Let's get candy-colored
and talk about the enduring wonders of the Marioverse
Intermission, everyone! I’ve had it up to about right here with internalized ableism and childhood trauma and teenage heartbreak and strangers’ ignorance and classmates’ unfortunate remarks that plant their fence-posts in your head for decades: we’re overdue for fun. When I want to have fun, I think about Super Mario Bros. You’ll notice I didn’t say I play Super Mario Bros. — the fact is, I rarely do that. But I used to! And because I used to, and I was so young when I used to, well, the world, and the music, and the possibilities inherent in the epic and mightily surreal adventures of two Italian-American plumbers — it’s a reliably comforting world to visit. Usually.
I’m going to start by whooshing us off to a simpler time in a pandemic-free America, 1991. It’s 1991, and I’m living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where my wealthy best friend’s lawyer-dad has purchased the brand new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or Super NES, not to be confused with the original Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. My innocent dalliances with the plumbers of Mushroom Land certainly began with the original, and, having no point of reference for the mesmerizing video game graphics to come, my peers and I wanted not for pixels. The few we had were fine. But one irritating aspect of the original Mario game — well, irritating to me, borderline-rapturious for hardcore gamers who liked a challenge — was that once any aspect of a scene was out of frame, you couldn’t turn around and go back. Missed that mushroom back there, or the 20 coins hidden in the brick that would’ve given you an extra life. Sucks to be you, Mario, because you can’t turn around. (And neither can you, Luigi, the brother I always felt a deeper affinity for because I preferred their plumbers’ uniform in green.)
Then came that world-cracking sky-splitting slumber party at Jeannette’s house. In a high-ceilinged hardwood-floored livingroom packed with shrieking 8 year-old-girls, one of whom was me, our formerly sparsely-pixeled gameworld of choice came alive in delectable pastel colors, where not only could Mario or Luigi easily backtrack, you could also ride an adorable baby dinosaur named Yoshi. Who wore little red tennis shoes! And could fly with the right enchantment, on tiny feathered wings! The original Yoshi was green and came from green-spotted eggs, but there were other yoshis of other colors — red and blue, to name too — who came from eggs spotted with the colors of their cartoon hide. And through it all, the Mario tropes shone in what was then dizzying detail: the stars with little dot-eyes that rendered you indestructable with their shimmer and sped-up game music, the Venus fly traps that leapt ominously out of the green pipes that had originally transported our plumbers to Mushroom World and bit perrilously at your feet, and of course, Toad, as in Toadstool, your adorable mushroom sidekick — well, in theory, a sidekick. In the game he tended to be someone you rescued who wasn’t the princess.
And sigh, of course Princess Toadstool didn’t do much in my day except wear floofy dresses and be blond, helplessly waiting for Mario to rescue her from the dragon-like villian, Bowser. That’s changed these days! At some point she acquired a first name, Peach: no one has ever told me how or why. And I feel like some kind of French Madam from 1960 when I announce to you in a shocked whisper that in the upcoming cartoon remake of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Peach wears pants. Pants! This is no doubt a hypercalculated decision carefully concocted by execs to keep our time-honored characters up with the times, and my reaction is precisely the one they’ve done exhaustive research to achieve from the demographic to which I belong. I strive to turn my back against such manipulation by the pop machine and the gatekeepers who run it, but sometimes, I’m just exhausted enough to say, “Execs and market researchers, you’re good at what you do.”
Let’s not talk about execs and market researchers right now, though, not when we’ve opened this conversation expressly to have fun. There are small-time artists who also benefit from Super Mario Bros.’ enduring impact on the pop consciousness, like these Threadless makers whose talents have supplied me with, respectively, this shirt and this shirt. (Both shirts have taught me among other lessons that the secret to great loungewear is to buy a 100% cotton t-shirt and wait 10-12 years for the most comfortable thing you can put against your skin.)
I had the novelization of the Super Bros. Movie that was so bad it scarred the cast, because I was devoted to movie-novelizations, not just because they usually contained glossy stills from anticipated films, though that was a plus, but because combining my all-time favorite activity, reading, with one of my most enduring passions, movies, was just about the greatest thing little me could wish for. I would still buy novelizations of films I love, if the practice were still a thing and if they did it for movies not geared toward adults. (I had the novelization for Clueless, too, and it included a glossary in the back pages of all the slang terms! Truly the golden age of pop culture.)
I was still obsessed with princesses when the original live-action Super Mario Bros. movie premiered, so all I needed was a glamorous blond and an adorable live-action baby dinosaur-dragon-thing to be happy. I got both:
Sadly, however, the respected actors that made the film possible did not get what they hoped for, a conclusion with which I roundly empathized when I rewatched the film as an adult with my dear friend Merrick. It’s an unforgivably terrible movie. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask Bob Hopskins, the star of the film. He played Mario! Asked by the New York Times to look back on his life and career, he said:
Similarly, Dennis Hopper, normally respected for his villainous roles, had this to report:
So I can’t help but harbor some hope and excitement for the upcoming film where it looks to all appearences like they’re doing it right. I won’t link the trailer here, though, because I’m not being paid to promote the francheise. (I would consider accepting a contract.)
One thing I’ve learned in 2022 is that video games have gotten deeply dramatic, drawing players in with character development and varying-degrees-of-traumatic plot twists that are downright literary in their layers. The first time I recieved a thorough education and updating on this matter (from someone younger, of course) I was genuinely stunned. By the time I lifted my jaw off the floor it was to say, “This is what you all do for fun?” Fun has gotten weighted for the generation defined by TSA aggression in airports and the 24-hour news cycle and a job market continually in tatters and the opioid epidemic and near-constant war and rising rates of depression and anxiety and demoralizing dating apps and Trump’s presidency and the accelerating impact of climate change and the bleak state of Arts and of Liberal Arts education in America. I don’t know where any of them would ever have learned to actually relax.
I’m not saying I’m an expert on the subject either, but — I sure do feel a bit more at ease when I hear the Super Mario Bros. theme performed by the London Symphony Orchestra: