Open the door
Get on the floor
Everybody walk the dinosaur
Well, I’ll be blunt: Super Mario Bros. (1993) isn’t a good movie, from a fan or purely cinematic viewpoint. It simply had too many power players working at different aims. But it does have its fans. And if there’s anything you can’t accuse it of, it’s not being inventive; its inventiveness is a high mark, and also its curse. It’s curse, among many other curses; Bob Hoskins once used the film a an answer to three separate questions in an interview: the worst job he’s done, his biggest disappointment, and the thing he would change if he could edit his past. The movie, as described by the late actor, was “a fu–in’ nightmare”.
But what if it had been longer? The cut we received in theaters back in 1993 was the cut decided on by the studio. But it was well known that directors Morton and Jankel had their cut of the film, though it never saw the light of day. This, however, was intriguing to fans. And, after a long and difficult road, Super Mario Bros. Archive community and Garrett Gilchrist have put out a restored version of this cut. And you can watch it here.
Restoring this unofficial (the directors were not involved, obviously) cut of the film took quite some time. The Archive community found this extended rough cut of the film back in May 2019. The problem was that it was on a VHS tape, and the quality wasn’t great to begin with; 30 years on a VHS cassette had probably done it no favors. So the team reached out to Garrett Gilchrist to restore the footage. You may know Gilchrist from his beautiful restoration of Richard Williams’ The Thief & the Cobbler. He was undoubtedly the right man for the job.
So does it fix the problems evident in the original cut of the film? Uh, no. I don’t think anything could. Super Mario Bros. was the product of writers, producers, directors, and investors all working against each other with little to no regard to each other. This situation once led to the late Dennis Hopper going on a three hour screaming rant at the the directors over the script; which would normally sound like Hollywood prima donna shit, but this was Super Mario Bros., and the production was a disaster, top to bottom, so this would be a reasonable response to that from practically anyone. But even in a disaster, there’s a spark of something, and it’s a testament to the crazy spark this film had that this cut exists.
Source: JoBlo
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