For my last selection, I have something of an omake for you guys. I'd venture to say that most people my age (nearing 30) are familiar with the Super Mario Brothers Super Show, an American show for kids that combined live-action segments with actors playing the Mario Brothers, with an animated episode with the bros in the Mushroom Kingdom. Well, Japan had its own take on the Mario Brothers animation, and released an hour-long animated film in 1986 entitled Super Mario Brothers: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach. This movie is very hard to find, and the only copy I could dig up is in tiny, VHS-rip resolution with a subtitle track that's tragically mistranslated at times, but I was curious anyway.
In the movie, Mario and Luigi own a grocery store, and one night while playing a video game, the characters come out from the TV. One of them is Princess Peach, who is suddenly dragged back in by King Koopa. Mario is left with nothing but Peach's amulet. The next day, while being depressed over the whole ordeal, a weird dog shows up, steals the amulet, and goes down a pipe. The brothers follow and suddenly find themselves in the Mushroom Kingdom. They learn about the special powers that they can utilize, like mushrooms, fire flowers and stars.
The rest of the film is mostly a string of gags based on Mario and company meeting various enemies from the video game. They deal with Lakitu, pirahna plants, a motherly flying turtle and goombas, and wherever they go, Luigi is sure to grab as many gold coins as possible. Eventually, after following an invincibility start under the water, they find an old shipwreck that they're able to use to travel to Koopa's castle. Koopa, a lovesick lizard, wants to marry Princess Peach and make her a Koopa as well, but Mario and Luigi show up to stop the wedding. Using the powers given to him throughout his journey, Mario defeats Koopa and rescues the Princess. Unexpectedly, their canine companion transforms into a handsome prince, Peach's betrothed. Seeing that Peach is safe, the brothers make the journey home.
Setting aside the fact that this adaptation of the first Mario game is just a silly adaptation for kids and that's it's certainly fun in its own way, I'd like to make note of the completely bogus, atrocious English subtitling job that someone subjected it to. My assumption is that the person who did it knew about ten words of Japanese and then made the rest up. Sure, the gist of the story is pretty obvious, but the translation is full of really obvious mistakes including a big whopper at the end where Peach refers to the Prince as "daddy" in the subtitles, when there's clear reference in the dialog to him being her "konyakusha," or "betrothed." That's a big difference (I would hope)! The translator also seems to want to Americanize everything, because "tempura" becomes "lasagna" and "ramen" becomes "pasta," among other things.
What I really find intriguing about this movie is that it even got made in the first place, especially considering how protective Nintendo is of these characters and their image nowadays. I recall reading an interview at one time with the man doing the translation for the DS Mario RPG-style games, and how he had to get approval on what the characters could say and what they couldn't. That's part of the reason that the brothers don't ever have much dialog in any of the games. This was early on in the brothers' life-cycle, though, so it's interesting to see the difference.
Clearly this is more of a curiosity than a must-see, and the crummy video and poor subtitling make it more work than fun, but I'm glad to have been able to see this just because it's so weird and the characters are so different from their official portrayals nowadays.
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