Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 4.0
Plain fun!
I first saw this movie when I was about eight years old. I was a big Mario fan back then, loved him, Luigi, the games and the genre to bits; and let me tell you, to see this movie for the first time was thrilling. I didn't even care if King Koopa was in the form of a human or not, or that Yoshi wasn't green. All I could think was "Oh gosh, that's them! It's the Mario Brothers, and King Koopa!" (Squeal, squeal.) I guess the point I'm making is that it did a pretty nice job of real-world reinterpretation. There's so many things I like about the movie that I don't even want to take the time to type all of it out.The reason that it only has four stars instead of five, despite how I've always loved it, is that it isn't in fact the best movie I've ever seen. It's among my favorites, yes, but it doesn't make my eyes pop out quite as much as it did back when I was a serious Mario gamer (and a child).The opening scene with the cartoon dinosaurs was a bit silly, and I think the film could have done well enough without it. The scene where King Koopa turns into the Tyrannosaurus of his ancestry was plain too short, as well as King Koopa himself... I mean, the bottom half of his body must have been two feet tall for him to fit so well in that crane bucket. There was also no real threat involved: the bucket was quite a ways away from Mario at the time, and Koopa couldn't have jumped over if he'd tried.Also, the inhabitants of Dinohattan could have had more reptilian features, even as small as those scales that you see on one or two of them early on. (And yes, I do remember that weird guy who is practically a walking lizard, even down to his delighted growl of pleasure at the smell of a piece of food he's holding in his hands.) I'm not saying go all-out with tails and claws, but let's stay a little more faithful to their dino ancestry.Oh yes, and another small detail that keeps the movie from sitting among my mental list of Best Movies of All Time: humans apparently being descended from monkeys. That's one detail that I simply cannot wrap my suspension of disbelief around. Apes, monkeys and humans descended from a common ancestor, if evolution scientists haven't determined wrongly.Anyway, just to end my review up on a positive note: my favorite characters are...Mario, Big Bertha, The Old King, Yoshi, Iggy, Spike, and Daisy. Peace!