Redstar wrote:Everyone seems to forget that much of the promotional materials for the original Donkey Kong showed Mario as a tall, muscular man and DK himself as a realistic gorilla. Because of this I don't think it's fair to interpret the character in just one way. Hoskins' Mario is just as valid an interpretation as Albano's or even Martinet's.
While I respect what you're saying and I also love scoping out the shadows for multiple interpretations of the same thing, you're delving into pretty esoteric materials, not everyone who saw the movie was hanging out in an Arcade downtown in '81 when that game [
Donkey Kong] came out. For instance, My father, an avid gamer of the Golden Age of the Arcade always says that he knew there was a machine at the arcades called
Donkey Kong, but that in his particular area, it was one of the most
unpopular cabinets in the arcades, with cabinets like
Centipede, Missile Command, Breakout and
Tempest being heavily favored over it.
What I'm getting at is, yes, while there are dozens of ways to interpret the characters of Mario and his friends, enemies and
frenemies, there is also a sort of aesthetic that people are generally used to when it comes to those characters. While it's good to keep a
je ne sais quoi available to those (Mario as a doctor, Mario as a time traveller or most controversially of all, Mario as a villain, in
Son of Donkey Kong) you also don't want to run the risk of alienating your audience too much. This is the problem of people like George Lucas, who've become drunk off of their own power and feel entitled to rewrite history.
When they made
Super Mario Bros. (the movie), I feel they achieved an absolute
harmony bridging the characters and places of the game world with the grittiness of a sort of parodied late 1980s apocalyptic world. They kept the same basic ideas already accepted for the characters: Mario is the older brother, shorter, heavy set, resourceful but being older he's stubborn. Luigi is the younger brother, taller, energetic, cheerful and full of life ergo he's extroverted and headstrong. King Koopa is a villain who way overthinks his plans to the point that they ultimately backfire on him, either killing him or severely incapacitating him.
So yes, while there are more than one ways to interpret a character, it's often best to stick to basics when dealing with a character like Mario as even by 1993 he was so tightly wound into pop culture that most people were only ready to accept a live action Mario played by Bob Hoskins or Danny DeVito or Bruno Kirby or some other similar, shorter, scruffy, gruff stout fellow. Tom Hanks is also too young to play Mario in my opinion, though in 1993 (that's around the time
Joe Versus the Volcano came out, right?) I definitely could have seen him as Luigi, if they'd given the character a different personality than in the film.
Even if I did this I'd have a big age gap for Julia XD I don't want to make the movie into "Grumpy Old Mario Bros." I can't replace Julia with say...Sophia Loren because then it really would be Grumpy Old Mario Bros., I might as well cast Lemmon and Matthau. 
Wait a minute....Matthau/Mario....Lemmon/Luigi....now I really am off my rocker 
