Thanks to the jaw-dropping success of its animated counterpart, 1993’s infamous Super Mario Bros. has been riding a renewed wave of popularity and momentum, if only for the fact the cult curio has been a source of endless fascination for the last 30 years.
An unmitigated disaster on every level, the first high-profile video game adaptation in Hollywood history set a precedent that the genre is still trying to shake off after being torn apart by critics on its way to box office implosion. It’s a deeply strange and often unsettling film, but despite Disney-owned Buena Vista being okay with whatever the hell was going down on set, John Leguizamo revealed the Mouse House drew the line at strippers.
It’s become urban legend that the initial vision for Super Mario Bros. was a lot darker and dingier than the shambles that ended up being thrown onto the screen, with the OG Luigi admitting to GQ that the studio was concerned with the potential of exposed flesh more than anything else.
“They were the biggest commercial directors of the era. They had this dark, dark vision that Disney was not okay with, so there was all this [head-butting] that was incredible. That party scene? Those are all strippers from North Carolina that they put on the set that they had in the most revealing clothes and costumes. Disney was not happy. They had to cut a lot of it out, blow it out, CGI it, whatever bad technology they had back in the day.”
If there’s one thing you wouldn’t expect to see in a Super Mario Bros. movie, strippers would definitely be near the top of that list, and we can’t imagine it’s something the team at Illumination is going to contemplate as its version nears a billion dollars.
