WHAT WENT WRONG - Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

What took 9 screenwriters, 2 directors, and an unlimited supply of Bob Hoskins’ scotch? Super Mario Bros., the first ever big-screen video game adaptation (that nearly killed the genre)! Join Chris & producer David Boman as they explore how Japan’s beloved Brooklyn plumbers found themselves battling Dino-DNA Dennis Hopper in a dystopian alternate dimension.*CORRECTIONS:David Snyder was not the production designer of 'Blade Runner', he was the art director. The production designer of that incredible film was Lawrence G. Paull.Chris mistakenly states that the 2000 film 'Wonder Boys' starred Topher Grace - it did not, but rather featured Tobey Maguire.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris, and I am joined not as always by Lizzie Bassett because she is on vacation this week. So I am joined by the next best thing, David Bowman, our incredible audio engineer slash producer, slash composer, slash does everything we don't want to do slash Lizzie's fiance and my best friend, David is looking great in a Luigi outfit right now. I am in a Mario outfit right now. and if you subscribe to the Patreon, you can watch a video of us in these outfits right now, white gloves and all,

white gloves and all. We're proving it now. I've got to take one of them off so I can still use my computer while we're recording. David, thank you so much for stepping up and co-hosting this exciting episode covering Super Mario Bros. Thank you for, you know, having me.

I'm sad to be stepping in for Lizzie. It's the first episode she's ever not been on, which is hard for all of us. That's true. I miss her. I'm sure our audience is going to miss her quite a lot, but I'll do my best. Well, it's not going to be good enough. I know. So today we are discussing the 1993 film Super Mario Bros. Oh, boy. Which is unfortunately not available to stream anywhere in the United States, but if you are diligent, you may be able to find it online for free, not suggesting that that's what we did. or you could order the Blu-ray and support the filmmakers that put together this movie.

Not to be confused with the 2023 film, The Super Mario Bros. movie, which despite middling reviews, has quickly become the most successful video game adaptation of all time, and it has already passed a billion dollars at the box office at the time of the release of this episode. David, we saw the Super Mario Brothers movie together. in theaters. Yes, we did. On Friday, we'll get to our thoughts on that at the end of this episode. Before we go any further, though, I would just like to remind folks, if you have not subscribed to our Patreon, please consider joining as you will get incredible bonus content, such as video footage of me and David, as I mentioned, in full on Mario and Luigi costume right now.

Yeah, Chris is one sexy Mario, I've got to tell you, folks, it's quite a sight to see. even though he did kind of skimp on the non-red shirt. He's wearing a blue shirt. I couldn't find a red shirt. I'm wearing a blue shirt. I couldn't find a red shirt. You can tell that to the patrons, Chris. But my mustache is canonically accurate to Mario's mustache.

So let's have died back 30 years because back in 1993, things weren't quite so peachy with the original Mario adaptation. See, that's a pun, and we will be doing a few of those today. Before we dive into what went wrong, and a lot went wrong on this movie, let's start with the basic facts. So Super Mario Brothers is a 1993 fantasy adventure film based on Nintendo's Mario Bros. Video Games series. It is the first feature-length live-action adaptation of a video game. There had been adaptations of video games for television. Pac-Man had a TV show, apparently, for a number of games.

of years. I never saw it. Did you ever see it, David? No. Pac-Man show? No. No. So, Super Mario Brothers was, or Bros., as we'll say, was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, a husband and wife directing duo. It was written by nine people, although credited, were four writers, Parker Bennett, Terry Runty, and Ed Solomon, though in actuality, there were upward, as I mentioned, of nine writers. and it was distributed by Bonavista Pictures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios. It was produced by Jake Eberts and Roland Yoff or Yoffie. I am not 100% sure how to pronounce his last name.

It starred Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, and Samantha Mathis. And as always, here is the IMDB logline. Two Brooklyn plumbers, Mario, Mario and Luigi Mario must travel to another dimension to rescue a princess from the evil dictator King Kupa and stop him from taking over the world. Yep. David, has you ever seen this adaptation of the Mario Brothers game before? So this is, I have a singular memory of this because this is, I'm not someone who ever falls asleep in movies, but this is the one movie. I remember I saw my friend Scott's house.

We were doing a birthday party, sleepover. Anders was there. It was a party. We were all stoked. Couldn't wait to watch Mario. Turned on Mario. Not what we expected. It's very different.

So much so that I just could not, I truly couldn't pay attention. And I just dozed right on off. Well, you probably weren't the only person. It doesn't resemble the game, at least visually, very much. And that's for a very specific reason. And that's why I want to focus on. in this episode of What Went Wrong

in terms of what went wrong in this movie. Now, guys, there's so much material out there about what went wrong with Mario because it was the first big screen adaptation of a video game. And there are great resources. There's a book called Console Wars

that I checked out, another on the rise of Nintendo. There are tons of accounts. They tend to focus on what happened on set, which we will get to. There were some salacious onset incidents and disputes with the directors and the cast. But I think what's more instructive of how this all came about,

how you got a movie based on a child's video game that features in the background what looks like an adult movie theater that says X, X, X, X, X, X, My Life is a Teenage Mammal at one point, which is insane. So how did we get that in this movie is the question that I wanted to answer, and that's what I'm going to focus on in this episode. So I just, hold on, I just want to interject and say that was my experience as an 11-year-old, but watching it for the podcast over the last couple of days? I loved it.

Yeah, it's fun. I mean, I got to watch it over the course of several days. You know, I had to take breaks because it was a lot to do at once. But, like, I mean, if I may, and I don't want to jump the gun, but like, my feeling was this movie, had a lot in common with movies like the Fifth Element, like, like Beetlejuice, obviously for aesthetic reasons,

Mad Max, you know, like all of this like weird steampunk, like dystopian stuff, Blade Runner. Yeah, Blade Runner, yeah. Not the same.

Like, you know, it's, it's comedy, which I guess, you know, yeah, it's a comedy,

but it's, yes, it definitely shares DNA with those movies. And again, for very specific reasons. Yeah, and what I was going to say is I feel like, you know,

if you, if you ask me right now, before we started this episode, like, what went wrong with this movie? It said that it, that it's tethered to Mario. Like, the problem that I thought was that if this had just been an original idea, because the way that it connects to Mario,

most of the time I felt was fairly disappointing. As someone who's, like, a normal level fan of the Mario's franchise, you know? But it was the way that they tried to connect it was so strange in ways. But as far as just, like, really weird or really, original, cool, unique, creative filmmaking? I thought it was pretty fun. Yeah, I agree.

I personally enjoyed it more than the new Mario just as a watch. I thought, like, the new Mario is beautiful to look at. We'll get into more detail on our thoughts later. But this movie is so weird and different. And it has some really fun scenes and moments, and it's so inventive with its production design in particular. And again, let's, let's, Let's save some of those thoughts, David, because all of that happened.

All of this was very intentional. And so it wasn't an accident that the movie was made this way. So Mario Mario, Mario, and that is his first and last name, was born in 1981. So the character was created. He had a cameo in Donkey Kong. So Donkey Kong predated Mario. He received his own game called Mario Bros in 1983, and that was an arcade game. That wasn't for a console system.

He then joined the Nintendo Entertainment System, NES, via the game Super Mario Bros, in 1985. And I'm not going to bore you guys with all of the ins and outs of the various sequels to this game. But there were kind of versions released in Japan, and then those versions were renamed and adapted and released in the United States. So there are kind of misnomers across which one is which. But the point is, by the early 1990s, Mario was a superstar. He was the first ubiquitous video game character in pop culture. And to give you a point of reference, two years into its production run, Super Mario Brothers 3, which was the third game released in the United States, it was not the third game overall

because of Japanese releases. It had made over $500 million worldwide on this video game in the early 1990. So this was an enormously successful property, and it was really unprecedented in its popularity. So as with everything that seems to glitter and has money following it around, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood would come knocking. And, of course, the problem with adapting Mario as opposed to adapting a book is what, David, if you had to guess? I don't know. What's the story? It's tough to say. It's pretty vague. Save the princess.

Right. Exactly. It's save the princess. So there's no real story. There's, it's, there are technically villains with the gumbas and the cupas. And there's characters, Toad, Princess, King Cupa or Bowser, and there's Mario. But it's unclear what Mario wants beyond getting to the princess. And it's really just hopping around levels. So it's not exactly narrative, rich with narrative. already, and it's unclear what story you would tell. And to be honest, that when you watch the new Mario movie, it's visually gorgeous. It pays homage to innumerable Mario games across the last 30 years, but narratively not a lot is going on. Still, even after 25 more years of games to riff on, it's not, there's probably less story than in this 1993 version. So again, I still think it's as hard to adapt as it was. You know what I don't think that it's been cracked is my point. Right. I mean, another observation. Obviously, the new movie was geared almost entirely toward kids given, like you're saying, like the thinness of the story and how it's basically just homage after homage each scene

referencing a different aspect of the Mario games. Yeah, the 93 version is not a, not a kid's movie. No, intentionally for unusual reasons, but they kind of make sense in the context of the era. So in In 1990, producers and studios across Hollywood launched into a bidding war for the rights to tell Mario's story on screen. Whatever that story was going to be. No one really knew. In the end, there was a really unusual champion that emerged and won the day. That's Roland Jaffe.

They said Jaffe. We'll say Jaffe. So it's probably wrong. It's probably Yoff and I was right. But Roland Jaffe is a British director and producer. and at the time he was known for two Academy Award-winning films that he had directed. Those are The Killing Fields. Okay.

Which have you ever seen it, David, about the Camero Rouge, I believe, in Cambodia. I have. We watched it in high school. And then The Mission, which starred Robert De Niro as a Jesuit priest in South America. And it's very heavy and is also great. I really recommend both of these movies. What year was the mission? It's a great question.

It was in the 80s, yeah. Yeah, 1986. So, both of these movies won Academy Awards. Jaffe was this really gifted, almost journalism-based director. He had come up directing kind of hard-hitting political dramas within the BBC system, and then he had directed these almost docu-drama films in the Killing Fields and the Mission. And so Mario feels like a really unusual choice for someone on the live. like Yuffy to approach. But what he wanted to do was he wanted to be a producer. He thought,

okay, I've won a couple of Oscars. I've done well on the directing front. He started a production company called LightMotive, and they wanted to make a big splash as producers. And so this movie, he was not going to direct. He was just going to produce it. And so there are a lot of different, you know, timelines available, including a 1992 L.A. Times expose about the making of the movie. There's a great Grantland retrospective from 2013 by Karina Longworth, and then Jamie Russell's book, Generation Xbox, How Video Games Invaded Hollywood. So I've tried to kind of pull all of these sources together to put together the following timeline. So basically, when Hollywood approached Nintendo about adapting Mario for the big screen,

no one had ever done this before. And so when the studios were pitching the movie, they didn't really know what to pitch. No one, they were kind of like, yeah, we'll just figure out how to adapt it. And that was it. And they would offer a price. And so Yafi met independently with the president of the Nintendo of America portion of the corporation, Minoru Arakawa. He's the son-in-law of the CEO of Nintendo.

So he is the Tom Wamsgans of this story, if you watch Succession. Oh, my God. We got another succession tie-in, by the way, which I, I mean, if we can just call out. Fisher Stevens, we will. Fisher Stevens. those sideburns in that Quinteple rat tail situation is just undeniable. Yes, it's intense. And so Yafi goes in, he pitches a live action adaptation of the game, which is unusual.

You would imagine it might be animated. And the key to the pitch was the tone of the film. And he wanted to make an edgy movie that wasn't just for kids. He wanted to make a Mario Brothers movie that would be for both adults and for the kids under 12 playing the game. And so Arakawa said, look, we've gotten offers up to $10 million for the rights to make this movie. And Yafi confessed, I only have $500,000.

And so he left the meeting thinking nothing would ever come of it. Something about this presentation stuck with Arakawa. A month later, Yafi was flown out to the Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto. He stayed there for 10 days waiting for something to happen. And after 10 days, Yamauchi, the head of the head of, Nintendo invited him to a meeting and asked why he should sell Yafi the rights to make the movie and not a major studio. And Yafi's played the only card he had. He said, we'll give you more creative control. But this is actually not what won Nintendo over in the end. So what happened

was they had actually been involved in the making of a film in 1989 called The Wizard, which starred Fred Savage. It wasn't based on a video game, but it's about a kid. who nowadays we would diagnose with autism, basically, who's a wizard at video games, and he travels to California with his siblings to compete in a video game competition. The movie was basically a 90-minute product placement commercial for Nintendo, and it was just really mediocre.

It was just like a really mediocre movie, and Nintendo was apparently a little disappointed because they felt like there could be a great movie, an edgy movie that could be made off of a video game, not just like a commercial. Okay, so the wizard, just to be clear, this wasn't promoting any specific video game. It was just like video games, Nintendo.

All Nintendo video games. Got it. Yeah, it featured all these Nintendo video games. And so what drew Arakawa and Yamauchi to Yafi was the fact that his last films were so adult. They dealt with war, with rape, with violence, with famine. They were heavy themes. And so they thought, well, if anybody can make an adult appealing version of Mario, it's this Academy Award-winning director.

And so the other key thing was that Nintendo wanted to keep all of the merchandising rights for the project. They weren't interested in the creative control. They wanted to just make sure that when they merchandised the movie, they got all the money from the merchandising. And with Yafi being an independent producer, they could insist upon that stipulation. Interesting. So in the end, Nintendo sold the rights to Mario to Yafi, and he had brought on another producer, Jake Eberts, who had just produced dances with wolves. So, like, two Academy Award-winning producers are making this movie, and they give them the rights for $2 million, nearly 80% less than what the top bid had been from studio bidders.

And so Hollywood kind of freaked out over the news. They were like, what is Nintendo doing? They're messing with our system. How dare they sell the rights to this most popular game to this independent producer. Now, in truth, Nintendo kind of did all of them a favor. It will turn out. And to be clear, at this point, Disney was not involved in the story. Some sources reference Disney purchased the rights to the film, but Disney didn't come into the picture until later.

So right now, literally, Yafi and Ebert are on their own. They have purchased the rights to this movie. They've secured financing to do so. And they don't even have a script. They don't even have a story. And so, David Buckle Your Seatbelt, because we're about to drive the heck off of Rainbow Road. So if you've got two Oscar winners, and you're adapting a video game,

you got to bring another Oscar winner in to adapt the video game. And so the first draft of the script, believe it or not, was written by Barry Morrow, who had just won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Rain Man. Wow. So he decided, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

And he wrote Mario as an existential road trip movie following two brothers, one of whom was a bit of a dim-wit. And so it apparently was so close to Rain Man when you read it, that the production called the draft Drain Man instead of Super Mario Brothers. And apparently it was not funny. It was a dramatic piece.

It was just rain, it was Rain Man. It was Mario Brothers Rain Man. What? And the producers, yeah, that was the first. No one had adapted a video game. They didn't know what to do. So that was the first draft. And so the producers decided we were looking for a comedy.

So they thanked Barry for his work. He was removed from the project. And at the same time, they're like, you know what, we need to get a direct. We need to get a lead actor in this movie. And who is short and funny and portly, David, that would play, that would be a great Mario. Anyone you can think of? Doa.

Penguin. Danny DeVito. Yes. Danny DeVito. So DeVito was interested in the project, but he wouldn't sign on without a script. And then when he eventually did get a script, it sounds like he just didn't like it. And so he eventually passed on the project. So they lost out on Danny DeVito,

and what follows is maybe the most insane revolving door of screenwriters and directors that we've ever covered on this podcast. And all of these drafts are available to read at www. SMB movie, like Supermari Bros.movie.com. Yep. So next up, writing team, Jim Genoine and Tom S. Parker,

who would go on to write The Flintstones and Richie Rich. they were a relatively new writing due at the time. They wrote a draft that was a true fantasy satire stealing from Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz. Their draft established Mario as the older brother, Luigi is the younger dreamer who would get the princess, elements that would end up in the final film. And one source claims that upward of $10 million

was spent developing all of these screenplays, although that number seems high to me. I believe that was including pre-production. So right around this time, director Greg Beeman was hired to direct the movie. I don't know any of his work. But apparently his 1992 film, Mom and Dad, Saved the World, bombed at the box office during the development process. And so he was let go from the project as a result. So they couldn't get financing with him attached to direct. So then Yafi offers the directing chair to Harold Ramos of Ghostbusters,

if you remember. Seems like a catch. Yeah, he would be great. He took the meeting as he was a fan of the game, but wisely turned down the opportunity to direct. And I could be wrong, but my guess is that at this point, uh, the producers are feeling that they're losing steam. And this is where like, you can get an optics issue with a movie. Right. Too many people start passing. You are unable to attract talent at that same level. Like, you know, Fincher might not want to direct the movie that Spielberg passed on and, you know, whoever else passed on. So here, I have a question for you, because I know you've, you know, on scripts you've worked on there have been times where something on your radar, it's like sort of having to be cognizant of that kind of thing.

Is the way that word circulates about too many people passing just within the community, or are they like official, you know, is this in like the tabloids and stuff? No, I don't, well, maybe the tabloids get a hold of it, but it's usually through agencies because, you know, a lot of people share agents. And so agents will share, you know, information about who's been involved, you know, who's gotten up to look at it first. because there's a lot of ego involved. Got it.

So there's just word of mouth internally with agencies and with actors. Exactly. And it usually does get out eventually. Right. So, you know, for example, you know, it would take a lot of passes on a big movie to get to a director like me. And or if it's a smaller project, they're not going to go to David Fincher. So I'd be higher on, you know, the list potentially. So with a movie like Super Mario Brothers, it's going to have a big budget.

So they do need an experienced direct. They can't really get around that. But the problem is it's this unknown. There's no script. No one's ever done this before. So it's a really risky project as well. And also, not only is it risky for those reasons, there's no studio behind it either.

So the financing isn't secured on top of everything else. So you don't know if you're going to get the resources to make the movie you want to make. Right. So at this point in the process, are they operating off of the script that you just mentioned, not drained, but the following one they make?

The second drafts. I see. And so they're casting based off of the characters in that. But presumably they're just trying to cast Mario and Luigi mostly. They're focused on Mario and Luigi and Cupa. Those are the three that they're focused on. Mario Luigi and Cupa. They all get to this later, but they offered the role of Cupa to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He turned it down. We'll get into some other ones. So Yafi kind of had a weird idea then. He had this interview in the early 90s. with the LA Times. He said, we made some mistakes. We tried various avenues that didn't work. I felt the project was taking a wrong turn. And that's when I began thinking of Max Headroom. David, do you remember Max Headroom? Have you ever seen Max Headroom? No. So Max Headroom was, it's really weird. You'd recognize it if you saw it. It's this satirical

sci-fi TV series that aired in the late 80s. It's set in a dystopian future or an oligarchy of TV networks control everything, including the government. And it's really weird. It's this talking head like shock jock character Max Headroom, speaking to camera, who looks like he's CGI. He's wearing a suit. He has a really intense blonde haircut, like square jaw. He has lasers behind him. If you just Google search him, you'll see, you'll recognize him.

He was billed as the first ever computer-generated television presenter. But in actuality, what's really fun is that he was not CGI. Whoa, yeah. He was actually an actor in heavy prosthetics and contact lenses that was shot in of a green screen with lasers keyed in behind it. Oh, this is so weird. It's so George Orwelly. It is. It's very George Orwell. It's very dystopian. It's very, it's very Blade Runner. It's very Mad Max. It's, it's, but it's like deeply satirical. It's almost a little bit of the matrix ahead of it. So most importantly, it was created or co-created by Annabelle Jankle and Rocky

Morton, a husband and wife directing duo from the UK. And they had come up directing commercials and music videos, and Max Hadroom was this calling card for them in the United States. And so they found representation at CAA, and in 1988, they directed their first feature film, which was called DOA, and starred Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. Oh, very cool. Who, David, you know Meg Ryan. I do. I saw her today, actually. Yeah, that's right, guys.

Am I allowed to tell? Yeah, I can tell. I'm working on a project with her. Let's leave it to that. David's... Yeah. It's on IMDB. David's scoring her movie. You can delete that I want to, but David is scoring Meg Ryan's new movie that she directed and is starring in. And she is very lovely and has been a pleasure to work with.

And I'm sure he's doing a great job. Thank you, Chris. And he hasn't been fired yet. So that's great. I have not. Also, fun fact, I think she and Dennis Quaid started dating during the production of DOA, although I do know they met while shooting Interspace the year prior. Interesting. So DOA was a neo-noir remake of a 1950 film of the same name. Most importantly, it was a flop at the box office. It made $12.5 million against its $30 million budget. So Jankle and Morton kind of in directing jail went back to directing commercials and music videos until one day their agent sends them the script for Super Mario.

That draft we were just talking about. And they hated it. It was down the middle. It was for kids. You know, it was basic. but Morton saw the potential for a far different movie, a grittier movie, a darker movie, a satirical movie, a movie that pulled from Blade Runner and Mad Max

and all of these other movies that you reference. And so as he explained in a 2016 interview, he called Annabelle, as I mentioned, they were married. He said, this script is terrible, but I think this could be our Batman. And she asked me how and why, and I came up with this idea of this parallel universe where the dinosaurs didn't actually disappear.

They just got shifted into another dimension, and then these two hapless plumbers happened to cross the dimension. Okay, hold on. Let me pause here, if that's all right, because I just want to ask, do you think it is a product of sort of who video games were being marketed to at that time

because they were new in the NES, maybe wasn't, maybe people didn't see it as like, oh, this is going to be something for 11-year-olds. Maybe they're like, this is a new technology and like everyone's going to appreciate this and older people maybe more so. Like, was that a part of the calculus when it came to, maybe we aren't targeting kids with this?

Because, you know, that was part of it. No, it's definitely that not just kids played Mario. It, you know, like, it was, everyone was playing it. But it was, it's really important. It's, I'm about to get to the context. What they wanted to do with for Mario was what Tim Burton had just done for Batman. And that's the model that they were working off of. So Batman, the 1989 film directed by Tim Burton, was kind of unprecedented as an adaptation of a comic book.

This is Michael Keaton? Michael Keaton's Batman. He played Batman. So obviously there was a 1966 series that Adam West starred in. And if you've seen it, it is super fun, campy, bright colors, feels like it's for kids. It's like the Mario adaptation you would expect, complete with like Kerpaw. Yeah. you know, literal text on screen exclaiming what's happening.

When Tim Burton made his Batman, it flipped the script entirely. Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne was brooding. His world was dark and stylized. And this movie was an enormous success. And it took place in a really dark world, not dissimilar from what ended up being made for Mario. And this movie, Batman was such a big success. It grossed over $400 million the year it came out,

and it became the fifth highest grossing film, of all time when it was released. Yeah, it is great. So, yeah, and so there really was the thought that, like, oh, we can do to Mario what Burton did to Batman. That was... Makes sense. That was the model that they were following.

And there was another really obvious reason to hire Morton and Jankle, which was that they were at the forefront of the very new digital effects revolution. And so, according to a 2018 profile in The Guardian, and Morton and Jangle had even directed the first entirely computer-generated commercial, which was for Pirelli Tires. And so their work on Max Headroom and various music videos was visually on the cutting edge. And there are actually a lot of things that Mario does in terms of computer-generated imagery that were revolutionary for the time, including using the software Autodesk Flame,

which has now become industry standard. If you guys want to learn more about that, go check out the Corridor Crew video on VFX Artists React to the 1993 Mario. They talk about that. I'm not going, it's a visual thing, so we shouldn't focus on that here. Basically, Yafi believed that Morton and Yankle's youth-oriented computer-assisted style would be this natural fit

for a digital character, the first digital character put on screen. I also get the sense that he was running out of options on the directorial front. Like, he didn't have a lot of choices. And there was a ticking clock on the project. So Nintendo had actually put stipulation into the language of the contract where if they didn't make a movie by a certain date, Nintendo would get to impose fines on the producers

that they had to start paying. So there was a ticking clock on the project. So they brought on a new screenwriting team to do a more sci-fi-oriented pitch, right? This is where you get like the Blade Runner element, based on Morton's idea of another dimension where dinosaurs evolve like humans. This is Parker Bennett and Terry Rente,

a duo responsible for mystery date, which I have not seen, and the princess and the cobbler, which I have seen. And it more or less kept the story intact, but introduced this alternate reality idea, and it focused more on the brother's relationship with one another. And apparently the producers and Nintendo likes the approach. The first draft had the feeling of a space opera.

It was kind of like Star Wars meets Mario. And it had an age-old prophecy like Star Wars. It had a magic book that helped Mario and Luigi on their quest. And that pitch won them a crack at the script. And Morton and Jankle then decided that the approach was too safe, too kid-oriented, And so they pushed them to go full Ghostbusters with the story, which is how they came up with Dino Hatton. So, like, that's obviously Ghostbusters, like taking place in New York.

So it's like Dino Hatton. And then they wrote Mario as apparently a bit of a sleaze ball in the first draft because they wanted Bill Murray to play Mario. But Bill Murray was unavailable. And there are a few other self-inflicted mistakes on the casting front worth mentioning. First of all, Dustin Hoffman desperately wanted to play Mario Mario. What? Yeah, Dustin Hoffman comes.

up on his podcast, like more than anyone else. He does. He wanted it so bad that he pitched himself to the movie, and he even got a meeting with Bill White, who was the head of public relations and advertising for Nintendo of America. However, Arakawa, the head of Nintendo for America, just didn't like Hoffman for the role. Unreal. And he offered no further explanation. And so despite having just won an Oscar for Rain Man, no less, Dustin Hoffman was passed over for the role. That is so bizarre to think about.

That is so counter to the way that things are thought about nowadays, or probably in general, but maybe it's just the fact that there's this international company dealing with. And they just, there's less, you know, they're less connected to it or feel. That's so interesting that they would pass on him of all people. Well, and then to go to Bob Hoskins, who, like, is great, but is not the name, you know, that Dustin Hoffman is, certainly. So next up was America's dad, Tom Hanks.

He was, at the time, America's boyfriend. He was briefly attached to play, I read Luigi and I read Mario. I'm not sure which one, because two different sources said two different things. However, after flirting with a $5 million payday for the deal, Mario, the producers got cold feet, and Hank's ability to handle a dramatic role

was called into question because he'd just done a bunch of comedies. So he was let go from the project, and then he went on a hell of a run, blowing up off of a league of their own and Sleepless in Seattle, and then winning two Oscars in a row for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. So they missed out on two Oscar winners in a row

to come into this movie. And so in the end, Bob Hoskins was brought in to play Mario. He's a British Thespian, great actor, a bit of a tough guy. I had no idea he was British. He's great. Yeah, he's great.

In an interview following the release of the Blu-ray for the film a few years ago, when Morton was asked about Hoskins' casting, he said simply, it was a matter of availability, he was available. Hoskins claimed that he repeatedly turned down the role, but Morton and Jankle kept sending him new versions of the script until he finally accepted. Sounds like a really inspiring combination to get this movie going.

That's pretty weird that years later they would make that comment, though. It's kind of an odd-dew. You know, I think it's, well, I don't think they're wrong. I think what they meant was more like, once you do a few rounds on the casting front, and I can't speak from experience, you get to the point where you just kind of need a body. Sure.

Like you're just like, we just need, for the love of God. I mean, he certainly looks the part. He really does look the part. And he's amazing. Like, I loved him as Mario. It's definitely hard to picture Hoffman or Tom Hanks as Mario. I could see Tom Hanks more than Dustin Hoffman. I can see Tom Hanks as Luigi,

but that's just because of his stature. But anyway, I guess, yeah. So they bring Hoskins in, but they then need to rewrite the script because they'd written it for Bill Murray. And so instead of having Parker and Rinty take another crack on the draft, they were fired. And they brought Dick Clement and Ian Lafranais in, again, tough last names on this one, guys. Apologies. To make the more, again, they're brought in to rewrite Hoskins' character and make the movie more adult again. This draft is referred to as the Die Hard draft

since it was much more of a satirical action film and it even featured a Bruce Willis cameo like in Die Hard crawling through the air ducts of King Coupa's Castle which I just don't know why they would do that but they said we were going to do that. So then the producers don't think this version is grounded enough so Clement and LaFranes wrote another draft

that featured a Mad Max style Mario Kart race This version was turned in in March of 1992, satisfied the higher-ups, and it seems like this was the draft that Hoskins signed on to the movie to play. Got it. So this was the draft that Hoskins was like, great, this is the movie I'm going to make,

the more adult, darker version. Leguizamo was cast as Luigi, and they auditioned a number of folks, but LeguZamo won the role. Was he pretty well known at this point? Maybe? Yeah, he was known. He was like a young comic actor,

you know, good-looking guy. He was known. And he had a funny comment about how Italian actors always play Hispanic characters referencing Al Pacino and Scarface. And so he's like, it's about time that a Hispanic actor takes a job from an Italian actor for an Italian role, which I did I think was fine.

So then they also cast Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy, and infamously now, Dennis Hopper was brought in to play King Cupa. And he famously would go on to claim that the only reason he ever took the role was for the money. And they paid him a lot of money for it. And he would also prove to maybe be the most difficult aspect of this shoot. And he's a very notoriously difficult actor to work with. So script in hand, cast in hand.

They set film, they're on a go-kart going 100 miles an hour now. Filming slated for two months later, summer of, thank you, 1992. Co-producer Fred Caruso found their shooting location, an abandoned cement plant in Wilmington, North Carolina. It had been used for Terminator 2 Judgment Day. end of the movie when they dropped the T-1000 and the boiling lava, that sequence, as well as Ninja Turtles. But the Mario production plans turn it into a full-on movie studio.

So you mentioned Blade Runner. Well, the reason it looks like Blade Runner is they hired David Snyder, the production designer of Blade Runner, to be the production designer for Mario. Oh, wow. And his biggest frustration with Blade Runner is that he'd only had the money to do one level, the street level, right, for their city environment. But with Mario, he was able to create Dino Hatten as a six-story story. interactive set complete with sparks flying and vehicle traffic on the bottom level.

And they created an aesthetic for the film that they called New Brutalism, which is this like concrete, you know, steel, mad max. As you mentioned, a little bit cyberprunk, a little bit post-apocalyptic, neon sign, punctuated, dystopian vision of a dino-dominated alternative dimension. And then they bring in this lead creature designer, Patrick Tautopoulos. He had just wrapped Coppola's Dracula. And so, like, just, again, to show you the tone of the people that were bringing in here. So they decided they're going to make slightly more cute versions of the dinosaurs than in Jurassic Park, which was shooting at the same time.

But they still want to be, like, accurate to what a dinosaur looks like. So it's really disconcerting to see Yoshi in this movie. I know. And Yoshi is like a velocirapture. It's just, like, he just looks like a baby velocirate. I also, I was so confused about what the gumbas were. Because, like, don't, what? No one knows.

And why is Toad a gumba? No one knows. They turned them from weird mushroom. Tota's supposed to be a mushroom and then he's like a lizard creature. Anyway, I won't even start with that. A lot of those were seemingly arbitrary choices because gumbas are supposed to be like weird mushroom soldiers. And the gumbas in this movie are humanoid dinosaurs with microcephaly. And it's very hard to understand why they are that. Yoshi, for example, was described as a combination between a T-Rex and an iguana.

And they built four versions of the Yoshi model, each for a different purpose. was a stand-in, a wirelessly operated version, one with just mouth and tongue movements for close-ups, and a fully functioning model. The fully-functioned version cost over $500,000 to make, and it required nine men and women to operate it. And I have to say, Yoshi looks great in this movie. Like, the way he moves looks great. All the facial expressions look great. I know. I ended up looking up when Jurassic Park because I couldn't remember the exact year, and I was like, oh, same year. But very convincing, yeah. They actually, apparently, the producers of Jurassic Park visited the set, the pre-production offices of Mario to see how they were doing

the animatronics and considered hiring some of the people from Mario for Jurassic Park. They ended up not doing it because they wanted to use Phil Tippett's just one studio to do it. So budget was quickly becoming a problem. And there's conflicting information here, but what's clear is that a combination of factors lead Ebert and Yafi to do two things more or less simultaneously, that kind of both save the movie and doom the movie. So the independent financing that they had secured, which was, I guess, through a French bank,

had either slipped through or was looking shaky. And as a result, Yafi and Ebert are really freaking out about the tone of the movie, because the movie's gotten riskier and riskier, tonally and financially, right? It's like, we might lose our financing. And so if we need to sell this movie to somebody else to save it, how are we going to explain the,

Blade Runner, you know, porn shops in the background. There were lizard stripper dancers in the original version. Real dark underbelly vibes. Yeah, they're eating dead, like, baby dinosaurs. Yeah. Like, on the street. It's really unusual. It's a very, very grotesque.

Yeah, and so basically, it seems like they were finally understanding, like, shit, maybe Morton and Jankle weren't the right people to make what actually should be a kid's movie. So they're kind of having this revelation a little late in the game. So all of this leads them to seek the safety of a traditional studio to keep the film on track. And this is where Disney comes in. So in order to make the product more appealing to the studio, they need to steer it back to a more mainstream territory. So they get, the producers go to Nintendo and they say, we are going to bring in a couple of script doctors just to tighten the script up.

They don't tell the directors. What? So the producers tell, they bring in, yep, Ed Solomon, who wrote Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Ryan Howe, who wrote Tapeeds, to rewrite the script without the input of the directors. Wow. So they actually handed a new draft to the directors

two weeks before they started shooting the film that was written without their input and was written without consideration of the sets, costume designs, character designs, animatronics that had been built for, weeks and weeks prior to the writing of this draft. Oh, man. I mean like hearing this, you have to assume that there was just so much tension going on. If they weren't willing to share that, if they were willing to go behind their back in that kind of way,

it's like communication and just the vibe of that relationship must have been real sour at that point. Exactly. As Rocky Morton explained in a retrospective for Wired, he said, quote, the producers found out I had called the writers because he found out about the rewrite and he called the writers and they forbade me to speak to the writer, the writer who was going to write the script I had to direct. And that was only a couple of weeks before we went into principal photography, which is the shoot.

I'd already had the set built and a lot of characters with prosthetics had already been made. So that script came in and a lot of it didn't match what we'd already started working on. And so this distrust festered and the relationship between the directors and the producers completely broke down. And the worst thing for the directors at this point

was that when the cast showed up to film in North Carolina, they were handed a brand new script that did not match the version they had signed on to make at all. And then the directors had to turn around and tell the actors, yep, we're great. This is the version we want to make, right? Because otherwise, the actors aren't going to do it. So the directors had to sell the movie.

And apparently, Morton and Yankle were, so blindsided that they really considered walking away from the movie, even though millions of dollars had been spent building their version for it, because they were handed a script that they didn't know they could make. Yeah. I mean, I don't blame them. I would be so pissed off. So at the same time, studio heads are flying in to see the set of Dino Hatton.

So most importantly, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who we've discussed on our Emperor's New Groove podcast, who was still at Disney at the time. He would leave shortly after this. He came by, and apparently he was. impressed enough with the production, again, nobody knows what to look for in a video game adaptation. And so he's impressed enough that he decides Mario's worth the risk. And Disney comes on as the distributor of the film via its Buena Vista Pictures subsidiary, and they have a

studio backer. And so this means that the fiscal safety of the movie is secured, but it represents a breakdown in the vision of what the film will be, kind of the final breakdown, right? Because Morton and Yankle and the team they've hired to their version of Mario is are basically like, wait, now we're making a Disney movie. Like they were making Mario Blade Runner, like the Mario Blade Runner satire comedy. And now all of a sudden it's like, no, we're making a Disney movie. And those are on polar opposite ends of the extreme, which is how you get a movie that's like on the one hand, kind of like a very sweet, charming, goofy romance between John Leguizamo

and Samantha Mathis that's like very Chase and very PG. and on the other hand, you have like very suggestive comments made throughout the movie and like weird erotica in the background. And, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And when I said that I watched it in like three different sittings, I think that's part of it. It's just like you go into a tailspin trying to figure out what's going on. It's like very digestible in chunks, but all of it together is just like what in the world is happening. Yeah. And so it seems like in the kind of like a last ditch effort,

to get the train back on the tracks. The producers go back to Clement and Lafranes, who had written the draft that everybody kind of had liked and signed on for. And they basically said, hey, can you come in and sprinkle some of that magic fairy dust on this new version that Disney likes? Like, can you rewrite the rewrite of your rewrite,

is what they're saying at this point? But they were unavailable. So they go back one more set of screenwriters to Parker Bennett and Terry Runty, who had done the original sci-fi draft I believe. And they were flown to set in North Carolina, and they had to sit at this uncomfortable intersection

between the producers, the directors, and the actors rewriting the script every single day. So, like, new pages went out on this movie every single day. And the story, they were just, like, struggling to make the story cohesive. And now, of course, why not wait until the script was ready? As I mentioned, Nintendo had given the production a hard deadline by which they had to release the movie.

quote, Nintendo let us do whatever we wanted. They just put a crushing deadline on the project. The movie had to be made by a certain date. Otherwise, there were all these financial penalties, which added a lot of extra stress to the project. So that's why they're not waiting. So the script changes are coming in daily. The actors give up.

The actors stop learning their lines very quickly on because they know they're going to get a new version on the day. Right, what's the point? Yeah, Dennis Hopper in particular, says, I don't care. And he was doing interviews with outlets. Like in 1992, he told the Chicago Tribune, quote, I don't really bother with it anymore, learning my lines. I just go in and do it scene by scene.

I figure it's not going to hurt my character. So he was so frustrated that at one point, they handed him a rewritten scene with new dialogue. And he said, I'm not going to do it. And he threw this multi-hour tantrum that led the directors to call lunch early. And then they were so desperate that they offered to let him rewrite the scene

and say whatever he wanted, And at that point, he said, no, this new version's fine. And they shot the script as written, and they lost half a day. And that's just what they were dealing with every single day on this movie. And it's not just that the cast was complaining. The continuity was becoming a problem because of the sheer volume of rewrites. So here's an example. According to Morton, quote, one day we'd be on set and the actor would pick up the crystal.

That's like the piece of the meteorite, right? That they're trying, it's like a, you know, Macuffin in the movie. But it wouldn't work with the continuity. Someone would say, you can't pick that crystal up because we're shooting out of sequence. If you look on page 24, the crystal is actually here. And we'd think, oh, God, yeah, it's a mistake. So somebody had to say to all the actors, okay, we're going to relight the set. But it might take a while.

So go back to trailers while we relight the set. It was like that every single day. Oh, my God. So things continued to deteriorate. Morton apparently didn't think an extra looked dirty enough and he poured hot coffee on him, which pissed off the rest of the crew. That's horrible. Yeah, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo quickly realized the movie was going to be really bad.

And so they started drinking during production. They would just, like, do shots of scotch together. And I mean, I mean during the work day, not like, you know, at night. Like, this is in the middle of the day. John Leguizamo talks about it in his biography, his autobiography. And it actually got so bad that Leguizamo was driving their plumbers van. And he was drunk when he was driving it. And he drove it too quickly.

He accelerated to it quickly. and Hoskins' finger got smashed in the sliding door. What? It broke his finger, and he had to wear a pink cast for the rest of the shoot that you can see in some of the shots. No way. Yeah. He told Entertainment Tonight, Hoskins told Entertainment Tonight in 1993 that he was electrocuted, nearly drowned, and stabbed four times during the production of the film.

But David, you mentioned an actor. Not all these actors saw the chaos as a bad thing. According to a game-in-former retrospective on the film, quote, Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson, who played Coupa's henchman, Spike and Niggie, and Fisher-Stevens, for anyone who doesn't know, plays Hugo on Succession. If you watch Succession, and he's great. He just launched a production company. Congratulations, Fisher-Stevens, well-deserved.

So, continuing with the quote, Fisher-Stevens and Richard Edson, playing Spike and Iggy, started writing their own dialogue and even convinced the studio to film a rap scene starring them that was ultimately cut from the theatrical release. And the reason it was cut is because there were lizard strippers behind them and they didn't want to put that in a Disney movie. And that's during the scene where they're on the dance floor with like the bouncer woman. So they were doing a rap in the background that you don't see. At one point in the original script,

Kupa had their characters devolved into Gumbas. But the actors sold the directors because then they knew the actors were like, well, then our faces aren't going to be in the movie anymore, right? Because they're going to be these little heads. So the actors sold the directors on the idea that their characters should actually be further evolved to become super smart instead. And then they just improvised all their dialogue for the rest of the movie. So they actually managed to trick the production into keeping them in the movie longer because it was so chaotic. That was such a weird move.

That was such a strange. It was very strange. Yeah. It was very strange. So coming towards the finish line here, guys, according to a number of articles and accounts, the truth is Morton and Jankle were in way over their heads. I don't think a lot of this was ultimately their fault. Circumstances got out of their control. But what's clear is that they were used to smaller, shorter shoots, commercials and television.

And the scale of this movie, which ballooned to $48 million and went from an originally scheduled 10-week shoot to a 17-week shoot, was just too much for them to take on. According to Morton, quote, we were told we were going to be fired. We were doing a terrible job. Every night we were told this. We were told we were behind spending too much money. The budget was hemorrhaging. The whole thing was a disaster. He said the production was hell.

The film had as many as five units, meaning camera units, shooting at any given time, just trying to finish it on time. A few other nasty things that happened. Fiona Shaw, who plays Lena, who is Cupa's like henchwoman in the movie. She's a mother derisly in the Harry Potter movies. Yeah, and she's in Killing Eve as well. She, during the scene in the boom-boom bar, she takes a shot with a worm in it.

Yeah, yeah. That was a live worm, and no one told her. No one told her it was a live worm. Oh, man. Oh, that was hard to watch. It was, yeah. And she did not know that was a live worm. Some of the fights are so weird that happened on set that it's hard to understand them.

For example, Morton and Jankle were adamant that they didn't want to ever see Mario and Luigi in their classic red and green jumpsuits. What? Which is why the producers had to insist on it, and that's why it only happens like three quarters of the way through the film. Yeah, also very weird. Yeah, they only put them on it at the very end. And the ending of the film is pretty small and disappointing compared to what the script called for. So the script wanted there to be this epic battle

between Mario and King Cupa or Bowser, you know, on the Brooklyn Bridge. And in the end, Mario would climb up part of the bridge and drop a ba-bomb down Cuba's throat, then knock him into the river where he would explode. It was like a very big ending. That scene was scrapped before it was ever filmed. The producers had run out of money. They said there was no more money, and they did not have faith in their directors to pull the scene off.

So instead, they rewrote the scene where Mario simply shoots Kupa with the weird devolve gun and turns them into first a dinosaur and then... Just a go. Just a go. Which I still thought was actually pretty fun. Now, of course, adding insult to injury was the fact that all of this became public at the end of the shoot. So Morton and Jankle returned to L.A. after rapping production, only to discover that Richard Staten and L.A. Times reporter had been interviewed,

the entire cast. He had gotten them all to speak on the record about what an awful experience this production was. So months before the film was even to be released, before it had even been edited, it was already labeled as a disaster around town. And that's like the last thing that you want as a film production. So the producers locked them out of the editing room physically. They could not get into the editing room. They had to petition the DGA to help get them involved in the edit. CAA dropped them as clients. pretty much immediately after this article had dropped. And at this point, Ebert and Jaffe had gotten two more production companies to buy into the film.

All of these producers had money in the game. And they actually sent out additional filming units to shoot more action for the film. And the directors were not invited to direct those units. So there is footage that was not directed by the directors in this movie shot without them by the end. Wow. So as I mentioned, if you'd like to learn more about the VIE. of Mario, please check out the Corridor Crew video on YouTube about VFX Artist React to Super Mario Bros, the 1993 version. In the end, Super Mario Bros. did hit its release date of May 28th,

1993. Unfortunately, it was going up against the likes of Mrs. Doubtfire and Jurassic Park, and it didn't really stand a chance. It grossed $8.5 million its opening weekend, ending its run at $21 million domestically, $38 million worldwide, well short of what it would need to recoup its $48 million budget. The film was written off as one of the worst of 1993, and it became an odd cultural artifact, how not to do something, right? People were afraid of adapting video games as a result. Hoskins, Leguizamo, and Hopper publicly disparaged the film after its release.

They all made a point of trashing it constantly, I think, as a way to distance. themselves from the project. They would openly say in interviews. That was the worst thing I'd ever done. That movie's trash. Wow. From what I've been able to gather, director Rocky Morton returned to commercial and music video work.

He directed a number of short films, but has never directed another feature film. Annabel Jankle moved on to solo work doing a number of live events and TV series in the UK. And in 2018, she did direct an adaptation of the Fiona Shaw novel, not the same Fiona Shaw, tell it to the bees, which is a game, queer romantic period drama starring Anna Pac-Win

that has her only other feature credit after Mario. Of the cast members, only Samantha Mathis seemed to have positive things to say about the film, stating that over the years she has been approached by enough people saying that they enjoyed it, that she feels she can be proud of the impact that it left behind. Now, of course, over the past 30 years,

Super Mario Bros has developed a cult following. As I mentioned, all of these scripts are available online, and they're only available online because in 2007, Ryan Haas, a Mario Superfan, launched a website dedicated to collecting as much material from the film as possible. This is Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive. Here you can find not only nearly every draft of the script,

but you can also find all the storyboards, costume designs, concept art, editorials, interviews, and more. It's as much as I've ever seen collected on any movie from a behind-the-scenes perspective. It's pretty remarkable. That's amazing. It sounds like a treasure trove.

It sounds like something that people could study because I have to think that a lot of that stuff is really, really cool. I mean, the scripts I'm not sure about like story boards, I would love to see. Check them out. And a lot of the reviews at the time did say it was a triumphant production design and world building. Yeah. It just was a failure from a story perspective. So in 2021, Brian Haas teamed up with film editor and restorationist Garrett Gilchrist to create an unofficial extended cut of the film based on a VHS workprint of one of the early director's cuts that had resurfaced. It runs 20 extra minutes and most importantly includes the improvised anti-Cupo rap that Iggy and Spike performed at the boom-boom bar backed up by scannily clad lizard dancers.

Wow. And of course, as we mentioned, there's been another Mario adaptation. The Super Mario Brothers movie released on April 5, 2023, nearly 30 years to the day from the original. While the original was the first and one of the least successful, this new one is the most successful video game adaptation of all time. It is already grossed, as we mentioned, over a billion dollars. It is also led in an increased interest in the original film, as evidenced by a sold-out midnight screening in Queens, New York,

on March 11, 2023, where, for the first time since its release, Morton and Yankle attended a screening of the film. Amazing. They have spent the last 30 years avoiding it, but of the evening, Jankle said, it was vindicating, it took 30 years of a bad feeling to be wiped out in one evening.

So I think now both of them can move on emotionally from this project, which I get the sense, deeply scarred them, and understandably so. And notably, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the CEO of Nintendo, never publicly commented on the movie,

always maintaining perfect politeness. So we don't know how Nintendo ultimately felt about Super Mario Bros. But I hope they liked it. That is what went wrong on Super Mario Bros. Wow. Yeah, that one is jam-packed full of wrongers. There was a lot.

There was a lot. Everything that could have gone, most everything that could have gone wrong went wrong on this one. But I think, you know, the key is that they ended up trying to make two different movies. Right. And that is the big problem. Yeah, I mean, again, I thought it was pretty fun.

And if you, this is a personal taste thing, you know, Lizzie would strongly disagree for sure. But if it came down to watching Twilight or this again, I would watch this again. Oh, no, I would watch this again. This is not, I like this a lot more than a lot of the movies that we've watched for this podcast. I really, I genuinely,

liked it. And the production design is so cool. And as much as, you know, you want to see like, okay, you know, you want like them to rationalize or justify why a Goombo looks that way or why they took such a scientifically weird and specific approach to like the fungus and the mushrooms, which you just as opposed to doing something more cartoony or video gamey. At the end of the day, and that's why I said at the top, like, if you can detach yourself from the canon or like the lore of Mario itself, it's just a really, really, really. really wild and very fun off-the-wall movie

and all of the acting, I mean, Dennis Hopper is Dennis Hopper. Like, we've just rewatched speed. Yeah. He's the same in that as he is in this as he is in a water world. Dennis Hopper is doing generic villain, but he's still fun.

Yeah. And I thought Bob Hoskins and was in particular, he was the best part of the movie, in my opinion. I agree. I thought, but John Legu's on, it was good.

And Fisher Stevens is so funny. He is so funny. And I thought Samantha Mathis was great. I thought she was great. She was great. The perfect princesses. She took a kind of a thin character and turned her into something, which is, yeah.

And I agree. I thought, so David and I saw the new film on Friday, the new Mario. And I think visually it's remarkable. The animation has gotten just the textures that they use. It feels weirdly lifelike, even though it's based on a video game. But the story felt. Like, there was, it didn't feel like anyone was inspired when they were writing it, if that makes sense. It felt like, all your phrase, they were coloring within the lines, is how I would describe it.

Absolutely. And very successfully. Like, the movie is obviously a success. This movie, they were trying to make something completely different. Oh, and I think I skipped this fact. So, David, when Morton conceived the story, the concept was, this is the true story of the Mario. Brothers that was then discovered by a Japanese corporation and adapted incorrectly into the video game. So the idea was like, we're telling you the true story that the video game is then based on,

even though this is a movie based on the video game. It's kind of what they did with Lightyear for Pixar. Yeah. See, and that makes sense. I do wish there was that preamble in a way because the emphasis on science and them trying to really, make an argument or visually portray it as so realistic as far as some of the biological sort of stuff and like the evolution stuff it like it almost needed that just so that you can kind of put it in context which I like so much more than the sort of you know again going back to the newer Mario movie where it's like they're playing Nintendo and there's like some weird

meta elements that don't really fit together it's like at least this had the 93 versions sort of had the nerve to just be like, we're just going for it, you know. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. No, it really does. Yes.

Yeah. So their whole pitch was, this is the true. This is the story that then Nintendo turned into a kid's game. Right. That's the idea that they were creating. All right. Let's not drag it on.

David, what went right? Well, no, I feel unoriginal because it feels like, I feel like everybody, uh, it came to this conclusion,

but the production design is just like amazing. I mean, truly on par with a lot of the movies that I mentioned earlier, I couldn't help but think about like the shrunken heads in Beetlejuice when I saw the Goombuz. And Beetlejuice was also an inspiration for the creature design as well. Yeah, it very much looks to be the case. And all of the, yeah, Blade Runner-esque sort of the posters, when you mentioned the Max, what was it, Max Headroom? Max Headroom, yeah. Yeah, and you see the Pink Cooper marquees and posters and stuff all over the place very, very. much on that style.

The political advertisements. Yeah, exactly. Very, very Orwellian, very government control. Right. And that attention to detail, not even attention to detail, but the ambition of like going for some of that deeper sort of backstory stuff that probably was just a consequence of them not being able to be decisive about what kind of movie this was. But it makes to this weird hodgepodge that is unlike anything I've seen.

And so just, I mean, if uniqueness can be what one. and write. I really did see that as a virtue of this movie and made it very fun to watch for me. Yeah, I agree. I'm actually going to, I want to call it the music. Oh, my, yes. Nice. I actually liked the music in this one better than the new one. And I know it sounds like sacrilege, but I thought this one struck a better balance. So, for example, when they're in the restaurant and they're at the Italian restaurant early in the film on like the double date, and And one of the Mario themes starts coming through the accordion and the restaurant. And it felt like really natural and organic.

And like the way that they worked in the Mario themes in this movie, I thought felt really natural and organic. Whereas in the new movie, I actually thought they felt kind of forced and out of place in certain sequences. And so I actually, I don't know, I would take the music from this one. I'm really glad you brought that up. I completely agree. So this is Alan Sylvester.

he was a film scoring legend he's like back to the future and a million things uh for scum but he but yes like taking the approach of we are going to score this movie in the way that feels best for the picture as far as story goes but then use the actual element the melodic elements and themes from mario as diogenic elements yes where it was like in the gumba dance was the same thing Yes, the gum. That was so cool. It was like, oh, these things actually have a function in the world. And it actually tied it together in a way that felt like such a cool creative way to approach that,

as opposed to just say, okay, we're just going to recycle these themes. Okay, we got a fast moment. Let's use the star theme or let's whatever. Exactly. It clearly took a lot of thought. And it was a bold move because you were making the decision not to introduce something that people would have that direct association with. But I think it worked out in such a cool way.

And I think giving him that freedom in not making him tied to the score being only those themes made it so that he could actually score the film in the way that he would want to score a film as opposed to like, oh, I have to use this here and I have to use this here, you know. I agree. Yeah, it made it so that it felt more original to me while still honoring the game, which I thought was really fun. And I really liked that about it. So I will go with the score, as you mentioned. I love it. Alan Silvestri, which he just did an absolutely great job. and I really enjoyed it. So, David, is there anything else that we should talk about before we wrap this episode of what went wrong? Well, I don't think so. I think we covered it at all.

It's sure been a pleasure being on. I'm very nervous guest hosting. I got big shoes to fill, but it's a lot of fun when I get to do it. Chris, great job. Well, hopefully this one airs. Also, lest we forget, we will be covering Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula next.

In two weeks' time when Lizzie gets back from vacation. do yourself a favor and pop on Dracula. It's a bloody good time. Gary Oldman looks insane. Keanu Reeves' accent is a bit all over the place and I am extremely excited to learn about everything that went wrong in this beloved Coppola genre film.

So check out Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula before next episode of what went wrong. As always, guys, we would like to thank you for listening to this episode of What Went Wrong. Please, if you haven't yet, leave us a rating and review. do read them, we do appreciate them, and the ones that are less than five stars only hurt our feelings a lot. As always, thank you to our, your favorite podcast, full stop supporters on Patreon,

our Uber patrons, as they're called Tom Christen and Soman Chainani. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast. Thank you to all of our patrons. As always, I've said as always enough times today, but if you do have a film recommendation, please feel free to hit us up on Instagram at What Went wrong pod or on Gmail, WhatWWWRongPod at gmail.com. Thank you guys so much. We will see you in two weeks, not with David, but with Lizzie.

Thank you, Chris Winter, Bowser. Pretty good. I don't have a pun for your name. All right. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content,

and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing the music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthan Yu-Ose.