The Super Mario Bros. Movie Trailer is Finally Out

“Some Mixed Thoughts in Brief”

Hey all, I’m on vacation this week! Except, when am I not on vacation, these days? Sometimes it does feel like my life is a sad vacation to the parking lot campground a county over in an attempt to feel like we’re going somewhere. But this week it is an actual vacation back down to Illinois, so I’m taking a kind of break from this blog too! And by “Break,” I mean I’m not writing “Periphery” or some other bullshit this week and instead I’m ranting about the upcoming animated Mario Movie for a couple hundred words! Again!

Last Friday, after many delays and a dearth of news from anyone at Nintendo or The Minion People, we finally got the first trailer for the 2023 Mario Movie, and we finally got to hear Chris Pratt’s Mario Voice. And, much like my impressions of the casting, my feelings are… mixed. Not the least of all because Chris Pratt’s Mario Voice, the one he said he’s been working on for ages and we’d all be blown away by, is just his regular voice with a tiny Italian twang. Like someone said “Mario” in the other room during recording, or Chris Pratt gave Charles Martinet a high-five before putting his tongue in a lock box far away.

Or the fact that Jack Black as Bowser sounds more like a professional wrestler than the traditionally deep reptilian gravel of the Koopa King. I mean, we already had a professional wrestler as Mario in the 90’s and, you know what? It worked! I’d rather have the gruff Brooklyn sewer grate of Lou Albano (or even Bob Hoskins!) over a regular guy that happens to be Chris Pratt. Better yet, why not just have Charles Martinet, the video game voice of Mario, do it?

Look, I guess I’m a Mario purist, which is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said on this blog. Right up there with everything else I’ve ever said. I want Mario and Bowser to sound like the Mario and Bowser from the games, which I recognize is mostly impossible. I don’t know if having a true Bowser voice for an hour and a half is sustainable, or would even sound good. It would probably be too much, like listening to Tom Waits sing for more than fifteen minutes. And as much as I love Charles Martinet, it might also still be too much to hear every line be “It’s-a Me!” Then again, I do listen to that much Mario in the games anyway, so who am I to say one way or the other?

Then again, those are really my only complaints with it. Considering that it’s coming from The Minion People, I was surprised at the restraint that was shown in the trailer for low-hanging comedy. There were no fart jokes, no freeze frames, no gratuitous schlock comedy. It was an actual, exciting movie trailer, which admittedly beat out my notably expectations for the movie. ANd the animation looks stellar; it’s full of character, small details, and expert lighting. Which is more than can be said for, say, Mario’s other big-screen endeavors. Between the trailer itself and the teaser poster released a few days before the trailer, the movie itself is actually shaping up to be pretty high-quality, at least as far as can be guessed from the trailer.

Folks on the internet plugged into this kind of stuff seemed to have breathed a collective sigh of relief, too. Most of them seem genuinely excited about it now. Which, I want to again reiterate, is the exact opposite of what most people felt when the casting announcement was released. And yet, I can’t quite muster up that same level of enthusiasm. Something about it still doesn’t sit right with me, even with the excellent-looking animation and pleasantly-restrained trailer. Those voices, man, I just can’t do it. And there’s something else I can’t just put my finger on. Maybe it’s that I’m afraid that if this movie does well, Nintendo will opt for these new voices for Mario games in the future, which I think would be the worst possible outcome from all of this. The last thing I want is Chris Pratt in my Mario Odyssey 2.

But I don’t know. What do you think? Can you get over the voices in favor of what might turn out to be a decent movie? Do you think that this trailer is just a gauzy coating over a veneer-thin stock-standard not-funny animated kid’s film that will end up being just as tacky as a new Minions movie? Or do you think it’ll be a properly entertaining adaptation of the world’s most beloved video game character and a new era of Nintendo’s move onto the big screen? Let’s-a go all leave your thoughts in the comments! Or, you know, don’t, because I can’t tell you what to do.