The Evolution of Mario in Adaptations in Movies & TV
Starting from a lost anime to billion-dollar box office.
'The Super Mario Bros. Movie'
We’ve got a new title for the next entry in the Super Mario Bros. universe! Illumination and Nintendo revealed the sequel today, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
The cast will include returning characters Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), Luigi (Charlie Day), Bowser (Jack Black), Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), and Kamek (Kevin Michael Richardson).
Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii was the last Mario Bros. game I played, so I have to admit to feeling a pang of nostalgia for this IP. It got me thinking about all the Marios who came before, so let’s dive into earlier iterations of the character to prep for this new entry.
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The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach!
Mario's screen debut was surprisingly early and almost forgotten.
This Japanese anime was one of the first two full-length film adaptations of a video game ever made, released on July 20, 1986. The film established Mario's core narrative (rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser) but took some creative liberties.
The characters’ outfits were changed, and the Mario brothers ran a grocery store rather than a plumbing business. The film fell into obscurity after its Japanese release and was considered lost media for nearly three decades until it was uploaded to YouTube in 2007.
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The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (1989-1991)
Television success came with this ambitious 1989 hybrid series that combined live-action segments with animated adventures.
The show featured wrestler "Captain" Lou Albano as Mario and Danny Wells as Luigi in live-action segments, while animated portions stayed closer to the games.
The series was popular enough to spawn multiple spin-offs, including The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, establishing Mario as a television fixture throughout the early 1990s.
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Super Mario Bros.
Oh, yeah. The franchise's most infamous chapter remains this unfortunate live-action bomb starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo from Buena Vista Pictures.
Instead of the colorful Mushroom Kingdom, the film gave us a grim parallel dimension populated by evolved dinosaurs. The movie abandoned nearly everything recognizable about Mario except character names.
Shigeru Miyamoto later told Edge Magazine, "The movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself."
It may have been a commercial and critical failure, but I still watched and enjoyed this one when I was little.
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The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Illumination Entertainment’s 2023 film marked Nintendo’s return to cinema. The animated film honored the games' original, colorful aesthetics while creating a new origin story for the brothers.
It grossed $1.36 billion worldwide, broke multiple box-office records, and became the highest-grossing video game adaptation ever made.
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Are you excited for the follow-up?
