- * If you pick up the latest Game Informer magazine, you might have noticed an interesting article about your favorite film located in the very back. We're happy to report that the article features a good deal of information and photos from our site, so we're glad that articles being written about the film are able to be as factual and informative as possible--something you probably wouldn't have seen a few years ago. If you've already torn through the article itself, GI posted a commentary as well as coverage of our own scripts update from a while back.
* We have a winner! Steven and I chose the following entry as the winner for a signed copy of Jeff Ryan's book: Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America:
"I saw Super Mario Bros. the movie right after graduating elementary school with my father. My father and I had watched Blade Runner late night on TBS a couple of times, and Super Mario Bros. was kind of like a comedy version of Blade Runner. It really didn't matter to me that the movie wasn't like the game. I thought it was brilliant!
The de-evolution technology in particular was brilliant to me. But also the whole grimy, goofy feel of it. It wasn't too far from the tone of a lot of dystopian sci-fi point and click adventure games that were being made for PC platforms in 1990s. A lot of those games dealt with serious sci-fi ideas, and yet that very seriousness was leavened with screwball humor, absurdity, and downright silliness.
But the SMB movie itself actually had some nifty sci-fi notions. Like the idea of an intelligent fungus that's distributed like some intelligent organic network throughout the city. That was something else that I was drawn to as a kid. In my own imagination, I envisioned my own version of how that would play out: the fungus would start attacking people and eating them, drinking their blood--I was a morbid child.
There was also some intriguing socio-political context to SMB and my own upbrining. I grew up in a very conservative area of Northwest Florida, and had never been taught evolutionary theory in any of the science classes at my elementary school. I had to learn from watching science programs on TV and reading about dinosaurs in non-fiction books. Also, movies like Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey helped, too. I was not raised in a religious family, thankfully, and so my parents did not try to imprint any sort of creationist or anti-science dogma on my brain. I mention all this, because once I began to investigate the idea of evolution and our identities as animals and as a part of nature I was totally captivated. And then when I watched SMB and it had the whole de-evolutionary tech it was like certain vital connections that I hadn't made before were switched on: humans evolved, dinosaurs evolved from lower forms, maybe dinos could evolve intelligence--hey, maybe humans could evolve into some kind of higher form . . .a creative chain of speculations, but the point is that the movie made me actually think. It was inspiring!
I think it's interesting to wonder if SMB had more of an impact that it's been given credit for. I was really into video games as a teenager, and one of my very favorite games was the SNES classic role-playing game CHRONO-TRIGGER. CT involved traveling back and forth in time, journeying to different worlds and discovering unknown swaths of history. In the game, if you go back to pre-historic times you find out that there are three dominant species: humans evolved from the primates, the dinosaurs . . . and the Reptites!
The Reptites are intelligent humanoids with heavy duty reptilian features--clearly evolved from the dinosaurs.
Chrono-Trigger was developed by Square Soft, who, at that time, had an exclusive development deal with Nintendo. Could it be that some of the design team for Chrono Trigger drew on the ideas of the "dino sapiens" from the SMB movie? After all, Chrono-Trigger itself is a kind of mega-genre mashup: sci-fi, time travel, swords and sorcery, pre/post-apocalypse, comedy, tragedy, magic, superscience, martial arts, cavemen and cavewomen, dinosaurs, demons, lost civilizations in the manner of Atlantis, etc.
Another possible echo of SMB: the Reptite conspiracy theory! During the Bush-Cheney years, people were posting videos and pics claiming you could see a flicking reptile tongue in Dick Cheney's or W.'s mouth. The videos and pics were like UFO pics: so grainy and ambiguous that you could basically see whatever you wanted. Sheer lunacy, but just where did the notion of reptiles disguised as humans originate from? SMB, maybe . . .
Watching it now, I still dig it. No, it's not a perfect movie, but it has a lot of fun elements. Good special effects, a solid cast (Dennis Hopper is my favorite), and some out there concepts.
* And finally, for those who are curious, be sure to check out Super Mario Bros. director Rocky Morton's latest project: a live-action zombie commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops Rezurrection.
More to come--stay tuned!