Trolling #11: Super Mario Bros. RULES!

Welcome back to CraveOnline‘s Trolling, dear friends. It is here where we devote our lives to committing every possible act of pop-culture heresy, putting every shred of our critical credibility on the line for the simple act of pissing you off. We attack the dear, and defend the indefensible. Read on, good sirs and madams, and feel the hate flow through you. Your hate makes us stronger. This week, I’ll be talking about the film that should be everyone’s favorite movie. Better than Aliens or The Dark Knight is 1993’s immortal classic Super Mario Bros.

The vast, post-apocalyptic wasteland of video-game-to-movie adaptations is a treacherous and tricky one. These days, video games are as varied and as complex as any medium, and they have – over the course of the last decade – come to supplant music as the single cultural signifier of American youth. The stories and characters from video games are celebrated just as highly as the characters and stories of feature films, so it’s something of a mystery why a major Hollywood studio hasn’t been able make a video-game-based movie that has become a big hit.

But there was one exception to the rule in what is probably the best video-game-to-movie adaptation made to date, and that is Rocky Morton’s and Annabel Jankel’s Super Mario Bros., a notoriously panned bomb (Bob-Omb?), and often cited as one of the worst movies of the 1990s.

But the critics are all wrong, the audiences are all wrong, and anyone who has had the audacity to attack Super Mario Bros. in any regard is all wrong. Indeed, Super Mario Bros. may prove to be one of the most entertaining, creative, and exciting movies of the 1990s. We here at Trolling declare: Super Mario Bros. rules. Here are some reasons why:

Super Mario Bros. was not a success and is, to this day, used as a byword for game-to-film failure. It also has a growing cult underneath it of people who love it and support it without a whiff of irony. Its popularity grows, and its esteem as a rollicking entertainment may someday finally be realized. Why do you hate it? It’s so lovable!

Until next week, let the hate mail flow.  


Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. 

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