The imagination gap
So, I saw THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE recently, and a lot of it just kinda ran right through me. It was a weird experience.
It’s not that I expected it to be funnier or more interesting or better-written than it was. The movie was everything I had figured it would be going into it. But something still felt off.
I’ve been a Mario fan (or, more accurately, a Bowser fan) since I was a kid. THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE would’ve been the first time in decades that I saw these characters I grew up with in a movie. It felt exciting. It should’ve been exciting. Why wasn’t it more exciting?
I think I have an idea.
See, when I was growing up, movies looked way better than video games.
Raptors in the movie JURASSIC PARK (1993)
A raptor in the game TUROK: DINOSAUR HUNTER (1997)
And so, when a game got a movie adaptation, it was like getting a multi-million-dollar glow-up for your favorite toy - letting you see it more fully realized than it could’ve been in the grainy pixels of your CRT TV.
Plus, Hollywood’s general refusal to consider animated films that weren’t Disney musicals meant that these adaptations had to be live-action - which forced a lot of redesigns.
That added a weird sort of excitement to it, too, especially where the source material really didn’t lend itself to a realistic depiction. Bowser is a fire-breathing turtle king with devil horns and a mohawk - what’s the “live-action” version of that?
In the 1993 SUPER MARIO BROS., Bowser is a person who evolved from a T. rex, and happens to style his hair…like that
So there was always a pretty high level of baseline hype around movie adaptations of games.
Some adult fans at the time may have wanted the “legitimization” that comes with being adapted into a more mainstream art form (and were thus pretty upset when the movies came out pretty bad); most kids were just hyped to see a cooler version of that thing we love.
The film adaptation of MORTAL KOMBAT wasn’t very good, but kid-me fucking loved it, because it shows my favorite character spitting fire out of a screaming skull - an act that I could otherwise only see rendered in graphics with a lower resolution than most emoji today.
The first MORTAL KOMBAT movie (1995)
The first MORTAL KOMBAT game (1992)
But that’s not really the vibe anymore, is it?
I mean, sure - gameplay graphics still aren’t on the same level as major motion pictures, and never will be. But the gap between the two of them feels much smaller now.
Back in the 90s, even the very best-looking games tended to give you chunky polygonal forms wearing stretched-out low-res textures. When you saw Bowser in SUPER MARIO 64, you had to turn that model into what you knew Bowser should look like, in your mind’s eye - because that wasn’t what was on the screen.
Bowser, as he appears in SUPER MARIO 64 (1996)
Sometimes there were bits of official artwork (in strategy guides and on the boxes the games came in), but these were always too few and too static. Having to extrapolate the appearance of these characters and creatures from the graphics of the 90s left us hungry to see what they “really” looked like, to see a depiction with the fidelity of the official artwork (or better!) but in action. And only movies could actually hope to sate that hunger.
But now, well…
Bowser, as he appears in BOWSER’S FURY (2021)
I’m not saying that Bowser’s graphics in a Nintendo Switch game look as good as the work of Illumination’s visual effects artists in a major motion picture.
But I am saying that he looks good enough in modern games that we don’t need the help imagining what he looks like anymore. And Hollywood’s increased willingness to make animated features means they don’t need to redesign the character that much, either.
So when I’m watching THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE, I’m not going “holy shit, it’s Mario!” - I’m going “yup, that’s Mario.”
That’s just…what Mario looks like.
And so, when the movie did things that should’ve felt cool and exciting - like turning actual stages from the games into action movie gauntlets - it didn’t feel like a dazzling upgrade to what I was already familiar with.
The movie still looks way better than the games, but the gap between what the games look like and what we imagine when we look at them is too small now to be exciting by itself. An adaptation like this ends up feeling less like it’s fully realizing the source material, and more like it’s just recreating it.
The biggest difference between this shot and a screenshot from a level in SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD is just where the camera is.
I think that’s why sequences in THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE that were clearly meant as flagship moments of callbacks and spectacle fell flat for me.
It’s not that my expectations for a children’s movie were too high; it’s that my own inner child’s expectations came from a time when we needed to do more work to picture what games were telling us to. It’s why adaptations of video games were inherently exciting: they promised to show you more than the games could; to show you something you hadn’t seen outside your head before.
And this suggests something excitingly counterintuitive, in itself: That the coolest parts of faithful video game adaptations might actually be what’s not in the source material.
When I was a kid, if a movie wanted to show me a video game character doing something I’d never seen before, they just needed to show me them walking around in a fully-rendered world with a higher polygon count than the N64.
Now, the bar for “something I haven’t seen these characters do before” is both higher, and easier to clear at the same time: show me them doing something brand new.
