Could’ve Been A Krull: Super Mario Brothers

Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer

Feature-length story. Not bad. The movie follows the two Brooklyn plumbers as they somehow get tied up in a controversy surrounding an archaeological dig going on near a new upscale development. There are vague feints toward a rivalry with a big, mean plumbing company (sort of the Croener Mortuary Services of the plumbing world), and Luigi (John Leguizamo) falls in love with one of the archaeologists, Daisy (the criminally underused Samantha Mathis).

The story (such as it is) kicks into gear when bumbling agents from a parallel world kidnap Daisy. Naturally, the Mario brothers follow them into the parallel world to save her. Fair enough. Let’s move on to …

Justification of Imagery. The filmmakers make a decent effort here. You know the parallel world where Daisy winds up? It turns out that the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs had a major side effect: It split the earth into two parallel dimensions – one lush and dominated by hyper-evolved, super-intelligent apes; the other barren and dominated by hyper-evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs. (Why the humanoid dinosaurs in the parallel world have warm blood and lack scales is anyone’s guess.) This barren parallel world has only one major city, which is run my a corporate fascist named Koopa (played by Dennis Hopper for some reason). Koopa employs a variety of henchmen, and his most fearsome weapon is a de-evolution (“Devo”) ray, which causes its victims to slide down the evolutionary ladder when zapped.

OK, all things considered, this is pretty good. By making the chief bad guy a Lex Luthor type, the filmmakers are able to install him atop a giant skyscraper that the Mario brothers have to infiltrate (which is a pretty good cinematic counterpart to the enemy castles in the game). Also clever is the Devo ray, which Koopa uses on his chief rival to reduce him to a primordial fungus that infests the city. This provides a great way to justify the presence of helpful mushrooms all over the place, but unfortunately, the filmmakers squander a host of other possibilities offered by the Devo ray.

To fully explain what I’m getting at, I must first talk briefly about great costuming in children’s theater.

Children’s theater presents numerous opportunities for designers to build vivid, evocative costumes that tell a story without condescending to the audience. For example, an artist designing a costume for an actor playing Fenris Ulf (the evil wolf from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) would be well served to outfit their actor in clothes that include wolvish imagery without turning into a unitard from Cats.

The costume designers for SMB had a similar job to do – create costumes that recall the characters from the game while still being cool and accessible. They had a good foundation to start from: The goofy, urban sprawl of the dinosaur planet’s capital city gave them enough excuses to outfit their characters in costumes that echoed the game. For example, the police in the dinosaur city wear bulky leather jackets whose shoulders bristle with black spikes.

This flexibility of design, combined with the Devo ray, should have produced badass imagery that echoed the game’s original characters while filtering them through a gritty, Todd McFarlane sensibility.

For example, Dennis Hopper’s villain character gets hit with the Devo ray at the end of the movie, and he de-evolves into a tyrannosaurus rex. Why not have Koopa de-evolve into a giant, flame-spewing, spiked turtle-beast? I can also easily imagine spiky police offiers getting zapped with the Devo ray and transforming into brawny cinematic counterparts of, say, the Hammer Brothers from the original game.

I could go on, but the failures in the design of this movie wither next to its failure to choose a …