Cast Member: The Latin American Spanish dub was directed by Rubén Moya, who voiced Anthony Scapelli.
• Distanced from Current Events: Following 9/11, many edits of the film remove the shots of the World Trade Center transforming into its counterpart from Koopa's dimension. However, because these shots are intercut with Scapelli's arriving at the building site, this has the side-effect of Scapelli suddenly appearing out of nowhere when Koopa accidentally turns him into a chimp.
• Dueling Works: The film came out only two weeks before another special effects-heavy adventure movie focusing on dinosaurs hit theaters as part of popular wave of Dinosaur Media in the 90s. Needless to say, it was a not a very evenly matched competition and it certainly didn't help the already floundering box office take of Super Mario Bros..
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Mojo Nixon, who played Toad, was legitimately terrified of Dennis Hopper's performance as Koopa, particularly the scene where he was de-evolving and strapped to the chair.
  • In the nightclub scene, Lena drinks a shot from a glass containing a live worm. Fiona Shaw was under the impression that the worm was fake until she felt it wiggling from her lips. She managed to keep a professional composure about it only for the directors to request that she redo it at least three more times. They also requested that she go to bed with her character's pet snake, with the reptile nearly strangling Shaw in her sleep at least once.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel hated the fantasy-based elements of the script and only agreed to direct the film if they could rewrite it to be more gritty and sci-fi. In the end, the producers feared it wasn't kid-friendly enough, so they forced heavy rewrites and barred directors from contributing to them. Further changes to the script in terms of special effects and character development limited their vision even further.
  • In the end, over twenty minutes of footage was cut to get Mario and Luigi into the parallel world sooner while the atrociously animated intro was inserted to make up for it.
• Fake Nationality: The British Bob Hoskins and Colombian-American John Leguizamo play the Italian (or Italian-American) Mario and Luigi Mario, respectively.
• Focus Group Ending: More like a focus group beginning, as test audiences weren't getting the concept of the parallel dimensions, so a pixelated intro was made in postproduction to spell it out.
• Follow the Leader: The directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, as well as producer Roland Joffé, went in hoping to make this movie their Batman (1989), which is what put fellow eccentric filmmaker Tim Burton on the map. With that in mind, the tone being darker and the setting being that of a stylized sprawling cityscape make a bit more sense.
• Friendship on the Set: Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo became good friends during the film's notoriously bad production and admitted later that getting drunk together was the only thing keeping them going as they how much of a disaster it was going to end up being.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • The cast and crew disliked Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel for their allegedly obnoxious and controlling behaviors, their regular rewrites of the script, and for making major changes to the film without telling each other or members of the production. When the LA Times arrived to write a behind the scenes article about the movie two months after filming had begun, none of the cast and crew they interviewed bothered to hide their contempt for the directors and the film as a whole.
  • According to Richard Edson (Spike), Dennis Hopper showed up to set for the scene where Koopa is having a mud bath, and when he got another in a long list of script revisions, he proceeded to blow his stack at Morton and Jankel for their incompetence, right in front of cast and crew (and especially embarrassing Fiona Shaw). Even when they called a meeting over it and brought him into the producers' office, he just kept right on going, for two hours, until after all that, he finally agreed to the revisions.
  • According to Morton and Jankel, they were chewed out by the producers nearly every night of the production for going overbudget and for all of the many issues occurring. During the film's last three weeks, they were told not to return to the set and their duties were taken over by Roland Joffé. They were also locked out of the editing room until they got the support of the Director's Guild of America.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The official novelization has long gone out of print.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: For the film's 30th anniversary, a collectors' edition Blu-Ray was announced that included multiple scripts, books, film cells, stickers, and lobby cards, with the DVDs themselves having extensive bonus features as well, including audio commentaries, deleted scenes, a workprint cut, featurettes, and archive interviews.
• Looping Lines: According to the post-production supervisor, this had the most ADR-looping of any film she had ever encountered.
• The Merch: Like most blockbuster movies of the time, there was a sizable marketing push involved in promoting the film, with everything from pogs to action figures to tie-in books being made. There was also a short manga adaptation in the spring 1993 issue of CoroCoro Comic.
• Money, Dear Boy:
  • While Lightmotive gave Nintendo the merchandising rights in exchange for lower price for the license, which is effectively giving up a massive portion of profits a studio would usually get, that's only because they saw the film as a stepping off point. They believing the film was a sure to be hit due to the name alone and that the box office would give them a large financial boost and that the movie's fame would turn them into the next big name studio that would get tons of lucrative licenses and film deals in the future. As is obvious, the complete opposite happened.
  • This is the reason why the film has one of the highest Embarrassed Actor Quotients since 1990. Apparently, many very good actors were having critical shortages of money around the same time...both Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins admitted they did it for the paycheck (in Hopper's case, it may have been a joke).
    Dennis Hopper: I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time — he’s now eighteen — he said, "Dad, I think you’re probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?" and I said, "Well, Henry, I did that so you could have shoes," and he said, "Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly."
• No Export for You: Second Sight's 2014 Blu-ray and digital release of the movie boasts far superior picture quality and features than Disney's barebones and Laserdisc-quality DVD release. Too bad that Disney mandated to Second Sight that the Blu-ray could only be available in Region B and not playable elsewhere...
• No Stunt Double: Most of the stunts involving Mario was done by Bob Hoskins with little to no assistance.
• On-Set Injury:
  • During the chase through the pipe, someone thought that the mattress was going too slow, so they loosened one of the wires that was pulling them. When the crew came back from lunch, nobody checked the rig. They then shot the scene where Mario and the Brookyln Babes flew out of the tunnel, only to find they were going way too fast and out of control. One of the Babes almost fell off the mattress twenty five feet onto solid concrete. They all stayed on, but when it hit the ground, it flipped over and they all smashed their heads. Aside from a few bruises, they were okay.
  • John Leguizamo accidentally broke Bob Hoskins' finger while doing a stunt with the Mario Bros. van.
  • Hoskins claimed that during the course of the production, he got stabbed four times, got electrocuted and very nearly drowned. "And that's just what happened to me."
  • Rocky Morton accidentally scalded the shoulder of one the film's extras when he poured hot coffee onto his Goomba costume in an attempt to make it look more dirty. John Leguizamo recalls that Morton shrugged off the incident since it was "just an extra" while Morton asserts that he had thought the coffee was lukewarm, that he had gotten the extra's permission before pouring it onto him and that he immediately apologized and got cold water for the man's shoulder.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • There's a puddle of slime on the floor of the de-evolution chamber. This is left over from a deleted scene where a technician is de-evolved into slime.
  • There was a talking Mario action figure that said, among other things, "Nobody touches my tools", which is a line from a deleted scene where he confronts the Scapelli Bros.
  • The Running Gag involving the pizza delivery that never gets to Koopa was supposed to end with the delivery guy finally arriving at the very end and throwing the pizza onto Koopa, who's been turned into primordial ooze.
• Real-Life Relative: Production designer David L. Snyder's daughter, Amy, was a makeup artist during filming.
• Romance on the Set: Lance Henriksen met his second wife Jane Pollack on the set. Likewise with John Leguizamo and Samantha Mathis as they started dating during production. Leguizamo even wrote once it was the only good thing that came out of the film's production.
• Screwed by the Network: Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were hired to make the film dark and gritty like Max Headroom. However, right after the sets were finished and the plot was storyboarded, the producers got cold feet on making a mature Super Mario film and made family friendly rewrites to the script without input from the directors, who did everything they could to keep the film as close to their original vision as possible. The fights between the directors and the producers for control of the film is one of the major reasons for the chaos during the movie's production.
• Sequel in Another Medium: The webcomic began publishing two decades after the original film's release.
• Spared by the Cut: Originally Toad was going to die by being turned into slime in the Devo chamber, while the friendly Goomba that Daisy helps was a separate character named Hark. Thanks to Mojo Nixon's screen presence the decision was made to combine the characters, with the sliming victim being changed to a technician.
• Star-Making Role: Despite the film's critical and box-office failure, this was possibly what catapulted John Leguizamo into stardom.
• Star-Derailing Role: Unlike Leguizamo, Richard Edson's career never recovered from the film's critical and box-office failure, as he starred in indie films and smaller projects afterwards.
• Stillborn Franchise: The movie's troubled production, box-office failure, and resulting mandate from Nintendo ended the production of a sequel, and dashed studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg's dreams of bringing Nintendo products into Disney's business model. More drastically, it put Nintendo off licensing their products for live-action films, with the next one being Pokémon Detective Pikachu in 2019, and Mario adaptations as well, as only in 2018 Nintendo allowed another film version of the franchise to begin production, this time as an animated film from Illumination Entertainment.
• Throw It In!: Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson improvised most of their lines as Spike and Iggy.
• Troubled Production: The film suffered from a nightmare mix of this and Executive Meddling (more details in the dedicated page), and started a trend of poorly received video game film adaptations that continues to this day (though somewhat alleviated by Pokémon Detective Pikachu and the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise since). As mentioned above, the script was changed right before filming begun and kept being rewritten on-set, the directors were Control Freaks who did not endear themselves to the cast and crew - John Leguizamo declared that he and Bob Hoskins only made it through production through copious amounts of alcohol, while Dennis Hopper snapped and went a long, profane rant on-set about how Morton and Jenkel were the most unprofessional directors he'd ever worked with right before a scene. The resulting failure made Nintendo take a more hands-on approach regarding adaptations, which were mostly denied, specially those made by Western studios (until the aforementioned Detective Pikachu in 2019, there was only the Donkey Kong Country cartoon in the late 90s), and aside from letting Bowser be in Wreck-It Ralph, the company would be soured enough by Disney to grant their theme park license to rival Universal Studios instead (which also led to them relenting on Universal making another Mario movie, but this time animated with Nintendo having much more creative input).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Dustin Hoffman expressed interest in playing Mario as a treat for his kids but was rejected by Minoru Arakawa who believed him to be an ill fit for the role. Danny Devito was Nintendo's top pick to play Mario and he was also offered the opportunity to direct, with negotiations going so far that he allowed the studio to use his name in early pre-production interviews. However, he wanted to read a script first and dropped out when the studio failed to provide him with one. Tom Hanks was then offered the leading role only for Nintendo and the producers to quickly decide against hiring him. His then-recent movie output had been underwhelming and he was asking for too big of a paycheck, so Hanks was replaced with Hoskins, whom the executives thought was more profitable. Bruno Kirby was also considered.
  • Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all considered for Koopa.
  • According to Mojo Nixon, he was cast in the role of Toad because the production wanted an actual musician for the character, but their first choice Tom Waits was unavailable. Nixon's agent pitched him to casting as a "third-rate Tom Waits—for half-price."
  • Harold Ramis, who was a fan of Super Mario, was the producers' original choice for director but he turned down their offer. Ramis would later remark on his relief in having turned down the job due to its many issues.
  • The first draft of the script, Super Mario Bros. (1991), was a pure fantasy movie. Bowser only disguises himself as a human in his first two scenes, the Princess character is named Hildy, and Bowser wants to marry her in order to obtain the Crown of Invincibility with which to take over the Mushroom Kingdom. Actual game enemies such as Piranha Plants and Thwomps make appearances, Toad accompanies the Marios throughout their journey as a main character, a baby dinosaur named Junior thinks Mario is his mother, Luigi gets Raccoon Power at one point, one of Bowser's lackeys (a possible prototype for Kamek) tells Mario "Your Princess Is in Another Castle!", Mario and Luigi sing a Villain Song about Bowser, and Bowser ends up falling into a pit of lava. In other words, this draft is much more faithful to the games.
  • Five early scripts, including the aforementioned Fantasy script, can be read on The Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive's Scripts page.
  • According to this issue of TV Guide, the movie was originally planned to be released in 1991 and would have been animated.
  • Jerry Goldsmith was attached to score the film but pulled out due to scheduling conflicts (Alan Silvestri filled in).
  • Mario's character was written differently before Bob Hoskins was attached to the role. Screenwriter Parker Bennett described him as "Bill Murray-esque", closer in age to Luigi,^note Hoskins and Leguizamo were twenty-two years apart. and that they had Bruno Kirby in mind for the role.
    [...]what we decided is, "Okay, Mario has a big chip on his shoulder about being a plumber. He’s inherited his dad’s business [and] it's not what he wants to do"; it’s sort of a It's a Wonderful Life thing with Jimmy Stewart at the bank when he wants to be traveling the world.
    […] And in the end he learns through the adventure that he’s the greatest plumber in the world and he needs his brother and they’re a team together and that was sort of what we were trying to do for that.
  • The biggest one was the reason Jeffrey Katzenberg bought the rights to this film for Disney. Had the film been successful, the Walt Disney Company would have then started efforts to market Nintendo and their franchises, led of course by the Super Mario franchise, in the Disney Theme Parks. Katzenberg and Disney Animation were also working with Sega to a limited degree for the same reasons with the Aladdin video game, and both attempts virtually faded when Katzenberg departed the company the next year. Their attempt specifically to bring the Nintendo franchises into the Disney parks ended up biting them in the ass later on when major rival Universal Studios struck a licensing deal with Nintendo in May 2015 (and it ended up stinging Disney even more when Universal later announced that it would be producing an animated Mario movie through Illumination Entertainment in 2018, with the end result released in 2023).
  • According to creature effects artist Dave Nelson, he and his team were up against the Jim Henson's Creature Shop to create Yoshi, in stark contrast to the Goombas and King Koopa transformation, which were always planned to be the work of their respective teams (Al Apone's MEL Inc. and Rob Burman).
  • Dinohatten was originally going to be called Dinoyork and the name was changed fairly late into the production, with Dinoyork still being used at least eight weeks into filming.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: One of the main sources of frustration in the production was that the producers kept wanting rewrites to the story to make the film more family friendly while the directors made also frequent changes to try and maintain their more mature vision of the film. Writer Ed Solomon once claimed to have seen Rocky Morton holding a script that was literally taped together from all the various drafts of the film.

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