by Jerry Roberts

March 31, 2002

I am going to make a revelation that I’m not especially proud of. I saw Super Mario Bros. in a movie theater. Granted, someone else paid my way but I’m not sure if I should feel bad for having seen it or feel bad because the person who invited me was out of pocket at the movie’s expense. Either way – I still wanted my money back! I was sitting on the side aisle under the safety lighting and I promise you that about halfway into this movie I became more captivated by reading the ingredients on my candy wrapper. Anything else during Super Mario Bros. would be. I found that I am far more interested in candy, it’s ingredience and it’s damaging effects on you than I was in Super Mario Bros. I found so little interest in the movie and so much more interest in the little things going on around me that whatever nothing was happening on screen was lost to me, but I don’t think that I really missed much. So, forgive me if I tend go off track here just as I did during the movie.

I saw Super Mario Bros. on Saturday June 22, 1993 at the 4:10 showing at the Galleria 10 Theater in Birmingham, Alabama. I was with my friends Jason, Susan and Joshua (I won’t reveal who paid) and we were in the second auditorium on the right as you go past the ticket booth. There were only about 15 people there, excluding ourselves. We sat on the side aisle on the sixth row from the front, and I was on the end next to the wall. There was a teen couple sitting in front of us who made out the whole time. He had a strange goatee that connected very thinly with his sideburns. She was blonde and smelled like cedar chips.

It won’t come as a shock when I report to you that “Super Mario Bros.” comes from a Hollywood so bereft of ideas that it will package anything with pretty ribbons and a multi-million dollar ad campaign as long as it gets your butt in the seat. I’m convinced that if they could make money with a movie about the ingredience of my candy wrapper, they wouldn’t hesitate. Whatever happens after they dump money into the production and sucker you into the theater is seemingly of no concern to them. The story pushes it’s way through so quickly to get to the next joke, special effect or “oh that’s in the game” moment that I barely had time to grasp the grain of sand passing for a plot. Or at least that’s what I saw while I was watching. *boy, there’s a lot of sugar in a Three Musketeers bar*.

Looking over a description of the plot from the one person in the world who did like this movie (we met in an underground parking garage and I’m sworn to secrecy) here’s how he/she/it described it: The story concerns a half dinosaur creature named Koopa (Hopper) who lives in a parallel dimension where half-human dinosaurs rule the land. Koopa plans to bring his dimension together with ours so that he can broaden his domain and his feeding ground. He needs a shard of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and now resides in a necklace worn by Princess Daisy (Mathis). But instead of going to get it himself he sends two knuckle-beak cousins Iggy and Spike to go and get it for him. Daisy’s would-be boyfriend Luigi (Leguizamo) works in a plumbing company with his brother Mario and when Daisy is kidnapped they have to cross over to the other world to rescue her. *What is fructose content anyway?*

That takes care of about the first 15 minutes of the movie and takes us right up to the moment when we cross dimensions. Now, I realize that lead characters unclog drains for a living but was it necessary to have the parallel dimension looks like a job they haven’t finished yet? Everything in the dino world is rusty and slimy and dark and drab and drips slime as if King Kong sneezed on it. The characters bounce around, talk funny and have no discernable characteristics, they bumble around as dinky and listless as . . . well . . . a video game character. *did you know that if you take your candy bar wrapper and carefully pull it open, sometimes there is stuff written on the back side*

This is the laziest production I have ever seen starting with the ad campaign, which aims at an illiterate audience by proclaiming “This Ain’t No Game!” Then to further the lethargic campaign the studio doesn’t even allow for the word “Brothers” to be spelled out, so based on this we have Super Mario Bros. (which I pronounce ‘Bross”) that “Ain’t No Game”. I would say that some movies destroy their credibility at the conception level – but this movie begins at the conception level, goes all the way through the marketing and splats (literally) on the screen. In addition, the guys doing to voice over narration for the film’s trailers didn’t get together either because one trailer pronounced the title Super Maahrio Brothers while another pronounced it Super MARY-O Brothers. *You know what I realized, there is some candy I avoid, not because I don’t like it but because of the mess. Butterfinger for example, I don’t care for because the nuget inside gets stuck in my molars and I have to dig it out with my finger and it just looks disgusting. Payday I really like but it’s hard to take a really big bite out of one because you don’t want to risk chipping your tooth on the peanuts.*

I am not so much at a loss to explain where the idea for this film came from, it is, after all a brand name and easily sold to kids who spent hour upon deadened hour in front of a video game. The movies are, let’s face it, a business and a business needs to make money.

What I am at a loss to explain is how names like Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper and Samantha Mathis got mixed up in this. Perhaps it was an easy paycheck. Maybe it was a way to . . . heck I don’t know. All I know is that I always get a little depressed when I see talent wasted . . . and . . . you know they say that sugar in candy bars causes hyperactivity but as a child I never really had an issue with it. Maybe some, more active children have this affliction but my system seemed immune to it. Naturally if I ate nothing but sweets then obviously there would be a side effect but just eating plain sugar never really bothered me. I wasn’t a candy junkie, mind you, like some of my friends but I did enjoy it much more than I should have. My favorite was Payday because of that rush of salty peanuts and sweet caramel however there was the aforementioned chipped tooth issue. I also had a weakness for Reese’s Pieces, which started with E.T. Never cared for Reese’s PB cups mostly because you only got two in a package. The only thing that I didn’t like was anything really sticky like Jolly Rancher or rock candy. I would invariably end up with purple teeth and I just know my mother loved that. M&M’s are great but I really liked the ones with the peanuts inside, they made the regular ones seem kind of drab. I liked the peanut butter ones but I wasn’t really that fond of the ones with the almonds.

Oh and uh, Super Mary-O Bross sucked.