30 years before the new cinema adaptation, the Super Mario games were already filmed once. Our colleague Yves has seen the result. And suffered every second.
The Super Mario Bros. movie could be one of the biggest cinema hits of the year. That would be good if only to rid the video game series of its bad 1993 ignominy. The first adaptation, Super Mario Bros, was a terrible flop. And our colleague Yves knows why.
Check out Yves’ take on the first Super Mario movie here:
As he reveals in the video, a lot of things didn’t fit together in the film. The makers transplanted the plot to a dinosaur parallel dimension where creep King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) kidnaps Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis), and New York plumbers Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi (John Leguizamo) chase after her.
The hair-raisingly bizarre ideas, the wooden acting and the holey script caused the film to sink at the box office and with the critics. Hoskins later described the shoot as one of the worst experiences of his life in an interview with the Guardian. Only effects and production design came off well in the general verdict, as can be read in the New York Times.
