Super Mario Bros. (1993) / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- The Reveal that Iggy and Spike have always been loyal to Daisy's father comes rather out of nowhere, as right up until the scene at the Boom-Boom Bar, they were shown to be loyal minions of Koopa. Did their increased intelligence make them realize they were doing the wrong thing and prompt a Heel–Face Turn, and they just told Daisy they were supporters of her father to convince her to trust them in an urgent moment? Or were they really loyalists all along and they kept screwing up their attempts to kidnap Daisy on purpose, until they felt that they had to finally actually do it or else Koopa would have them killed?
- After his intelligence boost, Spike asks Iggy a mathematical equation and answers it himself. The answer is wrong. Was this a failed attempt at showcasing Spike's increased intellect, or was it actually intentionally wrong to clue us in that Iggy and Spike are still not as smart as they think they are?
Award Snub: Regardless of what people may think of its overall quality, some viewers believe that the movie should've been at least nominated at the Academy Awards for its special effects and production design.
Awesome Music:
- Another memorable gem of a score from Hollywood composing legend Alan Silvestri, the man behind the iconic themes from Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and The Avengers (2012).
- Joe Satriani's "Speed of Light", the BGM for the mattress sled scene, is considered one of the best parts of the movie even to its detractors.
- "Almost Unreal" by Roxette, even if they didn't like it being used for the movie.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- The scene where King Koopa orders a pizza. It comes out of nowhere, raises all sorts of questions (the teenaged clerk clearly recognizes him but treats him like any other customer, and the Koopa Special implies that Koopa knows him and orders from there a lot) and contributes absolutely nothing to the story (aside from setting up a minor Brick Joke where Koopa wonders why he hasn't gotten his pizza yet). This is because the actual punchline (the pizza boy finally arriving after Koopa had been degenerated into slime and throwing the pizza onto the primordial ooze) was cut out in post-production.
- The talking Sauropod and Triceratops in the animated opening, which is made jarring by the film later showing other non-sapient dinosaurs which are normal animals that don't talk.
Critical Backlash: It's nearly unanimous that the movie is an In Name Only adaptation of the games, but many viewers find it to be a fairly weird, trippy and entertaining little flick if taken as its own self-contained story divorced from the source material. ^note Indeed, when The Super Mario Bros. Movie was released thirty years later, even many professional critics derided that film as an overly safe and unambitious take on the franchise, and commended this film for at least attempting to stand on its own two feet and approaching the material in a way that nothing before or since has done, even if the execution wasn't terribly successful.
Cult Classic: For some fans of the Mario series, this is must-see. The Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive is a thriving fan community devoted to the movie that's even had exclusive interviews with members of the cast and crew.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Big Bertha, the bouncer at the bar, is popular for her role, muscles, and positive representation.
- The cattle prod-wielding granny doesn't get a name but is one of the most memorable characters in the film and is the catalyst for the find-the-rock subplot.
- The Bob-omb, despite being an object, is beloved for its cute look and being the most accurate thing in the movie.
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Many fans tend to prefer the original 1991 draft and the more straight-forward fantasy approach it had over the infamous final film due to the script being more faithful to the games.
Fandom Rivalry: One has started with The Super Mario Bros. Movie due to having a vastly different approach to adapting the source material. Unironic fans prefer this film because it played fast and loose with the franchise, and criticize the latter film for being too safe. Ironic fans consider this film to be So Bad, It's Good and enjoy its ridiculousness, finding the 2023 movie to be too generic and boring to make fun of. Meanwhile, those who prefer the latter one feel this one was So Bad, It's Good at best, and think that film is much better due in no small part to being a much more Truer to the Text adaptation.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While still not highly regarded, the film has a much higher reception in Japan. While the film is seen as a horrible mangling of the Mario franchise in most other countries, Japanese audiences thought it was a good sci-fi movie, distancing it from its connections with the Mario franchise at large. And even fans who see it as a Mario adaptation think of it as So Okay, It's Average at worst. This extends to Nintendo figures Shigeru Miyamoto and Shigesato Itoi, who thought very highly of the film.
Genre Turning Point: Not so much for genre as for technological advances. At the time of this film's production, Industrial Light & Magic had a virtual monopoly on digital film editing and visual effects. Instead of going to ILM, this film turned to new products that were still in development, including Kodak's Cineon scanner and workstation and Flame (one of the first digital compositing programs). This film ended up serving as a successful test for those tools and led to the democratization of the visual effects industry.
Ham and Cheese:
- Dennis Hopper's acting is okay in some scenes, but in others, he's clearly having fun overacting and taking his role not at all seriously.
- Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson (as Iggy and Spike, respectively) improvised a lot of dialogue, just to amuse themselves and give their characters some direction. They have so much wackadoo energy as a result, they end up carrying a good chunk of the movie.
Harsher in Hindsight: The World Trade Center of our dimension merging with the under-construction buildings from Koopa's city results in the unfortunate image of the Twin Towers disintegrating.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- King Koopa's lair is a skyscraper with neon lights, just like in Super Mario 3D World.
- The idea of Mario going to a mock-up of Manhattan would be revisited in the games over 20 years later with the announcement of Super Mario Odyssey which features the location New Donk City. Realistic dinosaurs, including a Tyrannosaurus Rex, are also featured in Super Mario Odyssey, including a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment in New Donk City.
- Mario and the missing Brooklyn girls race down a frozen pipe to escape some Goombas, who give chase, with one eventually sliding on his belly. Three years later, Super Mario 64 would debut, and a star is earned in the winter-themed stage by sliding (on your belly) down a slide made of ice.
- A planet being hit by a meteor and being split into two parallel universes, one of which wishes to take over the other? Nintendo would reuse this idea later though not in a Mario game.
- The film predicted that some version of Bowser is a President. Reggie Fils-Aime's successor as NoA's president is named Doug Bowser.
- In the car chase scene, the police use the Fire Flower-inspired flamethrowers against Mario and Luigi. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! later introduced fireballs as an item, and Mario Kart 7 made the Fire Flower itself an item you can use against other drivers.
- Koopa's bath scene being one of the elements that made it into canon, since Super Mario Sunshine's final boss fight involves Mario disturbing Bowser and his family in a hot tub.
- Anthony Scapelli being turned into a necktie-wearing monkey is often regarded as a reference to Donkey Kong. While it's not implausible, the necktie aspect is most likely coincidental since Donkey Kong did not start wearing his iconic necktie until a year later with Donkey Kong '94 and Donkey Kong Country.
- One of the more infamous things about the movie is the fact that Toad is turned into a Goomba. Cut to Super Mario Bros. Wonder and now Toad can indeed be turned into a Goomba! ^Note
- Toad's spiraling haircut is oddly reminiscent of the striped caps of the Toad residents of Rose Town in Super Mario RPG.
Karmic Overkill: While Anthony Scapelli was a Crooked Contractor who deserved some consequences for trying to destroy Daisy's excavation site, getting turned into a chimpanzee and laughed at by everyone was a bit extreme. Not helping is one of his henchmen showing him sympathy in this state, proving what a good leader he was.
Memetic Mutation:
- There's a small one in the Bob-omb being the most faithful thing to the games.
- Dennis Hopper as Koopa saying Monkey.
- "Trust the fungus" became the rallying cry for the SMB Movie Archive.
Mind Game Ship: Between Koopa and Daisy. Lena is not pleased.
Mis-blamed: Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel are regularly derided for all the liberties they took with the Super Mario franchise when making the movie, as well as blamed by the actors and other staff for the many troubles on-set, but it's important to remember that they were just doing what they were hired to do. Nintendo and Lightmotive had no interest in ensuring the film was faithful to the source material. In fact, they openly wanted to make a "gritty and adult" version of the games, and they hired Morton and Jankel in hopes that they would give the film the same mature and futuristic aesthetic as Max Headroom. Even producers of other movies seemed to blame Rocky Morton for the film's failures, since he himself said that any later projects he attempted would stop dead in their tracks as soon as they learned he directed this film.
Moral Event Horizon: Lena trying to kill Daisy for her own agenda and following it up by stabbing Yoshi.
Narm:
- Koopa trying to gouge out Luigi's eyes less than a minute into his friendly lawyer act on account of his very first answer getting an unsatisfactory response. An attempted intimidating moment, the sheer suddenness just makes Koopa seem like a hilariously impatient and ineffective actor.
- Koopa's reaction to the Bob-omb may effectively spell out its danger, but it's hard not to laugh at the exceptionally melodramatic line reading.
Older Than They Think: The Luigi/Daisy Ship Tease did not originate with this movie. The first piece of media to do this was NES Open Tournament Golf two years prior.
One-Scene Wonder:
- Lance Henriksen appears for ten seconds and has two lines. He still manages to be memorable.
- Koopa's full T. rex form, seen seconds before turning into primeval slime. It is considered to be one of the film's highlights in CGI effects.
Questionable Casting: Several.
- British Bob Hoskins and Colombian American John Leguizamo as the Italian American Mario and Luigi respectively, despite the immediately noticeable difference in age and ethnicity. To the film's credit they try to address the first one by making the age gap part of their relationship (and Hoskins already proved he could do a good Brooklyn accent in Who Framed Roger Rabbit), but it's still quite a confusing choice.
- Finally, Dennis Hopper as King Koopa.
Quirky Work: Much like the games, the film is noted for how weird it is, from individual scenes like the dancing Goombas and Toad's devolution to the movie as a whole's conceit of a parallel dinosaur dimension.
Realism-Induced Horror: Amid the parallel dinosaur dimension plotline, Daniella and Daisy's kidnappings are played to scary effect, with the other girls Iggy and Spike kidnapped officially having gone missing. As far as the residents of Brooklyn knew, they were probably dead.
Retroactive Recognition: Harry Potter fans will surely recognize Aunt Petunia (Fiona Shaw) as Lena - same goes for Star Wars fans after her role as Maarva Andor.
Signature Scene: The dancing Goombas scene, the Boom Boom Bar scene, and the scene where Mario's last name is revealed are all iconic moments from the film.
So Bad, It's Good: The film had almost nothing to do with the games. Bowser/King Koopa was a human, Yoshi was a velociraptor instead of his own species of dinosaur, the "Goombas" were humans with dinosaur heads, and the movie didn't even take place in the Mushroom Kingdom at all. And yet, it's kind of...entertaining, in a way.
So Okay, It's Average: There are likewise some who don't find the movie all that bad and just an entertaining romp in general.
Special Effect Failure:
- Amongst all the revolutionary visuals and complicated animatronics for Yoshi and the Goombas, the devolved King Koopa puppet looks like an escapee from a bad episode of The Muppet Show.
- The brief "animated" intro, explaining the backstory behind the setting, looks atrocious when you consider the film had a total budget on par with The Lion King (1994). It looks like something Dingo Pictures put out rather than a forty-plus million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster. This can mainly be chalked up to the scene being tacked on last minute because test audiences didn't understand the alternate universe dimension-hopping concept.
Squick: The fungus, even in-universe. Mario in particular is constantly grossed out by it.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Most criticism about the film will point out how the film has almost nothing to do with the games, aside from a basic kidnapped princess plot and some of the characters having the same names, and never for the better. While there are some fans of the film's aesthetic, they generally come from those that divorce the film from its video game bases.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As seen here, the Tyrannosaurus puppet had several different forms and an incredibly complex design, but almost none of that is seen in the finished movie because it only had 13 seconds of screen time and was filmed at awkward angles. Making this worse is that Koopa's transformation into the T-Rex is the final fight of the film, and yet he's defeated immediately before he can wreak any havoc in this form.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Aside from a handful of special effects and animatronics, the dystopian Dinohattan doesn't really take advantage of its status of being a world descended from dinosaurs as neither the city nor its inhabitants are particularly reptilian in nature. This is especially true for Koopa who was partially de-evolved partway through the film, but it doesn't amount to much aside from him occasionally showing lizard-like traits for brief moments.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: God bless you Bob Hoskins, for trying to give a performance. He's playing Mario for all he's worth despite the terrible time he had on set. Even with it's reputation as everything wrong with Hollywood's efforts to adapt video games, no one has anything to say about him and will freely admit he was an inspired casting choice.
Ugly Cute: Yoshi's more raptor-like appearance in the movie.
Uncertain Audience: The film was originally written as a "hard and gritty" sci-fi take on the Super Mario universe to emulate Batman (1989) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). However, right before production began, the producers got cold feet and attempted to make family-friendly changes to the script that did not mesh well with the more serious setting, creating a film that tries and fails to be mature while also trying to appeal to kids.
Video Game Movies Suck: Word of God stated that the movie was made to test whether a movie would do anything to the series' reputation, be it positively or negatively. Ultimately, the games did more to impact the movie's reputation than the inverse, birthing the mentality behind this trope.
Vindicated by History: In The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, this movie was brought up as an example of what not to do with a movie, and a major example of Video Game Movies Suck. However, people in The New '10s and The New '20s have been a little nicer to the movie. Both pointing out it was somewhat impressive from a technical standpoint with some visual effects that have aged quite well. Some have gone on to appreciate this movie simply because of how Strictly Formula Film has become over time and praised it for at least trying to do something unique rather than going for easy fan service. And pretty much everyone agrees Bob Hoskins was perfect casting as Mario and was doing his absolute best with the role.
Visual Effects of Awesome: This film had to literally invent new technology to make much of its visual effects look as realistic as they do:
- Daisy appearing in the sand.
- Yoshi. For an animatronic puppet, it looks like it just stepped out of a time portal to the Jurassic Era. Yoshi was so advanced that the makers of Jurassic Park studied him to get their starting point.
- This also applies to a lesser extent to the Goombas. All of them, including those only seen in the background, had multiple movements built into the heads.
- The pan over the city towards Koopa's tower. This was done by one man over a period of six months and was deemed impossible beforehand.
- The Tyrannosaurus's CGI form seen as it devolves looks great.
- The King turning back into a human looks seamless.
WTH, Costuming Department?:
- Dinohatten has some truly awful looking hairstyles. Of note:
  - Koopa's Max Headroom-like hairdo, which has been compared more than once to a peeled orange.
  - Iggy's muttonchops combined with dreadlocks on the back of his head like several ponytails.
  - Toad has his hair grown out at a normal length only at the edge of his forehead, with the rest of his head being shaved into stripes.
- Luigi doesn't have a mustache. Perhaps just a byproduct of trying to make him a romantic lead, but it's still an iconic part of his look and John Leguizamo has grown out mustaches later on that show he could still look good in this film with one.

YMMV / Super Mario Bros. (1993)

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