This Ain't No Game?

That's the tag line for the film Super Mario Bros. Of course, the problem is that Super Mario Bros is a game. It's got cute plumbers and cute settings and cute mushrooms and even cute boss villains. It's all bright shiny colors, and you hop around from place to place, occasionally calling out an Italian-sounding "Whee!" It was the emblematic Nintendo game (and still is, although it's got some friends now, like Link). And it was all the rage in 1991, when everyone in Hollywood and their mother wanted to make a movie out of it. It was Hollywood, after all, and they'll make a movie out of anything, if they think they can make money from it.

The prize went to what I guess we might call the wrong people. The filmmakers were thinking of creating a dark film for adults; had they ever actually controlled a little Mario on their video screen? Were they totally out of their minds? And what was Nintendo's feeling about all of this?

It turned out that the company actually had little interest in a creative partnership. For Nintendo the whole thing was an experiment and they believed the Mario brand was strong enough not to be derailed by a movie... After Nintendo sold Joffé and Eberts the rights for a song — around $2 million — Hollywood was [in an] uproar. No one could quite believe that these two filmmakers had bagged the most sought after brand name of the new decade. Little did the studios realise that they had had a narrow escape.

The movie was one of the classic bombs of all time. But while some classic bombs just sort of dive a natural bellyflop, Super Mario Bros was a disaster of more complex, and entertaining, proportions. The movie might be a dog, but the story of making it is anything but. It's called Why the Super Mario Movie Sucked, excerpted from a book by James Russell.
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