Super Mario Bros. (film)

From MarioWiki

A poster for the movie, showing Mario and Luigi with some Koopas and the Mushroom Kingdom in the background.

Super Mario Bros. is a 1993 adventure-family comedy based loosely on the popular video game of the same name. Despite its popular background, it was not received well by the general public.

Plot

The story concerns Mario and Luigi, two Italian American brothers living in Brooklyn, New York who are being driven out of business by the mafia-like Scapelli Construction Company. Luigi falls in love with an orphaned college student, Daisy, who is digging under the Brooklyn Bridge for dinosaur bones. After a date, she takes Luigi to the dig and witnesses Scapelli's men (who, along with Scapelli himself, had previously threatened her to end her research on that specific piece of land for their own interests) sabotage it by leaving the water-pipes open. Mario and Luigi stop the flooding but are knocked out by two strange characters, Iggy and Spike.

Mario and Luigi head deeper into the caves following Daisy's screaming and discover an interdimensional portal through which Mario and Luigi follow Daisy. They find themselves in a strange dystopian parallel world where a human-like race evolved from Dinosaurs rather than the mammalian ancestry of true humans. 65 million years ago a meteorite crashed into the Earth and in doing so ripped the universe into two parallel dimensions. All the living dinosaurs of the time crossed over into this new realm before being sealed there forever. Iggy and Spike turn out to be lackeys (and cousins) of the other world's evil and feared dictator, King Koopa, descended from the T-Rex. However, the two have failed to also bring Daisy's rock, a meteorite fragment which Koopa is trying to get in order to merge his world with the real world that separated from Koopa's world during the meteor strike. It turns out that Daisy is the princess of the other dimension but when Koopa overthrew Daisy's father (and turned him into fungus), Daisy's mother took her to New York using the interdimensional portal. The portal was then destroyed, but when Scapelli was blasting at the cave, the portal was reopened. When Koopa hears about the re-opening of the portal, he sends Spike and Iggy to find Daisy and the rock in order to merge the dimensions and make Koopa dictator of both worlds. Spike and Iggy, however, who had grown more intelligent after being subjected to one of Koopa's experiments, decide to turn on Koopa and join forces with Mario and Luigi. Koopa thinks only Daisy can merge the worlds. It turns out Mario and Luigi were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lucky for Daisy, the plumbers were persistent in finding her.

During the big finale, the worlds merge, during which Scapelli gets his comeuppance when Koopa devolves him into a primate, but Luigi takes back the rock and the worlds separate. Mario fights Koopa and eventually wins when he and Luigi devolve him, making him a Tyrannosaurus, and then primordial slime. The brothers save the two worlds from a cruel dictator and Daisy's father turns back to normal and reclaims control over the kingdom. As the brothers return home, Luigi and Daisy admit their love for one another but Daisy is not allowed to return to New York with them. Mario re-phrases Daisy's words to Luigi but he isn't buying it. Luigi passionately kisses her goodbye and the two Mario Bros. go back to New York, while Daisy, along with Toad, all watch them leave. About three weeks later, Daisy returns for Mario and Luigi's help in fighting more villains. Meanwhile, Mario and Luigi's story is televised, giving them the nickname "Super Mario Bros."

Cast

Mario: Bob Hoskins
Luigi: John Leguizamo
King Koopa: Dennis Hopper
Princess Daisy: Samantha Mathis
Iggy: Fisher Stevens
Spike: Richard Edson
Toad: Mojo Nixon
Lena: Fiona Shaw
Daniella: Dana Kaminski
Scapelli: Gianni Russo
Bertha: Francesca Roberts
King of Dinohattan: Lance Henriksen
Old Woman: Sylvia Harman
Narrator: Dan Castellanta
Angelica: Desiree Marie Velez
TV Announcer: Robert D. Raiford
Goomba: Scott Mactavish
Yoshi: Frank Welker - The Making of Super Mario Bros.
James: Preston Lane

Trivia

Printed on the VHS cassette is the message "Recommend This Action Hit To Friends!", possibly to compensate for the lack of success in theaters.
Bob Hoskins didn't know that the film he was making was based on a game, until his son asked him what he was working on. When Hoskins mentioned the film's title, his son immediately recognized it and showed Hoskins the game on his own Nintendo.
Tom Hanks was originally cast as Mario for a salary of $5 million, but the part ultimately went to Bob Hoskins because he was more affordable.
Bob Hoskins replaced originally cast Danny DeVito, who the studio wanted, as Mario.
When Daisy is using the panel in the room with her father as a fungus, the noise that boots it up is a sound effect known as the "1-up" noise.
Dustin Hoffman begged to be given the part of Mario due to the fact that his kids were fanatics of the video game.
An article in Spy magazine claimed that the script was being rewritten so many times during production that the actors stopped paying attention to these daily rewrites.
Throughout the entire film, everyone in the parallel dimension (Koopa's World) calls the Mario Brothers as "mammals, plumbers, etc." The exception is the guard at the police station who is asking for their names.
The song to which the Goombas dance in the elevator (and later, when Toad plays it on his harmonica) is "Somewhere My Love" by Frankie Yankovic, from the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago.
A squeal was planned just as the movie's ending indicated, but was canceled due to lack of popularity.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, had several guidelines that the film had to follow. Most of these were ignored.
Daisy's original name was going to be Diana (according to the Super Mario Bros. movie stickerbook), but was changed due to there already being a Princess Diana at the time.
There is a scene that was cut where Koopa de-evolves a Goomba into the slime he slips in. However, in a Super Mario Bros. movie audio cassette, the scene is mentioned.
The location for the movie was an inactive cement plant, in Castle Hayne, North Carolina. It originally was designed to be a showcase for the use of poured cement, so there were wonderful aesthetics throughout that were exploited by talented Production Designer David L. Snyder (art director for "Blade Runner".) A tremendous amount of work had to be performed to transform the facility into a working location. (To learn more, read the Markee Magazine feature article "The Making Of Super Mario Bros.: It Ain't No Game!")
Mario mentions going to see Wrestlemania, signifying he was a pro-wrestling fan.