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Presented on 35mm film!Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The live-action “Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. It looked and felt nothing like the video games.
To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. origin story.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Muenzinger Auditorium, Boulder, CO, United States, Colorado 80309