Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
Adapting something to the big screen for the first time is hard enough. But when it’s a franchise as big and venerated as Mario, it’s an almost impossibly tall order—one that is more likely to piss people off than win them over.
There were a lot of things that could go wrong with Illumination Entertainment’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the first animated feature based upon Nintendo’s beloved video games. Considering the franchise is so widely known, and that it already received a critically reviled live-action film 30 years ago, Illumination’s Nintendo collab faced an uphill battle toward winning people over. Other than that gigantic, dedicated fanbase, Mario games aren’t obviously cinematic material. They’re defined not by storytelling, but by satisfying platform-based gameplay. This is a franchise with a main character that just says “Wahoo!” and “Here we go!” in a horrendously stereotypical Italian accent, after all.
That left the Hollywood voice cast, featuring Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya-Taylor Joy as Peach, and Jack Black as Bowser, among others, to reinvent the wheel a little bit, as the Mario characters finally gained some robust spoken dialogue. And for many of the actors—especially Keegan-Michael Key, who plays Mario and Peach’s very shrill pal Toad—it meant figuring out a way to make the characters a little more, uh, pleasant to listen to without alienating fans completely.