The 1993 movie so bad Dennis Hopper’s children hated it: “Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly”
There’s one much-anticipated adaptation of a beloved kids’ franchise from 1993 that still baffles over its total conceptual misfire.
It was an interesting decade for Dennis Hopper, at least. Beginning his career back in the 1950s, working with James Dean on the likes of Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, Hopper had ridden all of modern cinema’s shifting trends, through Easy Rider’s New Hollywood counterculture, Out of the Blue’s American indie picture, and swooping into arch-villain types in 1990s blockbusters like Waterworld and Speed.
So, when an easy bad guy gig for a Super Mario Bros movie landed on his desk for a month or so’s jolly in Wilmington’s Carolco Studios, Hopper agreed to the part. It turned out that the silver screen debut of video games’ most beloved plumber would spell legends of its chaotic shoot, collective headaches among cast and crew, and production ballooning to an exhausted 17 weeks. Along with its incoherent plot and wildly different tone from the games, Super Mario Bros received its most stinging critique straight from the mouth of Hopper’s then-young son, Henry, after witnessing its catastrophe.
“‘Dad, I think you’re probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros?,’” he recounted on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2008. “And I said, ‘Well, Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,’ and he said, ‘Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.’”
Most children would likely have met Super Mario Bros with the same bemusement. For nearly a decade, the Japanese Nintendo gaming giant had well established the plumber’s fantastical Mushroom Kingdom, a colourful realm of chunky topography and green pipes littering the terrain of Princess Peach’s hot pink castle, then a fiery descent into the cavernous dwelling of the evil King Bowser, or King Koopa if watching the Saturday morning cartoon offshoot.
So, what conceptual direction did 1993’s Super Mario Bros take? Why, totally inappropriate dystopian cyberpunk, of course. In a queasy mix of family fodder entertainment and edgy, industrial megalopolis visions featuring the gobsmacking credit of Carlene Moore’s “prostitute” extra, the husband-and-wife directing team of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel appeared to have dreamed up a different movie from the Mushroom Kingdom endeared to children around the world.
The pair had come from the British Max Headroom series, the Channel 4 tech-comic virtual avatar commenting on pop culture and the political climate, and boasted his own semi-dramatic debut with the Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future in 1985. Transplanting its lowlife high-tech style, the couple roped in former Blade Runner art director David Snyder for the movie’s production design, smashing such urban sprawl with a shoehorned dinosaur angle lifted from the then-most recent game in the core Mario series, 1990’s Super Mario World, for a set that looks like Total Recall frantically last-minute dressed with confused, prehistoric extras wandering Carolco’s ‘Dinohattan’ soundstage.
Everyone’s favourite video game mascot’s jump to the motion picture proved to be a disaster. The torturous shoot soon spread around Tinseltown, with gripes about the directing duo being out of their depth on set, constant script revisions, and the nagging feeling that time and money were being poured into a proper turkey. All this spelt a bad mood during the shoot, aside from the special effects team in their element. Particular animus was held by the main star Bob Hoskins, who didn’t mince his words to The Guardian in 2007 when casting his mind back to his turn as Nintendo’s moustachioed mascot, “It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare.”
Lesson learned. The fact was Nintendo had been a little blasé about the Mario property, disregarding creative control and letting the Lightmotive company oversee production and come up with a new angle for their character’s first move to cinema. “I think they looked at the movie as some sort of strange creature that was kind of rather intriguing to see if we could walk or not,” producer Roland Joffé told Wired in 2012. It wouldn’t happen again. For years, Nintendo remained tightly protective of its video game cast, original Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto sharing co-production credits on 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie to ensure brand protection.
1993’s Super Mario Bros, while generally recognised as a failure, has developed a place in many millennials’ cinema affections, glorying in its artistic blunder and appraised as a blockbuster sci-fi that at least dared to pursue something unique and risk-taking. John Leguizamo warmed to the plumber caper and his role as Mario’s brother, Luigi, recording an exclusive introduction for the 20th anniversary screening at Los Angeles’ Nuart Theatre and stating, “I’m proud of the movie in retrospect,” despite reportedly getting blind drunk with Hoskins every day to get through the shoot.
