This week, the world got its first look at Nintendo’s and Illumination’s upcoming “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Now, with a stellar and original title like that, no one should have any doubts that this new film will be better than the 1993 disaster, “Super Mario Bros.,” a live action mess starring a number of big names that completely missed the mark, even as a wildly imaginative ‘adaptation’ of Nintendo’s flagship IP.
We’ve been hearing speculation and fake news for a while now about how Chris Pratt, better known for his roles in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Jurassic World’ movies, where he always sounds like… Chris Pratt, wouldn’t be up to the task of inhabiting the titular role of Mario, and the few lines of Pratt’s dialog in the trailer are… inconclusive.
The question of Mario’s voice is a rabbit hole of inconsistencies. Early on in the history of the ‘Super Mario’ IP, Nintendo collaborated with both Korean animation studio, Sei Young, to produce “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show” and the oddly-titled, “The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3” (which really makes it sound like there are three brothers), and Western animation studio, DIC, to produce a single-season animated adaptation of “Super Mario World.” These non-game tie-in media were all released in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. While Mario’s voice was initially provided by professional wrestler, Lou Albano, he was later brought to life by Walker Boone. In both cases, Mario’s voice was somewhat gravelly and gave the impression of a Blue Collar Italian immigrant living somewhere in New York City… probably Brooklyn. This was, of course, the backstory written for Mario, and even when bastardizing the IP, such as in the 1993 movie, this was the main piece of characterization that stayed consistent.
But that all changed in 1996, when Nintendo released “Super Mario 64” as a launch title for the Nintendo 64 console. Suddenly, we got to hear Mario’s voice in-game for the very first time… and he sounded REALLY different. Instead of a gravelly voice with just a hint of both Brooklyn and Italy, Mario’s new videogame voice actor, Charles Martinet, transformed the character into a hyperactive caricature, with a ridiculous faux-Italian accent, while all of the character’s 8-bit sound effects that used to accompany physical action were replaced by manic exclamations. Martinet subsequently provided the voices for not only Mario, but his brother Luigi and the duo’s inverted foils, Wario and Waluigi, proving that he is capable of range, but never deviating from the template laid-down in “Super Mario 64,” with Nintendo even adding highly compressed Martinet quips to the Game Boy Advance remakes of older games like “Super Mario Bros. 3” and “Super Mario World,” perhaps in an attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that Mario had always sounded like an idiot.
While to my ear, Chris Pratt’s Mario voice does have a slight undertone of Brooklyn, and to my eye the 3D model of Mario used in the movie looks quite faithful to those old ‘Super Mario’ animations from the early ‘90s, I’m afraid that we’re ultimately going to end up with a movie where Mario just sounds like a different kind of idiot… named Chris Pratt: The Man of 1 Voice.
It will be interesting to see if negative backlash from the fan community – and, boy-howdy, does Nintendo have a craven fan community – causes Illumination to make some drastic changes, like Paramount did when audiences freaked out about Ugly Sonic. Depending on how mediocre Pratt’s voice acting is, I could see Illumination either requiring him to re-read all of his lines or simply casting someone else who is more suitable for the role.
The bright side, though, is that, aside from the Chris Pratt’s voice debacle and the uninspired title, the trailer makes this movie look like it will be a whole lot of fun.
