SUPER MARIO BROS. (1993)
For every move there is a counter. Each attack has a defense. Within the confines of this digital dojo we defend underloved works of art. It has been said that all art will eventually find its audience. We are that audience. Bow to your media. Bow to your device. Choose your fighter.
The video game selection cursor haughtily hovers over THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE (2023) but I shake my head. Correcting, the cursor confidently cruises over THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE (2026) coming soon and I shake my head more vehemently. Confidence shattered, the cautious cursor crawls to SUPER MARIO BROS. (1993) and I nod with extreme gusto. Select. Start.
IMDb: 4.2 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes: 27% Tomatometer / 30% Popcornmeter out of 100%
Metacritic: 35 / 100 Metascore, 4.5 / 10 User Score
Letterboxd: 2.1 out of 5
No, this isn’t rose-colored nostalgia goggles talking. If I was trying to “Crocodile Rock” you à la Sir Elton, I would have to tell you otherwise it’s entrapment. I just watched SUPER MARIO BROS. in big bad 2026 (if you’re reading this in the future, hopefully we won the water wars!) and believe me when I tell you it’s a good time! Tonally muddled? Maybe. A box office disappointment? Indubitably. A chaotic production wrought with peril (particularly for Bob Hoskins)? Positively! But is it also an ambitious aboriginal arcade adaptation that, while at times abrasive, is well worth appreciation? I would assert… ABSOLUTELY!
First, some numbers for the bean counters. Produced primarily by Lightmotive, in association with Allied Filmmakers and Cinergi Pictures Entertainment, and distributed by Hollywood Pictures, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, with an estimated budget of around $48 million and garnering a worldwide box office gross of approximately $38.9 million, allegedly making SUPER MARIO BROS. the second biggest box office bomb of 1993 behind LAST ACTION HERO (a flick of which I’m also quite fond). The film had a theatrical run time of 104 minutes unless you saw it in Italy which due to poor press caused cinemas to shave about 20 minutes off the run time, thus completely omitting the ending.
Now your mileage may vary, but music in movies goes a long way for me and the soundtrack for SUPER MARIO BROS. is absolutely epic! Be it Alan Silvestri’s jaunty original scoring or the licensed tracks from the likes of Extreme, Joe Satriani, Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch, Megadeth, and Queen, the soundtrack straight up slaps as the cool kids’ parents might say these days. Then there’s the movie-branded music video for Roxette which is some synth-driven, ethereal, dance-pop perfection that is tailor-made for slow dancing with your sweetheart and fits the finale despite being originally written and subsequently cut from the HOCUS POCUS (1993) soundtrack. Speaking of dancing, the Goombas dancing to “Somewhere My Love” by Frankie Yankovic (no relation to “Weird Al”) never fails to make me smile because as Luigi says, “Everybody loves to dance!”
And lest we forget about the George Clinton & The Goombas cover of “Walk The Dinosaur” by Was (Not Was). Rarely has funk benefited from such a fitting motif in film. If you weren’t walking the dinosaur in ‘93, could you even say you walked? If there was one glaring omission musically, I’d say it was Devo being conspicuous by their absence. With the prominent de-evolution plot point and thematic and aesthetic appropriateness, they would have fit like a Power Glove but alas it was not meant to be. What totally redeemed that oversight for me was the casting of Mojo Nixon as Toad and reimagining that miraculous mushroom man as an anti-totalitarian troubadour! By virtue of the transitive property put forth by Dean Sabatino of The Dead Milkmen in the song “Punk Rock Girl” if your movie has Mojo Nixon then it should require no fixin’.
This is one of many instances where creative casting truly shone through. Bob Hoskins might have felt like an obvious choice for Mario based on his star power, likeness, and previous experiences as a plumber in Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL (1985) but John Leguizamo was a gamble that really paid off for me. As a little brother I was a perpetual Player Two so I was pleased to see my guy Luigi given a look and character all his own. Leguizamo (who I lovingly refer to as “The Guiz” or “Guizmaster”) got to deliver fun lines (“comes from sitting on my butt playing video games all day”) and motivated most of the action in his pursuit of Daisy as the princess of the picture.
Hoskins and Leguizamo also had a solid brotherly chemistry, no doubt due to getting blotto together during downtime to lament the arduous filming process (this might also account for the many maladies Hoskin suffered in during production (e.g., broken finger, stabbed, electrocuted, nearly drowned). Giving depth and differentiating what has historically been presented complimentarily colored identical video game sprites was quite enjoyable with Hoskin’s Mario being the pragmatic, paternal, older sibling pitching plumbing parables as the solution to all life’s problems (“I’ve been listening to pipes all my life”) and Leguizamo’s Luigi being the impetuous, idealist, inamorato for our imprisoned interdimensional inheritor.
Speaking of our dino digging deuteragonist damsel in distress, I appreciate what Samantha Mathias brings to the role of Daisy as an atypical princess in peril. I think I can speak for all ‘90s kids when I say everyone under twelve wanted to be a paleontologist back then. Also, reimagining the Mushroom Kingdom as a pervasive sentient fungus was quite the creative innovation to tie together the dethroning and de-evolution subplots.
Our devolved djondjon daddy does a lot of set dressing for “Dinohattan” and I find it delightful! The filming location for Dinohattan is built out of a condemned cement factory on the outskirts of North Carolina also used for the Foot Clan halfpipe headquarters in TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (1990) and Top Dollar's nightclub from THE CROW (1994). Talk about a theatrical triple feature template for my whole identity throughout the early ‘90s! Honestly, I love the gritty, post-punk, industrial aesthetic for Dinohattan and its denizens that key producer Roland Joffé championed as “the New Brutalism.”
What could be more brutal than the Simpsons-level prophetic performance of Dennis Hopper as Donald Trump as King Koopa? Sure, it’s not expressly stated in the film but look at the hair, suit, and the trafficking of women? “Fascist! Oppressor of the proletariat!" That’s “one evil, egg sucking, son of a snake” that sure is easy to cheer for his inevitable defeat. Hopper truly epitomized the vicious lizardbrained qualities of a society evolved from dinosaurs rather than primates and that’s a unique and clever interpretation of the source material, particularly in reference to the Super Nintendo game Super Mario World (1991).
For the youth perspective, I showed SUPER MARIO BROS. (1993) to my nine-year-old nephew. Despite an obvious preference for the 2023 offering (arguably his favorite film behind 2024’s SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3), he said it was good but “Walk The Dinosaur” didn’t resonate with him like “Peaches” did (which he sang ad nauseum after his initial viewing). His final analysis was that contrasting both flicks was tantamount to comparing Basquiat with Banksy but that felt more than a little reductive and placating as if to say “I get it, Uncle Vito—you prefer scrappy, disjointed, cocaine-fueled craziness over concise and coherent compositions that dare to lean toward commercialism. Ultimately, he was most tickled by the fact that I was about his age when the O.G. Mario movie came out.
Singing the praises of SUPER MARIO BROS. is not a phenomenon particular to the parameters of this piece. In March of 2023, it was screened to a packed audience and uproarious applause at Quentin Tarantino's New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. As our co-directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel got to preside over the proceedings, finally getting to see their ill-fated artistic output find its desired audience, an experience said to have “washed away the stain” of the movie’s poor critical and economic reception thirty years prior. That kind of catharsis is worth so much more than 2,000 Koopa coins!
