Organize the Mushroom Kingdom!
June 25, 2018 11:28 AM   Subscribe

KOOPAISM IS CAPITALISM - MeFi's The Whelk on The Super Mario Bros. Movie at 25. [via mefi projects]
posted by Artw (11 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh hey, this is great. I've been seeing it on twitter but for whatever reason hadn't understood what it was in reference to.
The movie itself is a little less appealing than this, I must say.
"a tyrant has to be lucky everyday, his opponents only have to be lucky once" Now that's a quote I'll be remembering.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 11:34 AM on June 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Luckily for me The Super Mario Brothers movie has been uploaded to my Plex server, so I can do a watch imagining it as a warning from the past about Donald Trump.
posted by Twain Device at 11:41 AM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Bravo, Whelk! You've made a much more coherent and politically astute version of my own observation from last year:
"He lives in a ridiculous, tacky castle, behaves horribly towards princesses (and other women), and has a passel of awful children who need to be defeated mini-boss style."

posted by Strange Interlude at 11:58 AM on June 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


I just realized this timeline may be all my fault because I dropped a not insignificant amount of acid to see this on opening night.

Which was, as you may well imagine, a horrible mistake.
posted by loquacious at 11:59 AM on June 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


This is great! Also, I'm planning a movie night in association with an Oakland video game museum. Mario Bros. movie on a big screen with a ton of vintage consoles around that you can play Mario games on. I had no idea this year was its 25th anniversary. We'll have to work that into the marketing.
posted by brundlefly at 12:07 PM on June 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Already read and more than doubled his single digit number of claps.
posted by Samizdata at 1:01 PM on June 25, 2018


Yeah, I love this, and now I want to get into Karel Čapek as well.
posted by gucci mane at 2:14 PM on June 25, 2018


I just realized this timeline may be all my fault because I dropped a not insignificant amount of acid to see this on opening night.

Which was, as you may well imagine, a horrible mistake.


Of course it was a mistake.

You should have eaten shrooms.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:27 PM on June 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


I actually saw this in the theater when it was released.

I was in awe of a movie that was full of such psychedelic imagery and had a repeated line of "trust the fungus".

It's not a good movie, although i admire its tenaciousness of trying to reproduce video game mechanics fully in-camera. I prefer in-camera special effects generally.

Also, Bob and John are both actually great actors who were doing everything they possibly could to rescue this truly bad idea. Props to them for that. Dennis wasn't doing anything to rescue the movie, but it's possible that's why he's so... oddly compelling.
posted by hippybear at 7:55 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Of course it was a mistake.

You should have eaten shrooms.


Oh, that definitely would have been much, much worse. Please, everyone knows you're not supposed to do shrooms indoors or in the city. And I'd be wary about what shrooms might, uh, think and have to say about that movie. You really don't want to make shrooms mad, it's unfluffy.

That movie night was intensely confusing and I remember laughing a whole lot. Very loudly. At the wrong times.

I also remember getting more and more irritated as the plot, uh, devolved into the glorious mess that is is that we know and love. I remember thinking, specifically, "Wow, ok, I'm really high but not that high and it's not just me, is it? This movie is just confusingly awful, isn't it? Oh well. More weird CGI, please. And less of Dennis Hopper licking his lips and dipping his hands in paraffin because wut?"

I still love this dumb weird movie for the nostalgia and horrible CGI and the weird shrunken-head goombas, but with it's labored attempts at ready-made one-liners and catch phrases, it's like the anti Buckaroo Banzai. Even Dennis Hopper is as flat as a plastic action figure, like someone (presumably the film's editor) kept him clinically tranquilized on ketamine and Quaaludes for the duration of the production.
posted by loquacious at 9:25 PM on June 25, 2018




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