Tuesday 31 October 2017

Adaptation: Super Mario Bros.



The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.

That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.

And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.

In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.




Super Mario World
Super Mario World (SNES)
Takashi Tezuka (1990)

As Adaptation speed-runs through the first level of its button-mashing quadrant, there are three reasons why I've specifically chosen to play Super Mario World. 1) This is the game I lost a couple of Summers to in the early 90s (as referenced up there in the introduction), 2) This is the game which introduces Yoshi the dragon, who also appears in the film-version (and so provides the closest chronological influence for the film), and 3) This is the game I've got upstairs with my SNES*1. Hey, path of least resistance and all that...


It's certainly true that the moustachioed plumber was a thing before this particular installment of the franchise, of course. Mario has become to gaming what Darth Vader is to cinema; an iconic figure of the artform, a mainstream touchstone symbolising the progression and durability of the hobby, familiar even to people who've never so much as picked up a game-controller, let alone thrown one down in a fit of pique. The game harks from that golden era where domestically-affordable computing power had raised graphics and gameplay mechanics above the NES and Gameboy limitations, but before the 3D conversion-influx that the N64 inevitably brought.

But Super Mario World. Man, what a game. 96 levels, 24 of which are hidden, and the option of playing through them all linearly or taking secret short-cuts to skip the ones which are stumping you. Much like the London Underground, there's often more than one way of completing your journey (and much like the Underground, the hardened fanatic will take the extra time to visit each station anyway - that's where the fun lies*2). While this isn't exactly sand-box gaming, the ability to hop back through the world-map for power-ups and activate retrospective key-reveals makes the replay value absolutely massive.

Relatively short levels mean a high-level of 'unputdownable' gameplay, as you think 'Okay, I'll just complete this level before going to bed/work/court'. This is the hook of course, as it's rarely that simple. The skills learning-curve is steady, making Super Mario World ideal for younger (and older) players who might find the controller less intuitive. But like all good games, there comes a point where you have to sit up and start really concentrating, or be doomed to fall down the same pit for hours on end.

I've briefly tried other iterations of Mario after this, but the 2D platformer is my preferred format, and the SNES is my preferred presentation.
A fantastic game, as timeless as its hero*3...






Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros.
Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton (1993)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about 1993's Super Mario Bros movie is that at a point between post-production and release, someone watched the whole thing back and still gave it the green light. Bob Hoskins stars as Mario Mario, an American-Italian plumber working out of Brooklyn with his younger brother Luigi Mario (played by John Leguizamo*4). Luigi falls in love with an archeologist named Daisy (Samantha Mathis), and the brothers find themselves on a mission to rescue her when she accidentally falls through a dimensional portal at a dig-site and is captured by the evil King Koopa (Dennis Hopper).

The problem is that other than the character names and a couple of shoehorned references to red/green overalls, the film bears almost no relation to the very property it's shamelessly exploiting as its sole marketing focus. Cinematically notorious as a worst-case-scenario of the game-to-movie genre, it's actually no worse than many other family-oriented adventure flicks of the era. Although they were dreadful as well. And of course the whole world didn't see most of those, since they weren't misguided tie-ins to a globally successful game franchise.

The script is leaden and simplistic (not that it's the worse offender), utilising some manner of 'de-evolution machine' in its story as if the concept of natural-selection had even been in the same room as this screenplay. The way the premise and princess-kidnap-plot are wangled from the pixellated fantasy origins and into 'the real-world' is a bit like when theatre producers go 'yeah, we'll set Hamlet… in space!!', and then leave the original 16th-century dialogue in place so that the whole thing doesn't work. Despite the full-length 99-minute runtime not a lot actually happens here, and what does happen makes little-to-no sense even with industrial amounts of exposition. Oh, and Dennis Hopper's dinosaur-based villain is a actually just middle-age man scowling with excessive amounts of product in his bleach-blonde hair*5. When he's padding around the soundstage representing a filthy, dystopian city, it feels for all the world like Michael Bay got pissed and decided to re-adapt Blade Runner for kids.

Co-directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton have a legally-binding credit in the film's opening sequence (laid over the movie itself rather than an inserted-card), yet are somehow not mentioned one single time in the closing reel. Almost as if the traditional attribution had been removed on purpose so that the audience wouldn't be able to scribble down the names of those responsible. The first words to appear in that end-scroll are a nod to Roxette for the closing music. Imagine being so mortified with your own work that you'd dump Roxette in the shit over it. Well, quite.

On a technical level, the sound-mix on my 'remastered' DVD is atrocious with background noise rushing to fill any auditory gaps and then flopping over the dialogue. I can't imagine how bad it must have been in the vanilla-print (not that I'll be hunting it down to find out). This perhaps wouldn't matter so much if the disc actually had a basic subtitle-track but it doesn't and now I can't believe I'm complaining about this like it would have made the damned thing any more bearable*6.

At any point in this film you can stop and ask "right, what's going on again?", and be sure that there isn't an answer.

Super Mario Bros isn't even "delightful hate-watch" bad, it's just crap. The whole endeavour is based on what-iffery. The title-sequence opens with an entire monologue of it. "What if the dinosaurs weren't all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension? And, hey! What if they found a way back?".

Apparently at no point during the creation of this movie did a producer lean forward and say "…yeah, what if we all don't bother though?"






The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
DiC Animation (1989)

First things first, I watched the cartoon-segments of this. The 'Super Show' consisted of a live-action Mario Bros sitcom acting as a framing device for animated shorts of the plumbers (and The Legend of Zelda in some episodes). Anything which isn't cartoons is awful. All I'm saying is that 'The Super Show' was the scheduling-name for the combination of everything, but when a Best-of DVD was published, someone decided that 'Best-of' didn't go so far as including any of the live-action segments. But hey, by all means see for yourself. Anyway, I watched a couple of hours' worth of the Mario animations. They're uncomplicated but quite a lot of fun, especially for fans of 1980s animation.

Starring Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and little Toad, each episode is self-contained and takes a theme as the basis for the week's story (Jack & The Beanstalk, Aladdin etc). The first chapter on the Best-Of DVD is Star Koopa, which opens with Mario and gang on a spaceship being pursued by Darth Koopa. Cue the Koopa-troopers in white armour, the transparent equivalent of Carbonite and some non-copyright-infringing (and stun-only) lightsabers. If anything, what would normally be a heavy-handed pastiche works more as an actual homage, due to the visual and tonal similarities to Nelvana Animation's Holiday Special and Droids cartoons. This particular episode is the sort of thing I'd usually hate, but the overall charm of the series pulls it off.

Even with the disposable writing-format restricting any kind of development, and its always-changing, context-free location settings, the Super Mario Bros cartoon still makes infinitely more sense than anything in the 1993 movie...




Is the original thing any good, though?
Yes, yes, yes and yes.


Is the film-version any good, though?
No*7.


So, should I check out one, both or neither?
…maybe just enjoy the game?


Oh, is there a Wilhelm Scream in it?
In the game, no (there's no sampled dialogue), in the movie there's not that I heard (although I was just short of screaming inside my head for an hour and half) and I didn't hear one in the cartoon eps that I watched.


Yes, but what's the Star Wars connection?
Level 1: The game's character-writer Shigeru Miyamoto was a crewmember on Nintendo's 1996 Shadows of the Empire N64 game, whereas the film-version stars one of TPM's Gungan Guards and the cartoon features the voices of Thall Joben and Vlix from Droids.
That's pretty good-going, all things considered.



*1 An actual SNES, as opposed to the recently-released SNES-mini. No snobbery against the new version (I'm all for it, in fact), but there's not a lot of point in me buying one when I still have a functioning, vintage SNES and all the games I want to play on it anyway. [ BACK ]

*2 FYI, I'm not a train geek, I just love that train geeks exist. In all fairness, I suspect I'm not a train geek because Star Wars got its foot in the door first and I've only got so much disposable cash. As a wise man once observed, 'collectors are like freemasons, but without the handshake...'. [ BACK ]

*3 Yeah I know technically it's heroes and Luigi is available as a player as soon as someone picks up the other controller, but it's not called Super Luigi World, now is it? We all know that Mario's brother is the hanger-on in this partnership. While Mario's doing the skilled work of re-plumbing a toilet-main, Luigi's mopping up the sewage with that slack-jawed expression on his face. No, don't look at me like that, no-one likes Luigi. He's basically Scrappy-Doo in overalls... [ BACK ]

*4 Okay, Bob Hoskins may not be entirely Italian-looking, but John Leguizamo is fucking Colombian. What does this suggest about the casting director? Does the film's artistic license extend to the point where the brothers aren't actually from the same continent, never mind the same mother? And let's not go into the dynamics of a family where there's a 22-year age gap between brothers... [ BACK ]

*5 And okay, the fresh-faced John Leguizamo was only 29 with this movie was released, but Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper were actual, established actors by that point. Granted, neither has a perfect decision-making record even outside of Mario Bros (Leguizamo also guilty on that front), but I mean really guys, what the actual fuck? [ BACK ]

*6 The best part? I've actually seen this film before. In 1993. In the cinema. No, really. I don't remember actively hating it, although a nagging disappointment certainly factored into my reactions. But now, enough time seems to have passed that I'd forgotten how bad it could be. Anyway, I am next due to watch Super Mario Bros in 2041. Can't wait. [ BACK ]

*7 NO. [ BACK ]



DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

1 comment:

  1. The game's a classic for good reason. Though people are less harsh on poor Luigi nowadays. After all, with Kirby around, he's no longer first in the hate-queue...

    ReplyDelete