Further into the shoot Hopper had a notorious 45-minute meltdown during which he turned the air several shades of blue ranting at Morton and Jankel. They were aghast at the constant script revisions with which they were presented as Joffe tried to rein in Morton and Jankel.īut he did grow bothered – very, very bothered. Hoskins and Hopper brooded in their trailers. When the Los Angeles Times accompanied Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to the North Carolina facility in 1992 – he was there to agree a distribution deal – it found a set teetering on open revolt against the directors. What could go wrong? Everything, it quickly became clear.
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It’s completely different now, but back then it was taboo to make a movie based on a video game.” I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents interested in video games. At that time, there was a very hardcore movement against video games, and a lot of anti-video games sentiment.
“I wanted the film to be more sophisticated,” Morton would later say. The look they envisaged was supremely gritty: closer to Blade Runner than the bright, bouncy Nintendo aesthetic. They were, above all, keen to dispense with most of the Super Mario elements of Super Mario Bros. When they arrived at the sprawling five-story set at Castle Hayne, North Carolina, their first act was to throw out most of the script and steer the project in a bleaker direction. They’d been hired on the strength of their work on Channel 4 future satire Max Headroom. Overseeing it all would be fledgling husband and wife directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. Fiona Shaw was to play his sidekick Lena. In the end, Dennis Hopper signed on, intrigued by Jennewein and Parker’s kid-friendly screenplay. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned Joffe down, as did Michael Keaton. The biggest headache was casting “big bad” King Koopa. This made him perfect given that the (new) script pitched Mario and Luigi as rough at-the-edges New Yorkers. He was an up-and-coming heartthrob, who had grown up in a tough neighbourhood in Queens. I worked as a plumber’s apprentice for about three weeks and set the plumber’s boots on fire with a blowtorch.”Īs his younger brother, John Leguizamo was perceived as a safe pick.
“I’m the right shape,” he joked at the time. Plot threads never quite congeal, and stray ideas stick out like sore thumbs on reptiles that somehow evolved them.” “It’s a kiddie movie sometimes, a weirdo cult comedy at others, part dark sci-fi, part wacky-ass romp, and the disparate elements collide like bumper cars when they ought to resolve into a satisfying whole. “It doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be,” wrote Adam Bertocci in a recent appraisal of Super Mario Bros published on fanzine. The surprise ultimately wasn’t that Super Mario Bros brought in just $20m (£15m). And instead of the bouncy Mario, Luigi and Koopa, it set the odd-couple pairing of Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo against Dennis Hopper, reprising the maniacal energy he had brought to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. So how did this straightforward premise end up as the bizarre and, frankly, disturbing Super Mario Bros movie? More Cronenberg than Donkey Kong, it imagined a secret city underneath New York where the dinosaurs have taken refuge after an asteroid struck Earth (“Dinohattan”).
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