Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trivia / The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Go To

  • Acting for Two:
    • Charles Martinet voices the Mario brothers' father, as well as Giuseppenote .
    • Jessica DiCicco voices the Mario brothers' mother, the yellow Toad, the woman in the Super Mario Bros. Plumbing commercial, and Pauline; as well as the laughs for Luigi's childhood bully and Baby Peach.
    • In the Swedish dub, Göran Gillinger voices both Foreman Spike and the Koopa General.
    • Yuval Yanai voices both Spike and the Penguin King in Hebrew.
  • Acting in the Dark: According to Charlie Day, who voices Luigi, many plot details were kept from the film's actors, with him only being given just enough of the script to do his voice role.
  • Actor-Shared Background:
    • Aside from Charles Martinet, all the actors who voice members of the Mario Bros.' family (Jessica DiCicco, John DiMaggio, and Rino Romano) are of Italian descent.
    • Giacomo Campeotto, who voices Mario and Luigi's father in the Danish dub, is also of partial Italian descent on his own father's side.
  • Approval of God: Many of the Rare employees who have worked on the original Donkey Kong Country games, including Steve Mayles, Kev Bayliss, David Wise, and Grant Kirkhope (though he was dissatisfied about not being credited for the DK Rap), have all shown their approval towards the film's incorporation of the Donkey Kong Country characters.
  • Ascended Fan Nickname: The Koopa General shouts "Blue Shell" as he tucks himself into his spiny shell and flies like a homing missile. "Blue Shell" is a fan nickname used by the Mario Kart community and the wider geek culture, while Nintendo themselves only refer to this infamous item as the Spiny Shell in the official merchandise.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Originally, Anya Taylor-Joy had no interest in playing Peach, knowing her infamous role as a Damsel in Distress in most games, when she's made a conscious effort not to play customary roles that would demean women. When she found out Peach would instead be a much more proactive character than in most past games, she signed up.
  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A lot of people think Lumalee says, "The only hope is the sweet release of death." It's actually "The only hope is the sweet relief of death."
  • The Cast Showoff: Jack Black as Bowser. Owing to Black's extensive experience as a musician and vocalist, he gets to sing multiple times in the movie.
  • Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Content Leak: The designs for Mario and Peach were leaked via a McDonald’s promotion before the trailers properly showed them off. A slew of promotional posters were also leaked.
  • Cross-Dressing Voices: The male Lumalee is voiced by Juliet Jelenic, daughter of director Michael Jelenic.
  • Creator's Favorite Episode: Writer Matthew Fogel said the movie was his favorite thing he ever worked on, especally since he's a fan of the games.
  • Creator's Oddball: The film was marketed unlike any other Illumination film, lacking pop songs, having Advertising by Association in only one tv spot, and not having shorts on the Blu-Ray.
  • Defictionalization:
    • The SMB Plumbing website is real and fully operational — choosing "book an appointment" will bring you to a website that shows theatres and times to see the movie.
    • To a lesser extent is how fans are recreating segments of the movie using Super Mario Maker 2 as best as they could.
  • Delayed Release Tie-In: The film received a set of McDonald's Happy Meal toys in December 2022, around the film's original release date. This ended up being the reason behind Lumalee's appearance being spoiled early before the final trailer made his official reveal.
  • Deleted Scene: They were fully animated and rendered, and then cut from the film. You can watch it here
  • Executive Meddling:
    • The licensed pop, rap, and rock songs were originally included in the early cut as temporary tracks by Nintendo and Illumination, but according to Shigeru Miyamoto, several of those songs were kept because they felt that the music fit the scenes that they were making. Before the music was finalized, Brian Tyler made scores for those scenes, but unfortunately, much of his work for those scenes ultimately went unused despite his protests to use his material instead, with his musical cues only heard on the official soundtrack. (The only licensed songs that Tyler didn't create a score to replace with in the final cut were in the public domain — "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" (also known as "Habanera") from Carmen, which plays when things go awry during the plumbing job, and "The Wedding March" by Felix Mendelssohn, which plays exactly where you'd expect it to.)
    • According to Luis Leonardo Suarez, the movie's ADR director for the Latin American Spanish dub, Nintendo, Illumination and Universal all initially insisted on shoving local celebrities into the roles for the main leads. While the final cut did had celebrities on the cast, he was able to get away with having them only provide work for random background characters instead.
  • God Never Said That:
    • Soon after the Super Mario Bros. Plumbing commercial was released, fans noticed that the woman's voice sounded very similar to Jeannie Elias, the voice of Princess Toadstool in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. It didn't take long before people started saying that it was Elias herself making a Remake Cameo. This rumor spread like wildfire on YouTube, Twitter, various media outlets, and even this very wiki as a supposed trivia fact. However, there was never any official confirmation from Elias or Illumination that it was indeed Elias, and it'd be confirmed a week after the film's release that Jessica DiCicco was the voice, finally disproving the rumor.
    • Not as widespread as the example above, but there were some rumors that one of the cheering Kongs (specifically the one who yelled "We love you DK!") was voiced by Richard Yearwood (the voice of Donkey Kong) of the Donkey Kong Country cartoon.
  • In Memoriam: The credits feature Satoru Iwata being credited as the "Former President of Nintendo". Later, a string of text dedicated to Laurent de la Chapelle, a computer graphics supervisor who had been working with Illumination Entertainment since the first Despicable Me, can be seen.
  • International Coproduction: The film is a collaboration between the American Universal and Illumination, and the Japanese Nintendo, Toho, Dentsu, and Fuji Television, with animation handled by Illumination's Paris studio.
  • Kids' Meal Toy: In December 2022, the movie received toys at McDonald's. These include two different versions of Mario, Toad in a kart, Luigi with a flashlight, spinning Peach, Donkey Kong holding a barrel, a fire breathing Bowser, and a spinning Lumalee. The UK/European set are instead papercraft versions of the karts and of the Super Mario Bros. Plumbing van.
  • Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.":
    • In a genre-wise and language-wise basis in Japan; this is the first western-animated Super Mario Bros. production released in Japanese, as none of the previous western animated shows featuring Mario (though, funnily enough, not Donkey Kong, as Donkey Kong Countrynote  did get an official Japanese dub), Saturday Supercade, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, were brought to Japan due to Nintendo's meddling. This is especially relevant, as the film uses some elements from the lore of those shows, including the famous "Plumber's Rap" from Super Show, which, in turn, was dubbed to Japanese.
    • Due to many of the Mario games not being localized in India, the film marks the debuts of characters such as the Yoshis, Foreman Spike, the penguins, Lumalee, and the Biddybuds in India.
  • Meaningful Release Date: The final trailer premiered on March 9, 2023, on 2:00 PM PST, or March 10 in most countries in the Eastern Hemisphere. March 10 is sometimes known as the Pop Culture Holiday Mario Day ("MAR10").
  • Missing Trailer Scene:
    • Mario's infamous "Mushroom Kingdom, here we come!" line from the teaser trailer is nowhere in the actual film.
    • While the scene where a Cheep Cheep latches onto Mario happens in the film, it cuts away before Peach and Toad can help him as they did in the trailer.
    • Numerous voice lines from TV spots are not present, such as Mario saying, "My little brother's lost!" and "I'm not afraid, I'll do anything for my brother," and Toad claiming that Mario may never see Luigi again.
  • Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Charles Martinet voices Mario's father in English, French (both European and Canadian), European Spanish, Catalan, German, and Italian. He voices Giuseppe in a whopping twenty-six languages.
  • The Other Darrin: The voice cast from the games has been replaced with Celebrity Voice Actors for the movie besides one Role Reprise.
    • Charles Martinet does not voice Mario or Luigi this time around, with Chris Pratt and Charlie Day covering for those characters instead. Unlike most examples of this trope, he is still involved in the movie as the brothers' father and Giuseppe.
    • Bowser is voiced by Jack Black as opposed to his usual game voice actor, Kenny James. A clip of James growling as Bowser, however, can be heard when Kamek informs Bowser about Mario, as well as during the fight in Brooklyn.
    • Peach and Toad are voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy and Keegan-Michael Key respectively instead of their shared voice actress in the games, Samantha Kelly.
    • Instead of Takashi Nagasako, Donkey Kong is voiced by Seth Rogen and Cranky Kong is voiced by Fred Armisen. Both Rogen and Armisen also fill in for Richard Yearwood and the late Aron Tager from the Donkey Kong Country cartoon, as this is the first speaking roles for the characters since the show ended in 2000. In a broader sense, Rogen also replaces Grant Kirkhope from Donkey Kong 64.
    • Eric Bauza replaces Katsumi Suzuki as Diddy Kong. In a broader sense, Bauza also replaces Andrew Sabiston from the Donkey Kong Country cartoon and Chris Sutherland from Donkey Kong 64.
    • Jessica DiCicco replaces Kate Higgins as Pauline and Samantha Kelly as Baby Peach. In a broader sense, DiCicco also replaces the former's Saturday Supercade voice actress, Judy Strangis, her Donkey Kong Cereal voice actress, Jo Belle Yonley, and the uncredited voice actress who voiced her in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series.
    • In the "Super Japanese version", aside from the fact that this is the first Japanese voice-acted work featuring Mario outside video games since the 1990s, as all the voice-acting is normally done in English (see above), none of their voice actors from that era returns:
    • In the Latin American Spanish dub:
      • Mario is voiced by Raúl Anaya instead of Bernardo Ezeta and the late Víctor Mares, who voiced the character in the cartoons, as well as Víctor Delgado, who voiced him in the 1993 film.
      • Luigi is voiced by Roberto Salguero instead of Ricardo Hill and Manuel Cabral, who voiced him in the '90s cartoons, and José Antonio Macías, who dubbed him in the 1993 film.
      • Mark Pokora, Luis Leonardo Suárez and Germán Fabregat respectively voice Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and Cranky Kong instead of their Donkey Kong Country actors Rubén Cerda, Raúl Carballeda, Ismael Castro, and Arturo Mercado.
      • Ale Pilar voices Princess Peach instead of María Fernanda Morales, Rocío Robledo and Dulce María Romay, who voiced her in the '90s cartoons.
      • Bowser was voiced by José Luis Castañeda, Miguel Ángel Ghigliazza, Leonardo Araujo and Jesús Brock in the '90s cartoons, and by Álvaro Tarcicio for the 1993 film. In this film, Bowser is voiced by Héctor Estrada.
  • The Other Marty:
  • Permanent Placeholder:
    • Juliet Jelenic, the daughter of co-director Michael Jelenic, provided the scratch voice for Lumalee with the intent to use another actor for the final voice. The crew ultimately kept Juliet's voice because they couldn't find an actor to provide the desired dissonance.
    • Several pop, rap, and rock songs were used in place of a finished score for the assembly cut of the film. Despite Brian Tyler later creating material to replace them with, Nintendo and Illumination elected to include the songs instead. The cues from the OST and the songs that they were replaced with are as follows:
  • Playing Against Type:
  • Posthumous Credit: Former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who died in 2015, is given an honorary credit in the film as the "former President of Nintendo", despite passing away before development on the film began. However, he was involved in the early negotiations with Sony Pictures Animation back in 2014.
  • Production Posse: Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelanic reunite with three of their Teen Titans Go! cast members, Khary Payton, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Scott Menville.
  • Promoted Fanboy:
    • Chris Pratt himself is very enthusiastic about voicing Mario, considering it a childhood wish come true.
    • Jack Black said much of the same during the direct revealing the first trailer, claiming that playing Bowser was a childhood dream.
    • Seth Rogen stated during the second trailer that he's a lifelong Nintendo fan, and his dream was that if Mario ever got a film adaptation, he wanted a role in it. His pet dog is even named Zelda.
    • "Peaches" music video director Cole Bennett expressed during a "behind the scenes" video that it was a "dream come true" to work with Jack Black, and the director of photography, Franklin Ricart, called it a "childhood moment" to be doing a piece used for the Mario movie.
  • Real-Life Relative: In the film's European Spanish dub, Mario and Luigi are played by real life brothers, Guillermo and Rafa Romero, respectively.
  • Release Date Change: Originally scheduled for December 21, 2022, it was announced on April 25, 2022 that the film would instead be released on April 7, 2023. However, Universal later moved the release date up to two days earlier in the US and in over 60 international territories.
  • Role Reprise:
    • Via archive audio, Kenny James returns to voice Bowser's grunts and roars.
    • Kazumi Totaka provides Yoshi's cry in The Stinger, as recycled audio from the games.
    • Shy Guys still make sounds provided by Nate Bihldorff.
    • In the European Spanish dub, Rafa Romero reprises his role as Luigi from the European Spanish dub of the 1993 live action film.
  • Self-Adaptation: Hoping to avoid a repeat of the infamous 1993 live-action film, Nintendo was directly involved in producing this movie with Illumination, with Shigeru Miyamoto himself being a producer on it.
  • Short Run in Peru: The film was scheduled to be released in most of the world such as the UK, Ireland, Australia, France, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, and most of Latin America during March 2023. However, the release dates were later changed a few months before they were scheduled to be released due to unknown reasons.
  • Stunt Casting: When the English voice cast for the movie was first announced, some fans criticized the choice of Chris Pratt as Mario (over longtime Mario voice Charles Martinet) as an example of this trope. These persisted even after the first teaser trailer was shown, where Pratt had only two brief lines in what sounded like more or less his normal talking voice. These criticisms did wane somewhat as the marketing continued and more clips were revealed, but only ebbed after the release of the movie, with critics and fans generally agreeing that, while not a highlight of the film, Pratt's performance was appropriate for this more down-to-earth take on Mario, and he does in fact change his voice with a subdued but serviceable Brooklyn accent rather than just using his normal talking voice.
  • Throw It In!:
    • According to Jack Black, the idea of Bowser crooning a love song wasn't thought up "until halfway through the recording process". When Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic first pitched the idea to Black, he was initially hesitant, but after they impressed him with a short demo of "Peaches", he agreed to turn it into a full song (with the help of his fellow collaborator, John Spiker).
    • Toad sings a short, improvised song as he joins Mario and Princess Peach on their journey.
  • Two Voices, One Character: While Jack Black provides his spoken dialogue, Bowser's grunts and roars are still supplied by Kenny James, his voice actor from the games (though they are archived audio rather than new recordings).
  • Uncredited Role:
    • Grant Kirkhope is not mentioned in the film's credits as the composer of the DK Rap, which is simply attributed to Donkey Kong 64.
    • Due to most of the cast being regulated to "Additional Voices" status, several roles are also uncredited. These include the couple that hires the Mario Bros at the start of the film (with the wife being voiced by Cree Summer), the palace guards, the Kong bodyguard who takes the Mushroom Kingdom trio to see Cranky, and the Sledge Bro that Invincible Mario sends flying into several members of Bowser's army during the final battle.
  • Viral Marketing: The SMBPlumbing.com URL listed in a TV ad for the film takes you to a real website, set up to look like one made by Mario and Luigi for their In-Universe plumbing business. The website also features some easter eggs like a clickable manhole that reveals a new poster◊ for the movie, and plenty of icons that play sound effects when clicked, such as the classic Warp Pipe sound, the countdown at the start of a Mario Kart race, and the Nintendo GameCube start-up jingle. Additionally, if you click on the broken page image right above the testimonials and click the 2nd, 3rd, and 1st Warp Pipes there in that order, you'll hear an orchestral version of the series main theme; alternatively, clicking the 2nd, 1st, and 3rd pipes in that order will show Mario atop the 2nd pipe and play a remix of the underground theme that ends with a snippet of the SMB3 Hammer Bros. theme. And if you call the number in the commercial, a prerecorded message from Luigi is played. Subscribing to the cell phone number to receive frequent text messages also periodically gives other posters◊.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Shortly before Nintendo went with Universal, an animated Mario movie was originally planned to be made by Sony Pictures. Sony came close to finalizing a deal with Nintendo back in 2014, with a plan for Genndy Tartakovsky to direct and Avi Arad to produce for a planned July 2019 release. Unfortunately for them, this happened shortly before the infamous Sony Pictures breach that same year, which not only leaked those plans, but would cause the deal to fall off and for the film to get Quietly Cancelled shortly afterwards. However, talks evidently continued between the two parties at some point, seeing as Avi Arad and Sony Pictures eventually collaborated with Nintendo to adapt The Legend of Zelda into a live-action film.
    • Video game composer Grant Kirkhope had tried to get involved with the film's production, but to no avail. The movie does use the "DK Rap", but doesn't credit him for it.
    • According to the behind the scenes of the "Peaches" music video, the original concept pitched by director Cole Bennett involved Jack Black out in a backyard actually singing to a real peach. However, the concept was changed for, as Cole put it, "reasons out of my control", though he also noted he was still really excited about the final version.
    • Bits in Brian Tyler's score, such as moments in "World 1-1" and "Karts!", were removed in the final version in favor of licensed music. Most notably, an entire song, "Driving Me Bananas", went unused in favor of a-ha's "Take On Me." This also almost happened to the track "Superstars", which was going to be replaced with Jump by Van Halen, but Brian Tyler fought and eventually won for the usage of it instead.
    • Sebastian Maniscalco auditioned for the role of Mario before the casting of Chris Pratt. He went on to play Foreman Spike.
    • Early concept art shows that Fire Mario, Captain Toad, Toadette, Toadsworth, Yoshi, Lakitu, Thwomp, Boos, Boom Boom, Toadies, Monty Moles, Rocky Wrenches, Boomerang Bros. Fire Bros., and Squawks were planned to be in the film. Another concept art also shows Luigi escaping from his cage and using his wrench to rescue Cranky and the other prisoners. In the movie, however, he lost his tools after getting attacked by the Dry Bones, is always in his cage and no escape attempts were shown. It was probably part of a subplot for Luigi that didn't make the final cut. Yoshi doesn't appear, though his species has a brief cameo and he's alluded to in the post-credit scene, the Blue Toad in Peach's Castle has a similar role to Toadsworth and Mario couldn't use the Fire Flower against DK during their battle because the gorilla blew on it. There's also an image of Mario in the plumber's van which is labeled Luigi Bros and Cranky would have looked how he did in the games.
    • A fully rendered shot of Super Mario beating more of Bowser's goons in the climax was originally included, then cut from the final film. You can see it here
    • Apparently according to Matthew Fogel (the writer of the movie), Bowser was originally going to be even meaner and more cruel than he already was in the movie, but then they decided to give him some more likability (most likely his Laughably Evil demeanor).
    • He also revealed that the original script could've been 1 hour 45 minutes in lenght in order to haver more emotion and character development, but much of it was cut because executives believed that children couldn't sit through a film that was longer than 90 minutes note ; they also considered most of it to be exposition for some reason.
    • The reason why the typical green Yoshi doesn't have a main role in the film was due to not fitting in the story; thus, the story didn't want to include too many characters.
    • According to concept art by story artist Jeff Diffenderfer, Princess Daisy — who is absent from the final film — was originally planned to appear in the film as a supporting character.
  • Word of God: The directors discussed how Nintendo was heavily involved with the designs of Mario and Luigi's family, and listed some details about them. Uncles Tony and Arthur are both the brothers of their dad, and Arthur's wife is named Aunt Marie.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top