Adaptation…
“It was par for the course,” reckons Annabel Jankel, co-director of Super Mario Bros. “Every comic book had been adapted into movies. It was inevitable to try and translate something like this to the screen.”
Being a pioneer is sometimes lonely work, though, and big questions remained over how to turn a game into a movie experience. “We had this poster that Nintendo produced for us.
“It had all the characters from the games and we tried to include as many of them as possible into the story. There was the mushroom, King Koopa and Iggy and Spike. We were choosing bits from the game rather than trying to make a direct translation.
“Neither co-director Rocky Morton or I were enthusiastic gamers, which might have been something to do with the end result...”
Even though Super Mario Bros. was a huge box office flop, the floodgates opened. Double Dragon and Street Fighter appeared the following year with beat ’em ups being more cost effective to realise on-screen than Shigeru Miyamoto’s Mushroom Kingdom.
Next: Post-Pub PlayStation...
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