20 Video Game Movie and TV Moments That INSULTED Fans

The first, and thankfully only live-action Mario movie proves just what can be achieved when things go so badly the first time. We’ve now been over three decades without a human actor playing Mario on film, and long may this run continue! But why did things go so wrong?

Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s Super Mario Bros. stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario Mario and Luigi Mario (yes, really), Italian-American brothers and Brookyln-based plumbers who stumble onto King Koopa’s (Dennis Hopper) scheme to fuse Earth’s human dimension with its dinosaur one (Manhattan twinned with Dinohattan, etc), and become reluctant heroes in the process.

Nothing about this film is right, and its overt connections to the game – its characters – couldn’t be farther from their source. It’s not just the humans Morton and Jankel didn’t know what to do with, as pretty much every non-human is hideous and unrecognisable from their 8-bit counterparts.

And no greater liberties were taken than with the goombas. In the game they are angry mushroom-like creatures who act as members of Bowser’s army and just generally obstacles to get in your way. In the film, they are hideous reptilian creatures in trenchcoats, and we are treated to a scene in which Mario and Luigi get a large group of them dancing to the muzak in an elevator, swaying them back and forth so the plumbers can escape unnoticed. Given the scene didn’t need to be there at all, we can only ask: Why?