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So, Back in college, my friends and I would joke that Super Mario Bros was a game all about communism. You had the red guy, a working class man, fighting against a King and his soldiers, hoping to overthrow a repressive regime. Not the most sophisticated analysis of the game, but, you know, we were college students goofing off, and who expects red wine fueled ramblings at 2 am to be the most sophisticated things in the world? It doesn’t quite work, because the game is about restoring a proper princess to the throne, who will then use her magic to restore the kingdom, which says all sorts of things about the rightness of the monarchy, but I digress... Little did I know that within that germ of an idea, there was a gem of truth, hidden in a much derided and panned failure of a movie I had seen once as a child. I remember being mildly annoyed that what was on screen didn’t sync up with the continuity of the games and the comics and the cartoon, being instead this weird live action comedy that changed things (heaven forfend! Not the sacred canon!). I remembered some bits that were famous (Mario’s full name being Mario Mario, and Luigi’s Luigi Mario, for example), but otherwise consigned it to that bin of memories designated for old bad 90s movies you see as a kid. But then I found a copy at Goodwill, and thought, hey, my partner likes Mario games, and hasn’t seen this. I should show it to her. And holy poo poo. This loving movie. It blew both our minds. Super Mario Bros (1993) is a fascinating movie. A dystopian look at the dangers of unchecked ambition and allowing lizard brain impulses to conquer the rational parts of our mind, it follows the titular Mario Bros, Mario and Luigi, as they stomp, smash, and crash their way through a futuristic alternate world that is Bladerunner(1982)-meets-Idiocracy (2006). The closest comparison I can think of is Starship Troopers (1999) or Robocop (1989) in terms of “Critics completely missed the point, as did the audience” Following, very roughly, the basic plot of the video game, plumbers Mario and Luigi encounter paleontology student Daisy right before she is kidnapped by koopa brothers Iggy and Spike. Iggy and Spike come from a parallel dimension where dinosaurs, nor mammals, were the dominant species, and evolution took place along vastly similar lines -- apparently convergent evolution is still a thing in alternate dimensions. Following Daisy and her kidnappers through a portal into the "Koopaverse", they are confronted with a hellscape: a terrible vision of New York City where no one cares about anyone else, police brutality is rampant, and Donald Trump is president.  Yes, I know. It gets even better from there. Bob Hoskins, playing Mario, evidently had no idea that the film was based on a video game, and he and John Leguzamo evidently spent most of the film drunk. The stated intention of the directors was to make a Ghostbusters like comedy, but what they ended up making is far, far different... So, let’s do a deep dive into this masterpiece. We open with a distorted version of the SMB theme. It’s a little sinister, not quite right, which is perfect for the tone of the film. Things aren’t quite right here, things are going to be different, Then, a lovely animated segment set 65 million years ago, in Brooklyn, New York, narrated by The Simpson’s Dan Castellaneta. Great use of computer style graphics here, to set the tone.   Castellaneta explains, in layman’s terms, what really happened to the dinosaurs. The movie theorizes that the dinosaurs may have been more intelligent than we thought, and, well, what if they escaped into an alternate dimension before that gigantic meteor wiped them out? And then, what if they came back?  It’s a bonkers segment that really sets the tone for the rest of the film. Either you’re buying into what they’re selling or you’re not. And most critics, I suspect, checked out at this point. But we both know better, dear reader. We both know what we’re doing here. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t like this idea. We both know you want more.  Jump cut to 1973, where a young woman is running through the dark towards a cathedral, carrying a bundle covered in a red blanket. She wears an oversized military coat with spikes on the shoulders, a coat we'll see many more of later in the film. She leaves the bundle on the doorstep, but instead of the typical soon-to-be-orphan child, inside the wrapping is an oval shaped metallic orb. After locking a blue crystalline-shard of rock into an opening on the orb, she lingers for a moment before pounding on the door, then fleeing through the streets of Brooklyn once more.    A nun opens the cathedral front door and, noticing the metallic orb on the doorstep, takes it inside. Meanwhile, the young lady continues to run down the Brooklyn streets, narrowly dodging honking drivers before reaching an open manhole, and climbs down inside. Back at the church, the nuns observe the case as it opens, revealing a large egg. We cut frequently to some stained glass of Jesus, even though the story is far more that of Moses being abandoned in the Nile than it is Mary and Joseph.    The woman continues to run down a long sewer tunnel, constantly checking behind her.. As she backs into another tunnel, a tall man with strange hair, spiked shoulders that match the ones on the woman's coat, and enough medals to rival a third world dictator emerges from the dark. He demands the location of "The Rock." She leaps away from him in shock, exclaiming, "Koopa!" He grabs for her, and she leaps back, knocking aside a support beam which causes the tunnel to collapse around them.  Back at the cathedral, a group of nuns watch as the egg hatches. It cracks open, revealing a human baby girl. The nuns then look at the rock shard that came with the metallic case they found, and the tip of the rock flashes...   So, before we can move any further, we need to talk about the big, well, lizard in the room, and that’s David Icke. Icke is an infamous conspiracy theorist who believes, well, just about anything and everything but the truth. quote:Icke claims he saw former British Prime Minister Ted Heath's eyes turn black while the two waited for a Sky News interview in 1989. In 1990, while spokesman for the Green Party, he visited a psychic who he said told him he had been placed on earth for a purpose and would begin to receive messages from the spirit world. He believes that the universe is made up of "vibrational" energy and consists of an infinite number of dimensions that share the same space. He advocates the existence of an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings called the Archons (or Anunnaki) who have hijacked the earth and that a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, the Illuminati, or the "elite", manipulate global events to keep humans in constant fear so the Archons can feed off the "negative energy" this creates. He claims many prominent public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood and are propelling humanity toward an Orwellian global fascist state, or New World Order, a post-truth era where freedom of speech is ended, Icke believes that the only way this 'Archontic' influence can be defeated is if people wake up to the truth and fill their hearts with love. So, lovely guy, probably an antisemite, and currently peddling the “5G causes Coronavirus” gobbledygook your great aunt is posting about on Facebook. And, if you were paying attention to the movie, the idea that there’s a parallel dimension where the lizard people didn’t die out, and that they evolved into humans, well... quote:Icke says the reptilians come from not only another planet but another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension (the "lower astral dimension"), the one nearest the physical world. From this dimension they control the planet, although just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they in turn are controlled by a fifth dimension. It’s difficult to communicate just how big and how different the Conspiratorial World View was in the 90s. The X-Files was on TV, The Invisibles was dominating the comic shelves, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton were writing about how the evil Japanese were scheming to take over the country. It was huge to posit that there was a whole alternative worldview that, if adopted, explained everything. (Perhaps this is just nostalgia, but it's almost quaint and charming, comparing old conspiracy theories to new ones, and you can see this tension in the transition from “Lizard People Run the World” and “The CIA has HARP Satellites That Control the Weather” to today’s “Clinton Runs a Child Sex Ring Out of a Pizza Parlor” and “Disney Movies Are Being Used to Brainwash Young Women Into Butterfly Sex Slaves”. They used to worry so much more about shadowy organizations and secret societies taking over the world; now they all sound like they’re being written one handed.) And the film, while showing off this view somewhat, also has the goodness to say “Who gives a poo poo about all that? What matters are the material conditions and life of the working man!” Next: We’re only 4:30 seconds in, and the world is already a capitalist hellscape...
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Apr 17, 2020 16:32
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I remember getting a confused youthful boner from the fat lady whomst kisses mario and gives him the rocket boots. That's my mario movie story.
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Apr 17, 2020 16:33
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A good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve26GpPDTgY everything I've read about how much the cast and crew loving hated every single minute spent on this production is hilarious and I would love a more exhaustive documentary (for the Criterion release, of course)
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Apr 17, 2020 16:35
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There's a new Mario movie coming out, rev up the thread.
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Feb 16, 2023 04:26
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