I'm Tired Of People Pretending To Hate Super Mario Bros (1993)

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I get it. You want Super Mario Brothers in its on-screen form to be identical to the games. You want to see a spaghetti eating pudgy guy in a red suit running through a CGI world of turtles and dinosaurs. And, for all intents and purposes, you’ve got that. You’ve had it. You have the whole line-up of Nintendo variant franchises all depicting the Mario brothers in exactly this way. But, in another reality, this isn’t SMB at all.

In another reality, the 1993 live-action adaption of the NES Mario brothers won awards, and went on to not only inspire sequels, but an entire franchise of new games where you take command of Mario and Luigi as they dive through multiple dimensions to fight fungal spores, and human-dino hybrids.

A racing game where you’ve got to keep your car connected to the electric rails, or you risk crashing and hurtling into the endless desert of Dinohattan (okay, that name is a little bit silly).

A first-person shooter where you wield devolution weapons in your quest to liberate the oppressed masses of the dystopian kingdom that Koopa now rules.

And maybe an RPG where you create your own “Dinohattanite” on a mission to make it big, or die trying.

The possibilities could have been endless.

Instead, we got the reality we’ve been dealt, and this cliffhanger that’s never had an answer.

A scene at the very end of the movie where Daisy bursts through the door, and says something along the lines of, “You guys are never going to believe this!” and then it cuts to credits.

Cruel, torturous world. I remember being about eight years old, totally hyped, pumped to see what happens next.

I’m 40 now.

I still don’t know what happens next.

It’s true that a few of the actors involved in this movie, actually hated that they were involved in it, decades later. But, I feel like the dystopian-warning that the directors made here kind of went over a lot of people’s heads? Like, maybe the message didn’t go over people’s heads, but what it was meant to be, kind of did?

I don’t think it was intended to be a rosy, brightly colored videogame movie.

I think it was just intended to be a wild and fantastic science fiction world with some characters we’re familiar with, and that’s exactly what it is!

And I look back on movies like this, especially the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie, because you do not see movies like this anymore. You just don’t. Hollywood doesn’t take risks like this in the 21st century. Hollywood does 47 Marvel movies, and book adaptions, and CGI cartoon movies. And then every once in a while something good comes out.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I miss “the old days.” You know, the nineties. It’s partially about being a kid again, but it’s also kind of about living in a time that really was better, you know? Better … in a lot of ways that are comparatively not good anymore.

Soon I’ll be 41, and wondering, what other piece of my childhood and/or teens do most people hate that I actually think is really cool, and wish we could all revisit one more time?