BONUS: The Game Was Better: Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Speaker 2 Welcome to How Do This Get Played Premium DLC. I am Nick Weiger alongside Heather Ann Campbell.
Metaphorically alongside. What, huh?

Speaker 3 What'd you say?

Speaker 2 I said metaphorically alongside. Oh, yeah, metaphorically.

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm Heather Ann Campbell, metaphorically alongside Matt Apodaka.

Speaker 1 Hello, everyone.

Speaker 2 Hello. Hello.
Hello, everyone.

Speaker 1 We're doing it.

Speaker 3 Are you guys ready for this one? Are you fucking ready for this one?

Speaker 2 I'm

Speaker 2 ready. I've rarely been less ready, but I am.

Speaker 2 I'm very, but I'm excited to talk about this because this is fucking bananas. Well,

Speaker 3 I'm concerned that we're going to receive a cease and desist,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 I think we should just plow ahead. I think we should just give them what they want.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't think,

Speaker 1 look,

Speaker 1 anyone can talk about a bad movie. I think that's fair game.

Speaker 1 We're allowed to do what this is within our rights

Speaker 2 as human beings. It's our right.
100%.

Speaker 3 It's our freedom of speech. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 Hey, free speech.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm not, I oppose free speech, but I think

Speaker 2 that it protects us in this case, and the law is on our side. And hey, the reason we are talking in these terms is because we are talking about a hot topic,

Speaker 2 or at least it was a hot topic back in 1993. The film Super Mario Bros., the only live-action Nintendo film outside of Pokemon Detective Pikachu.
That's it.

Speaker 2 Super Mario Brothers, and then they shut shut it down for 25 years before trying again with Detective Pikachu, which I love. You guys like Detective Pikachu? I did love it.

Speaker 2 I thought it was great.

Speaker 3 Not only, not only, I learned a little insider info about Detective Pikachu, which was that

Speaker 3 the reason Detective Pikachu exists is it was proof of concept for the studio to Nintendo for a Pokemon movie.

Speaker 3 And if it did, you know, gonzo business and didn't ruin or tarnish the brand in any way, then they were going to move forward with a Pokemon movie with the same people involved. But

Speaker 3 as we all know, it did not set the box office on fire. It did great.

Speaker 2 It was,

Speaker 3 but it wasn't like representative of the strength of the Pokemon brand,

Speaker 3 especially when you consider that Sonic the fucking hedgehog beat it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yo,

Speaker 3 the most successful video game movie of all time is now Sonic the Hedgehog.

Speaker 2 Detective Pikachu is so good. I thought it was, I guess it's probably the thing of people were like, what is Detective Pikachu?

Speaker 2 That extra layer probably was just enough to make people think it was a weird movie that they were maybe a little skittish about seeing theatrically, but I thought it was, it was fantastic.

Speaker 2 Contra, the film we were discussing today. So Super Mario Brothers, the film was directed by, co-directed by Rocky Rocky Morton and Annabelle Jankle.

Speaker 2 And it was, it had a number of credited writers, one of whom was Ed Solomon. Ed Solomon has a lot of

Speaker 2 things he's worked on that have turned out great.

Speaker 2 Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Men in Black. He's got some real credits,

Speaker 2 but you know, this was one of those ones where I feel like it probably got...

Speaker 2 It went through so many passes by so many writers and so credited and uncredited, and then also got probably so many notes from the studio and is just this

Speaker 2 big, ugly glop of a film.

Speaker 2 But had you guys, so I hadn't seen this film since VHS. Heather, I know you're very, very familiar with this movie.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I have seen it a lot.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that being said,

Speaker 3 When this movie enters your brain, it immediately passes beyond

Speaker 3 your cerebellum and right out the back of your head.

Speaker 3 It's like you're taking in a movie that you cannot see or watch.

Speaker 2 And I should note that you're maybe listening to this podcast where, you know, almost five minutes in and you're like, what do you get? This guy, they're talking about movies? What is this? Movie?

Speaker 2 This is a movie podcast? Am I? Did I subscribe to the wrong? How did this get?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the truth is,

Speaker 2 this is a video game podcast. Yes, but we are doing a video game-based movie.
This is the first edition of a premium DLC

Speaker 2 concept we are doing called The Game Was Better. So we are reviewing a movie that is based off of a video game where we prefer the game, which pretty much encompasses all of them, I would say.

Speaker 2 Is there any video game movie where you're like, the movie is better than the game? Hmm.

Speaker 1 I've seen quite a few of them.

Speaker 2 I can't think of one.

Speaker 2 I've seen like, I mean, I mean, like ones that even that I like, like Mortal Kombat, is still like, I'd still rather have the game Mortal Kombat than watch this film.

Speaker 3 What about Rampage?

Speaker 1 Rampage is crazy.

Speaker 2 There's a case

Speaker 3 crazy, but the game is repetitive and kind of boring. And so like you arguably we couldn't do an episode on Rampage because I'd be at least one of three dissenters on the opinion.

Speaker 2 I think I can say this. I met for the Rampage movie like fucking like 11 years ago or something like that.

Speaker 2 And I was like, that's a great idea because that just is, it's already, it's the game is based off of a movie concept that works.

Speaker 2 So now you're just taking this license that you have and now you can make it into a

Speaker 2 fucking movie. But like, here's my whole issue.
The whole thing in Rampage is that it's human beings turning into giant monsters. Yes.

Speaker 2 And then you get the hilarious thing where they're naked walking around covering their bodies. You don't get that in the movie.

Speaker 3 That's is that what you went into the meeting with? Because if so, I understand why you didn't get hired.

Speaker 2 I was like, look, this children's movie has to be filled with naked adults covering their

Speaker 2 breasts and genitals.

Speaker 2 And they, and yeah, they, they escorted me out quickly. But I, I thought, like, I was like, that is a,

Speaker 2 it's to me, yes, I think there's a case for rampage in the movie because the game is pretty thin, but I do feel like that was a movie that should have been a home run. Anyway, so

Speaker 2 this, uh, you know, staying in the bait in baseball terms, this is a big-time whiff of a film. Super Mario Brothers was,

Speaker 2 and this is a thing I saw on Wikipedia that I just thought was interesting. I'll just read this verbatim.
The screenwriter, this is a, this is, this is a quote.

Speaker 2 The screenwriters envision the film as a subversive comedy with a weird and dark tone similar to Ghostbusters. And that definitely bleeds through as you're watching this.
It's a dark movie.

Speaker 2 And honestly, I feel like I didn't, I was, I saw this when I was old enough to not be scared by it, but I feel like if I saw this when I was like six or seven or eight, I'd be like,

Speaker 2 I'd have the shit scared out of me by this. It's so dark and creepy.
You've got human beings turning into monsters and goop at one point.

Speaker 2 You've got like, you've got all these weird-looking, like the Goombas look fucking horrifying. The Goombas look awful.
Look, they look like absolute shit.

Speaker 2 They've got these gigantic broad shoulders and these tiny little softball heads, and then they're covered with the scaly texture that is just repulsive creatures that I feel like would scare the shit out of me if I was a youngster.

Speaker 3 I'm going to send live here on the podcast. I'm going to send you guys a website.
And the website is the internet's most

Speaker 3 thorough Super Mario Bros. The movie repository.
So it lists every deleted scene. Some of the deleted scenes are on this website.

Speaker 3 It's smbmovie.com, which I've been going to infrequently over the last few years.

Speaker 3 It also has props. It has props for sale.
It has breakdowns of different drafts of the script.

Speaker 3 It's a robust

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 3 archaic. The website itself looks like it was designed in like 1999.

Speaker 2 It's funny because, yeah, it looks very, very old, very frozen in time in the angelfire slash GeoCities era of web design, except it's been updated as recently as August 15th, 2019. So

Speaker 2 they're still making regular updates to this site.

Speaker 2 So I guess the way,

Speaker 2 the big thing here,

Speaker 2 the big swing they take here is they set it in

Speaker 2 real life,

Speaker 2 like actual Brooklyn. I don't mean like it's like a Brooklyn

Speaker 2 Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 Oh, but Super Mario Brothers. Hey, I'm one Mario Bros.

Speaker 1 On my way to get a slice.

Speaker 3 Do you think that they did that because of the Super Mario Brothers

Speaker 3 animated show?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Super Mario Brothers Super Show.

Speaker 2 I think there's a good chance they did that. I think that's also just production-wise.
It's just like you don't have to build this whole fantasy world, this mushroom kingdom. But also,

Speaker 2 I think there's a tendency, and you saw this even with Sonic, which we mentioned, to have these films be the video game world is crossing over into our world. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In fact, I'd say a lot of children's adaptations do that, a lot of animated adaptations.

Speaker 2 The The movie that I think is closest to this, and I think is a much better, much more watchable film, much more satisfactory from a fan service standpoint, is the He-Man film Masters of the Universe, which has Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and has a similar plot of the Masters of the Universe characters come to our world to try to find the fucking cosmic key or some shit.

Speaker 3 I got a bone to pick with you on this, Weiger. I don't think the Super Mario Bros.
movie is about them coming to our world. It's us, it's humans going to their world.

Speaker 2 Yes, you're right. It's a connection of the two worlds.
That's what, yes.

Speaker 3 We spend most of the movie in Dino Hatton, which is Bowser acted by Dennis Hopper. It's Bowser's kingdom, which he has taken over from the former king who is made out of mushrooms.
He's a fungus.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they've devolved the former king.

Speaker 3 There's so much. There's so much to talk about in this fucking movie.
There's so much.

Speaker 2 It's how they, this is the my issue is that they

Speaker 2 their way of

Speaker 2 of integrating the things that we know from Mario, the way we know from the Mario universe, are so unsatisfactory and so many steps removed from what we know.

Speaker 2 Like, there is ultimately like a mushroom, a super mushroom joke, but the main way you're seeing mushrooms is what you said, Heather, which is that a the

Speaker 2 Daisy's father, the character of Daisy's father, has been turned into a big fungus mushroom-like creature who is just like, it's just gross to look at.

Speaker 2 I guess I don't want to, like, I, I want to root for this fucking

Speaker 2 weird fucking mold that's everywhere. I don't want to, I don't want that.
I'm not on this thing's side.

Speaker 3 Well, so if I, I'm going to try and summarize the entire plot of Super Mario Brothers, the movie, in like two sentences, maybe three. Wow.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 In Brooklyn, a girl named Daisy is actually the daughter of King Koopa from the Mushroom Kingdom, left on the steps of an orphanage when she was a child.

Speaker 3 But now, in the modern day, she's being sucked back into the mushroom kingdom against her will, where she is going to inherit the throne of King Koopa.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 Mario and Luigi enter after her to save her from this nightmare world where King Koopa has designed a new technology that devolves

Speaker 3 human beings and reptiles.

Speaker 3 Because in his kingdom,

Speaker 3 Humans evolved from dinosaurs. Yes.
But in our kingdom, they evolved from monkeys.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 3 And he's going to use this new technology to take over both the Mushroom Kingdom and Brooklyn, which he does by crossing over and reenacting 9-11.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's

Speaker 2 a key plot point.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 more seeding the idea for 9-11 because this predated it by several years.

Speaker 1 The craziest thing about that description is that it sounds nuts, but all of that is true.

Speaker 2 Every single thing you said is true.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, so Daisy, that's the character who's left off in an orphanage. That was the thing that I,

Speaker 2 like watching that opening scene, because I'd forgotten so much of this film, having not seen it for probably 20 years.

Speaker 2 And the, like, I was, you had to get a, uh, we had to use, use a VPN to watch this on Japanese Netflix. It's not streaming anywhere on any U.S.
service or even available for rental.

Speaker 2 So I was watching it on Japanese Netflix and I'm watching the scene where this like this little, I think an egg, I think she's in a fucking egg is dropped off at the orphanage. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I was just like texting, texting you guys like, I forgot this movie immediately sucks. Like it's just right away.
You're like, oh, this is fucking terrible.

Speaker 1 It started with that animation of the dinosaurs, the talking Brooklyn-ass dinosaurs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's supposed to be, I guess, like a pixel art thing. Yeah.
Kind of. It's kind of got that filter to it.

Speaker 3 I have a theory on that, on the opening scene, which is the cartoon, which is that it was added very late in production.

Speaker 2 Oh, sure, I can buy that.

Speaker 3 Because it is tonally extremely different from the rest of the movie.

Speaker 3 You open with a cartoon explaining the history of the Mushroom Kingdom and how the dinosaurs, some of the dinosaurs survived the meteor impact and were splintered off into a separate multiverse where the dinosaurs evolved into people, but it's told like a cartoon.

Speaker 3 I think the original opening scene in this movie was fucking Daisy as an egg smuggled into the real world.

Speaker 2 That makes sense because it's kind of like a little preamble to what is effectively a cold open.

Speaker 2 And I think they probably added that to try to make the story make any sense at all, which it makes very little of. It's also, you spend so much of the early part of it.

Speaker 2 Here's another issue. So I mentioned that all the

Speaker 2 way that that the lore you know from Mario is integrated is not satisfying. One way is

Speaker 2 that King Koopa is just a man. He's just Dennis Hopper

Speaker 2 doing the best he can, but he's just a man for 90% of the movie. The mushroom thing I mentioned.

Speaker 2 Another thing is when you get to Dino Hatton in the Metropolis NYC analog in the Mushroom Kingdom, there is a toad character who is a man with a spiral haircut like on his head, which I guess is meant to replicate a fucking like toadstool, like a mushroom cap, but it looks fucking gross.

Speaker 2 And then he's killed, he's like turned into a Goomba in short order. That actor, the actor, by the way, who plays

Speaker 2 Toad in Super Mario Bros., his name is Mojo Nixon, which I love. Wow.
And then one of his credits

Speaker 2 shortly after Super Mario Bros. was in the film Buttcrack playing Preacher Man Bob.

Speaker 2 So there you go.

Speaker 3 Guys, I've got a live update right here.

Speaker 3 While you were telling us a little bit about that actor, I went ahead and looked up

Speaker 3 some background on that animated dinosaur prologue.

Speaker 3 And I have confirmed that...

Speaker 3 According to SMBMovie.com, the dinosaur prologue was the final addition to the movie during the post-production process.

Speaker 3 According to Parker, the producers had held screenings of the film that left the audiences confused.

Speaker 3 In order to avoid theatrical frustration, they opted to add the prologue to the beginning of the film to simply spell it out.

Speaker 3 The prologue never existed in any of the scripts.

Speaker 3 Rather, the film was meant to start on a primordial setting complete with realistic dinosaurs before a meteorite catastrophically obliterated the landscape.

Speaker 2 A brief portion of this original opening can be seen at the end of the animated sequence so this was an era in video game movies and and that that like the way you're describing it and and what you're talking about dinosaurs which is such a big theme in this movie is is is all the shit about dinosaurs going extinct in our world and surviving in the other as you mentioned earlier heather and evolving into into human-like creatures the

Speaker 2 it was it was from an era where

Speaker 2 The writers were everyone behind it, the producers, everyone behind it had no idea what the actual appeal of the intellectual property was.

Speaker 2 So they just made a bunch of rash decisions that they felt made sense and or were interesting on their own, but still kind of like had elements of the intellectual property of the game.

Speaker 2 And so like, there's like the thing about Mario that's there's nothing in that.

Speaker 2 There are dinosaur creatures in Mario, and yes, Yoshi has an appearance as again, another gross fucking, as a gross stop-motion lizard-like creature or slash puppet i think he might be a puppet but they have like a fucking

Speaker 2 nothing about like the the the the super mario world is like oh there's a lot of dinosaur shit it's like dinosaurs exist in it but we don't want to know like like oh this is all tie we're trying to make the dina the presence of dinosaurs in mario make sense somehow like who gives a shit Yeah,

Speaker 1 when I was watching, this is my first time watching it. I had never seen this movie before.

Speaker 1 I was aware of it.

Speaker 1 And so this is one of two movies that I've watched for this show: this and Water World for when we did the Water World game episode, that both do feature Dennis Hopper as an antagonist.

Speaker 1 And now, and these are the only two movies I've ever seen Dennis Hopper in before.

Speaker 2 And I understand him to have this legacy as

Speaker 1 a renowned actor. And now I'm just like, was this a prank?

Speaker 2 Was Dennis Hopper a prank?

Speaker 1 I don't get it. I guess I got to watch something that he's in that's good.

Speaker 3 But Easy Rider, man.

Speaker 1 I'll pop on Easy Rider because I want to understand him. He is compelling as a villain.
He's very interesting. He was doing the best he could.
But

Speaker 1 my main takeaway watching this thing was just like, it's like, yeah, like we were saying,

Speaker 1 nobody making this understood Mario. Like, they did way too much work

Speaker 1 to make any of this. They should have just made it like a fun.

Speaker 1 They just

Speaker 1 made it fun. None of this is fun.

Speaker 2 There's nothing fun. It's just gross and dark.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 You guys think that it's that it that it missing that it doesn't understand the uh appeal of Mario? Let me tell you, there was also a version of this movie that that audiences didn't understand.

Speaker 3 And I'm gonna pull from the Super Mario Brothers Movie.com website again from a 2010 interview where they talked about how much ADR they'd done.

Speaker 3 Now, ADR is when you take a scene where a character's back is to camera or they are off camera and you put in dialogue that helps explain plot or fills in holes that you have to edit around.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 apparently, the post-production supervisor at Super Mario Brothers, the movie, said it was the most ADR looping she ever encountered.

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 It was a struggle to make the story come together, even as much as it did. There's an original document on the website that shows all of the ADR that they did.

Speaker 3 And it includes huge numbers of scenes that didn't make it into the movie. So as they're mastering this film, it was an even longer cut also.

Speaker 2 So this like

Speaker 2 two-hour

Speaker 3 Blade Runner version of Super Mario Brothers was probably two and a half hours.

Speaker 2 Jesus.

Speaker 1 Because this movie, how long is it the runtime now? It's like an hour 30, probably or something.

Speaker 2 I think, yeah, I think it's closer to like an hour 40. It's, it's, you know, it's not super long, but an hour 44 is the official runtime.

Speaker 3 It's not super long. Then that's just, that means it's the regular Mario Brothers movie.

Speaker 2 High five. This has been DLC.

Speaker 3 See you later.

Speaker 1 I have this quote from Dennis Hopper describing

Speaker 1 the film's production that I think is very funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He goes, it was a nightmare, very honestly, that movie.

Speaker 1 It was a husband and wife team directing who were both control freaks and wouldn't talk before they made decisions. Anyway, I was supposed supposed to go down there for five weeks.
I was there for 17.

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 So Mario is played by, we mentioned Dennis Hopper, the Mario Brothers, the titular Super Mario Brothers, who are designated the Super Mario Brothers towards the end of the film.

Speaker 2 It's like, you guys are the Super Mario Brothers for your heroism. The Mario Brothers, who have a Mario plumbing business, Mario Brothers plumbing business.

Speaker 2 Mario is played by Bob Hoskins, hot off of his,

Speaker 2 something of a, of a, of a movie star in the late 80s, early 90s, great actor, hot off of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was a big hit, and hook.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so he was cast in this, in this very desirable role. Apparently, I read somewhere that Dennis, or not Dennis, Dustin Hoffman was trying to get cast as Mario because he wanted to impress his kids.

Speaker 2 So Bob Hoskins is Mario. I believe he's a British actor.
Yeah. And he is doing the most, the most Brooklyn-y,

Speaker 2 I'm from Brooklyn. Hey, it's me.
I'm Benedict Cumberbatch playing a Brooklyn guy.

Speaker 2 This is where I'm from.

Speaker 1 I was down in Canal Street this weekend.

Speaker 2 And then all the jokes in the movie are things like, you know,

Speaker 2 whatever, like Luigi, who's played by John Leguizamo, who will like, like, you know, catch something and be like, hey, I should, oh, boy, I should try out for the Yankees.

Speaker 2 You know, it's like all just like the most broad Italian stereotype slash Brooklyn ripped from Sebastian Maniscalco's act, like comedy.

Speaker 2 It's very, I mean, and I think that, again, it's just like they don't know the appeal of the Mario Brothers is not that they, it's not that they're these Italian stereotypes.

Speaker 2 Like, that's an element in the vocal performance or ended up being an element in the Charles Martinette vocal performance, but it's not really the characters are.

Speaker 3 I think it was, I think there was a lot of influence by the Super Mario Brothers animated show. I think that there's no way because you had

Speaker 2 Lou Albano. Lou Albano, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Lou Albano is playing Mario and he's playing Mario like this. And Luigi is played by another wrestler.

Speaker 2 I don't remember who played Luigi.

Speaker 3 And he's he's talking like this. I'm Mario.
Why don't you give me a slice of pizza? I feel like the only

Speaker 3 introduction that a a regular human audience had to the idea that Mario might talk were those two actors.

Speaker 2 And so they were like, well, the one thing we know for sure is they talk like they're from Brooklyn. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 The actor who played Luigi,

Speaker 2 it looks like Harvey Atkin. And I don't know if he has a wrestling.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. Harvey Atkin played King Koopa.
Danny Wells played Luigi. Oh.

Speaker 2 And I'm not sure if he has a wrestling pedigree or not.

Speaker 3 Ding-dong Danny Wells.

Speaker 2 I was trying to do that too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that makes sense because

Speaker 1 if that was the only access they had into Mario, I feel like a lot of people, especially at that time, would have been like, well, I'm not playing a video game.

Speaker 1 I could never play a video game. Do you have something else for me to understand? Oh, this cartoon.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 Also, the, so John Leguizamo plays Luigi,

Speaker 2 just doesn't have a mustache. None of you couldn't grow one or what, but it's just like there's no mustache on this guy.
Are you kidding me? Like, they get the body types, right? Like,

Speaker 2 Mario's a little stockier. Luigi's a string bean, but give him a fucking mustache.
Yeah, and they don't get their outfits. They don't get their outfits at the end.

Speaker 2 They don't get their outfits till act three.

Speaker 2 They could be the Mario Brothers plumbing company, and one of them's wearing a red suit, one of them's wearing a green suit from

Speaker 2 the jump.

Speaker 3 At what point are we going to talk about the

Speaker 3 Attack of the Clones-esque bar nightclub that

Speaker 3 Mario and Luigi find themselves in?

Speaker 2 Very strange, where I believe Big Bertha runs the house.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 she's supposed to be a,

Speaker 3 what do you call it?

Speaker 3 The spiny that throws the...

Speaker 3 All of their costumes in the movie are like... If a human being had spikes on them, what would it look like?

Speaker 3 And she's got like a red jacket with a bunch of spikes on it because she's supposed to be a spiny, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Anyway.
I was trying to remember because I thought the, maybe I'm wrong. I thought the big Bertha was that big fish that jumps up.
But maybe that's something that's.

Speaker 3 She's named Big Bertha, but her costume is a spiny.

Speaker 2 Okay, got it. Look,

Speaker 3 I'm not trying to justify their choices.

Speaker 2 Why would you? What would you do? See, they go to a bar. They go to an adult nightclub bar.

Speaker 3 And as a kid, that was the scariest scene of the entire film for me. I'm fine with the Goombas.

Speaker 3 Like, they're weird looking, but I was like, oh, they got little cute little smiles and they dance in an elevator.

Speaker 3 It was the nightclub where I was like, oh, no, Mario and Luigi are in danger. Because if I was in this nightclub, I would be in danger.

Speaker 2 Because when you say adult nightclub, like they go in and it's like an eyes wide shut masked orgy. Like everyone's just fucking and sucking.

Speaker 2 Big Bertha's overseeing the proceedings. Mario's like, oh man, I'm getting hotter than Mas lasagna.

Speaker 1 Mario does

Speaker 1 sort of because she has the that, what did the fuck it's called?

Speaker 3 Daisy has a crystal around her neck.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 1 But she has it at that point in the nightclub, and Mario tries to like suck it out from between her breasts at one point.

Speaker 2 I was shocked by this. Yeah, they have a little kissing scene, and then he swipes it

Speaker 2 in the old mouth.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's

Speaker 2 fuck. This movie's so fucking bad.
It's so good.

Speaker 3 It has so many layers. There's a Mario kart section, guys.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yoshi, we mentioned.

Speaker 2 There's a, you know, Iggy, who's one of the Koopas.

Speaker 2 The Koopa kids is presented in human form. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Wait, we've talked about Yoshi?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I brought up Yoshi really quickly.

Speaker 3 I would like to say that in 1993, the Yoshi puppet is among the most advanced animatronic puppets that existed at the time. I believe it.

Speaker 2 Yoshi

Speaker 3 was a Jurassic Park style, photorealistic, tiny Velociraptor looking thing. Yes.

Speaker 3 And he serves no plot points in the movie. He just walked, like imagine spending at least.

Speaker 3 at least $3 million on a fucking animatronic puppet. And its job is to walk into a room and somebody goes, oh, it's Yoshi.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, it just doesn't seem like,

Speaker 1 I mean, because there's, I mean, when you're playing Mario, the game, I don't know, like, like, or, you know, the first Mario, you're not really playing it like, oh man, the story.

Speaker 1 You're kind of just, you know, going through it or whatever. But the story presented in the game isn't that hard to adapt into a workable movie.
So I just don't know why.

Speaker 2 It's extremely straightforward.

Speaker 1 It's so simple. It would be the easiest thing.
And I just, I'm just so confused as to how they took so many wrong left turns into like trying to make it into this other thing.

Speaker 1 I was just baffled by it because, I mean, yeah,

Speaker 1 I'd never seen it before, and I watched it and I can't stop thinking about it.

Speaker 1 It's not left my brain.

Speaker 3 It, it really, it's like a origami-wrapped present where the paper itself, you keep unwrapping forever, like you never get to the actual joy of the thing, but you keep being like,

Speaker 3 How is it possible that in this photorealistic, photorealistic, creepy, crazy Dino Hatton, they also have cartoon bombs that wind up and walk identical to the video game?

Speaker 2 Everything else. They're sort of called ba-bombs.

Speaker 3 Yeah, everything else in the movie, not a one-to-one recreation of something in the game. And then suddenly, somebody pulls out a tiny walking bomb and winds it up, and everybody panics.

Speaker 3 They look at it and they scream, ba-bomb.

Speaker 3 It's got eyeballs, like cartoon eyeballs on it.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's weird. And then there's so much just plot about their rivalry with the Scarpelli brothers fucking plumbing firms.
It's like, what is it? This is a complete invention. It doesn't even pay off.

Speaker 2 It doesn't, well, it pays off.

Speaker 2 I guess the lead Scarpelli gets turned into a monkey by the de-evolution, Ray.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 let's. I mean, I'm trying to figure out how to wrap this up.
I think that maybe since we're saying the game was better

Speaker 2 Maybe we see where we would rank this if this were a game in the Mario franchise and Okay, I I would say that I think this goes

Speaker 2 Above Hotel Mario. I think that's probably where it go like like just like I would I would rather watch this film again than try to play Hotel Mario

Speaker 3 I would rather watch this movie again than play Mario Sunshine.

Speaker 2 Wow, that is a hot take. That is a scorcher.

Speaker 3 Because I mean, Sunshine's real low on my list. I hate the mechanic in, I hate the core water mechanic.

Speaker 2 You don't like Flood?

Speaker 3 I don't like Flood. I don't like the design of Flood.
So Super Mario Brothers, the movie goes above Mario Sunshine, but

Speaker 3 Sunshine's really low. Like, it's not like I'm putting, I'm not putting this in like in the top 10 of Mario games.

Speaker 2 Apodaka, let's add Mario Sunshine to the queue because I think this would be a fascinating one to discuss. I would love to knowing that Heather hates it.

Speaker 1 I would love to play it. I've never played it before.

Speaker 2 What the fuck? Wait a minute. I missed like a whole area.

Speaker 3 It's a weird or bad game.

Speaker 2 It's weird as shit. It's weird as shit.
It's fucking weird.

Speaker 2 Mario game water backpack. What was that?

Speaker 3 If Mario is a weird game, all games are weird. Like that.
We open the door and all of the games are going to come walking out.

Speaker 2 Great point. Appodaka, add every game to the queue.

Speaker 2 Matt, your verdict.

Speaker 2 Where do you rank this bad boy?

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, I guess, because

Speaker 1 I have a very basic

Speaker 1 relationship to Mario, but I know enough about Mario to know that this movie was wrong, but I

Speaker 1 in bed and

Speaker 1 you know, upsetting it for many reasons. I feel like I could make, we could all make a better Mario movie.

Speaker 1 They're making a Mario movie right now that apparently is not delayed, from what I understand.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 But I guess for me, a Mario game that I didn't enjoy

Speaker 2 would be

Speaker 1 what is it? What is it called? It's right here. Hold on.

Speaker 2 Matt is reaching for his shelf.

Speaker 3 He's opening something up. He has a game he hates right next to him.
That's that's one of the pieces of information I'd like to point out about what just happened.

Speaker 2 He's like, hold on, I hate this game.

Speaker 3 What's it called?

Speaker 2 I have it right next to me.

Speaker 3 Right out of frame and grabs it.

Speaker 1 Paper Mario Sticker Star.

Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah.
That was what you know what they just we mentioned origami earlier. Yeah.
And there's that new Paper Mario. Oh, fuck.
What's the, what's the origami subtitle? Because as of this recording.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we, this, as of our recording, thank you, Adam. Paper Mario Origami King has been announced today.

Speaker 2 And that looks, it looks very cool visually, but the thing they did with the Paper Mario series and Superstar Saga, or not Superstar Saga, sticker

Speaker 2 star. Sticker Star, yes, I confused it with a Mario and Luigi RPG series.
The sticker star was one of them. They started to depart from the formula and they got real shitty.
So, yeah,

Speaker 2 I think that's good company for it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you know what? I'm the origami king.

Speaker 1 I'll absolutely buy that note, even knowing I hated sticker star.

Speaker 1 I'll give it a go.

Speaker 2 As long as the combat is like, you know, is like the original Paper Mario and like Thousand Year Door, as long as it's, as long as they've done that and not try to do something, got too cute with it, like

Speaker 2 Super Paper Mario and the rest. Hey, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at get played pod or send us an email at getplayedpod at gmail.com or leave us a voicemail at 616-2Played.

Speaker 2 That's 616-275-2933.

Speaker 2 And if you have any recs for How Did This Get Played, Premium DLCs, The Game Was Better, any movies you'd like to hear us review on the premium side, those are the handles you can use to get in touch with us.

Speaker 2 Hey, we'll see you next time. Until then,

Speaker 2 as Mario says, and the podcast is over.

Speaker 4 What's going on? It's Lamorne Morris.

Speaker 3 And Hannah Simone.

Speaker 4 And we host The Mess Around, a new girl Rewatch podcast now on Headgum. Now, here's the thing.
Every single week, we chat about an episode of New Girl, and we really get into it.

Speaker 4 Like, we get up in there. We get up in there.
You know, we reminisce about our times on set. We share behind-the-scenes tea.
We react to rewatching episodes that we haven't seen in years.

Speaker 4 We talk about how Jake Johnson is dog.

Speaker 3 That's not true. We talk about so many memories we have of working with the biggest stars on the planet.
I'm talking Prince, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo.

Speaker 4 We're just two BFFs having a good old time, okay? Sometimes we even talk to other co-stars like Zoe Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Damon Waynes Jr.

Speaker 4 And your dad, we talk to your dad on this show as well.

Speaker 3 Make sure you subscribe to The Mess Around wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every single Tuesday.