A Mind-Numbing Work of Staggering Why?

You know what movie probably doesn't need to be another twenty minutes longer? Huh? Yeah, I can't actually hear you. That's not how blogs work. It's sort of a one-way street, but I'll just assume you said Super Mario Bros.

Good choice.

"I don't know, you step on turtles, collect 
coins. What do you want? This isn't Hamlet."

-Shigeru Miyamoto

If you'd somehow blocked this out, there was indeed a live-action--adaptation? No, that's no the right word since the film makes only the slightest, vaguest gesture in the rough direction of fidelity to the source material. In fairness it was, at the time, a series of five or six games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto who was actively and aggressively opposed to the concept of story or lore in his games. So the filmmakers were stuck with the task of making up a fictional universe based on Super Mario's universe.

What they came up with was a weirdly literalized and dystopian take on the game's "story" about rescuing the princess from the villain, but it's a passing resemblance at best.

Nestled between the Nintendo Seal of Quality (remember those?) and the 
warning about not dunking your game cartridge in paint thinner was seven sentences
explaining why you'll be running to the right for the next couple of hours or so.

Weird blond hair, rage issues, never
won a popular vote. Holy shit, this movie
predicted President Trump in 1993. 

In the movie it's Princess Daisy and not Peach (or Toadstool if you're old), and the villain is Dennis Hopper as some kind of proto-Trumpian autocrat in a three piece suit instead of a fire-breathing turtle dragon. It borrows the idea that Mario and Luigi are plumbers from Brooklyn, transported to the Mushroom Kingdom through a drain pipe like in the old cartoon series but tweaks it to Mario and Luigi are plumbers from Brooklyn, transported to a dark alternate universe run by fascist dinosaur people.

Is Toad dead? The movie doesn't bother telling
us, so I guess we'll never know. #justicefortoad.

Names and elements from the game are there, but are just arbitrarily applied to characters. Like, Toad is in the film, but he's folk singer instead of a mushroom (which is also not a toad I suppose). He gets arrested, sentenced to de-evolution, and then we never see him again. Big Bertha, a giant fish in Super Mario 3, is here, but she's a human woman whom Mario gropes and then robs (no, really). She gives the Mario brothers pneumatic boots that allow them to super-jump. Because, one assumes, cocaine.

Maybe Disney's hesitation had 
something to do with all the strippers?

Anyway a new, extended cut of this 1993 goat rodeo of a movie was assembled by an editor called Garrett Gilchrist who drew from old VHS tapes, leaving us all to ask "why?" The new version is called "The Morton-Jankel Cut" (thanks a lot, Zach Snyder...) which is weird because Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were the original directors and I don't think either of them were involved in this version. Although according to Morton, they weren't involved in editing the theatrical cut either thanks to studio interference from Disney, who'd bought the rights.

Pictured: Iggy and Spike rapping
"Koopa: the Party Poopa" before getting
hauled off by the dinosaur stasi.

You can watch this--you know, if you want to for some reason--on the Internet Archive. I fast forwarded through some of the changes and-what? I'm not paid enough to sit through this entire movie again. Or at all. Anyway, from what I scrubbed through, I can confirm that Gilchrist's cut restores the subplot about rival plumbers and some more of Scapelli's leering at Daisy. There's more of the club scene with Mario and Big Bertha's S&M flirtation, as well as Iggy and Spike's treasonous rap. Oh, and he put back a scene in which Koopa murders some guy. 

So I guess it's not really a director's cut, but more of a fan-edit which raises several questions. Questions such as: Wait, there are Super Mario Bros. movie fans? and more importantly, There are people out there who believe that Morton and Jankel's artistic vision was worth restoring after nearly thirty years in the DVD bargain bin?

Pictured: auteurs Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel,
seen here discussing whether or not they included enough
strippers in their movie about a kid's video game.