The New Super Mario Bros. Movie Embraces the Dystopia the 1993 Super Mario Bros. Movie Warned About

By Madeline Blondeau | March 29, 2023 | 4:01pm

TV/Movies Features Super Mario Bros.

The New Super Mario Bros. Movie Embraces the Dystopia the 1993 Super Mario Bros. Movie Warned About

After around seven years in development, The Super Mario Bros. Movie finally hits theaters next month.

The project has roots in Shigeru Miyamoto designing Universal’s Super Nintendo World, where the creator first met Illumination founder Chris Meledandri in 2016. Miyamoto saw a kinship in Meledandri’s creative process, and the two began to brainstorm a multi-movie enterprise. Fast-forward to 2023, and the final project—helmed by the two creative leads on Teen Titans Go! To The Movies—is primed to stomp the box office.

For a company that styles themselves after Disney, and a cable company who seeks a similar creative fiefdom, it’s a wet dream. Nintendo, in particular, has long aspired to have tight creative control over each and every aspect of their IP. The company has a lengthy, documented history of shuttering fan projects, hampering emulation efforts, and shutting down archival attempts. Like Disney, Nintendo does this in service of “magic”—an undefinable sense of immersion distinct from reality.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie looks to capitalize on that idea. It is slavishly on-brand, with little deviation or variation on designs we’ve spent two-plus decades internalizing. Ideally, a child could see the Mario movie, ask their parents for a Mario game, then eventually visit the Mario theme park and see little differentiation between all of it. This is brand synergy firing at all cylinders, and something Nintendo has aspired to since their monopolistic 1980s ambitions.

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It’s also a course correction from one of their biggest perceived public missteps.

Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s Super Mario Bros. hit American theaters exactly three decades ago this year. Popular opinion of the ambitious sci-fi take on the series has varied over the years. Depending on who you ask, it’s one of the worst movies of all time or a misunderstood cult gem. (Guess where I fall.) There’s one thing that can be agreed upon, however: it’s a very different animal from the videogames.

Mario ‘93 is isekai dystopian sci-fi drawn in equal parts from 1984, Brazil and Blade Runner. The central premise sees the two brothers square off against an AU Trump-esque villain, militaristic company man Koopa. Koopa holds a chokehold on the media, forbids protest music, and uses a private police force to keep people in check. Imagine theme park rules and regulations applied to a city—right down to Universal’s terrifying facial recognition software—and you’re halfway there.

Morton and Jankel frame this sort of tight governance, city planning, and media control as inherently villainous. Further, it leans heavily on pointing out the ecological destruction wrought by over-development. Fungus—a cornerstone of the Mushroom Kingdom—has been reduced to phlegmish growths through the city. Koopa has an overblown reaction to dirt and grime, too, as his germophobia is a central part in some of the film’s humor. Capital-driven development and uniformity, the film argues, are a rejection of reality.

Super Mario Bros. is a dark, scary film centered on the evils of capitalist monopolies. It also happens to be a derivative work from a monopolistic capitalist success story. Released as a different film altogether, Super Mario Bros. might not have received the hostile reaction it did from critics and the general public at large. Tied to the cartoon plumber kids recognized more than Mickey Mouse, however, it was almost always guaranteed to be a disaster.

It was a disaster that scared Nintendo away from making movies for a long time. But as Miyamoto grew older, and our culture refused to let go of the ‘80s, he saw his early work become a valuable commodity.

This was what finally convinced Miyamoto.

“Basically, it’s not that ‘I want to make a Mario movie’, but that I began to consider that ‘we should bring more Nintendo content into the field of video-making’,” Miyamoto told investors in 2020. “With films, the amount of people who would contact our IP would widen, and increase the amount of people engaging with our IP. Then, we’d be able to further increase the spread of our media via video.”

Translation? Less hyper-political Roland Joffe fever dreams from the Max Headroom team, more inherently corporate productions made to sell videogames. This is how Nintendo intends to further its own “magic” going into the new decade—“video clips” and theme parks that enhance the prospective value and mindshare of an intellectual property.

But this isn’t magic—quite the opposite. Since the 1960s, Disney has decimated vast swaths of Florida land in the name of (say it with me) “magic.” They have rewritten local laws and ordinances to destroy communities, filled swamps with concrete, and eradicated much of the regional wildlife. What has been done to the state of Florida over the past century is cartoon villainy done in the name of cartoon reality.

Everything from SeaWorld to Universal to every last fucking Fun Spot followed. Florida is now the place to go if you want to attend Hogwarts, ride a roller coaster that holds some silly record, or go watch a whale die slowly in a tank. And thanks in part to The Super Mario Bros. Movie— likely immortalized in the Universal corporate canon—it will be one of the only places you can see plastic mushrooms and plastic trees from an old videogame.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie and its accompanying theme park are the very sort of enterprise Joffe, Jankel, and Morton’s Super Mario Bros. tried to warn us of. Easy, recognizable entertainment that services a larger entity. A barren concrete city where natural life is choked to death. Figureheads who we blindly trust to entertain us and do no harm, but represent the further encroach of cultural stagnation.

Morton and Jankel’s Super Mario Bros. will never be a “video asset.” But in 20 years, that may be all The Super Mario Bros. Movie is—promotion for an aging theme park governed by fascist state policy. Another concrete monstrosity supported by a drip feed of “memorable moments.” Cold, unfeeling gray where even the smallest mushroom is plucked before it can grow through the cracks.

Wahoo!

Madeline Blondeau is a Georgia-born, PNW-based editor, writer and podcaster. Her words can be found on Anime Feminist, Anime News Network, Screen Queens, and Lost In Cult. She’s also the creator of Cinema Cauldron—a long-form audio essay series on film. You can follow her on Twitter and Letterboxd @VHSVVitch.