‘Super Mario Bros.’: 1993 Live-Action Movie Gets Extended Fan Recut With Never-Before-Seen Footage
The infamous live-action adaptation of Super Mario Bros. that released in 1993 went through the gauntlet of changes in an attempt to salvage a “problem” film, but after 28 years, fans have come together to cobble together a recut of the movie that extends the story and more closely resembles the vision that Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel signed on for.
When Disney (under its Hollywood Pictures label) sought out to create, they didn’t skimp out on talent: the movie featured a cast that included Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis, and Fiona Shaw, along with a brief cameo from Lance Henriksen, and the voice talents of Frank Welker and Dan Castellaneta, with a score by Alan Silvestri, and digital visual effects that would go on to become industry standard shortly afterward. Nonetheless, the Super Mario Bros. film is best known for its nightmarish production: Hoskins broke a finger, nearly drowned, was electrocuted, and got stabbed four times, multiple late and on-set rewrites completely shifted the intended creative direction of the film, and co-directors Morton and Jenkel clashed with the crew over alleged control-freak behavior, leading to issues when producers Jake Eberts and Roland Joffé attempted to steer the story closer to the video games that they’d been hired to adapt.
The movie follows the different take on “rescue the princess” plot that the games have been known for, with some notable deviations from the source material. Mario and Luigi’s backstories as Italian-American plumbers gets a little more emphasis here, while Daisy (who is a composite character with Peach, then known as Princess Toadstool) is inexplicably raised in the United States rather than the Mushroom Kingdom, which is established as being in an alternate dimension. The movie’s biggest departure from its source material comes in the form of its visual presentation: rather than being set in an Alice in Wonderland-inspired storybook fantasy world with vibrant colors, Super Mario Bros. instead brought the franchise into a version of the Mushroom Kingdom that was a kid-friendly(?) science-fantasy cyberpunk setting, akin to the kinds of worlds seen in Max Headroom (which the directors previously co-developed) or Blade Runner.
If that sounds kind of neat way to reinterpret the franchise, well, it’s unfortunately not as cool as it sounds; it’s the poster child for bad video game movie adaptations and it bombed pretty hard at the box office. Nonetheless, the film has had a cult following in spite of its detractors, since there are those who actually liked the cyberpunk approach. As of yesterday, the fruits of a longtime fanmade effort to restore the original film to the best of the fans’ abilities has finally occurred (hat tip Polygon), thanks to the discovery of a rough cut of the film with several new scenes. The fans deserve all the props in the world for trying to reconstruct the original take on the film, which features over 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage. The new version of the movie has a more consistent tone, for what it’s worth, and makes some other adjustments along the way.
Since the original Super Mario Bros. movie isn’t entering the public domain anytime soon, and Disney aren’t interested in remastering and officially releasing this movie, we’re not going to directly link to it. Nonetheless, we’ll be happy to link to the Twitter thread of someone involved with the project, who can show you where to watch it:
Trust the fungus. @smbmovie
Super Mario Bros: The Morton Jankel Cut (VHS Extended Rough Cut 1.0) Movie 1993https://t.co/nCIDh8h4LA pic.twitter.com/OFjNGU5OTj
— Garrett Gilchrist (@TygerbugGarrett) June 1, 2021
Super Mario Bros.: The Morton-Jankel Cut is available to watch. Meanwhile, Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment are trying their hand at an animated Super Mario Bros. feature film that should hopefully fare better than this one, currently scheduled to release in 2022.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
