The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s opening rap is a big retro gag for ’80s kids
Illumination’s animated all-things-Nintendo celebration The Super Mario Bros. Moviebegins with plumber brothers Mario and Luigi splitting from their boss, Spike, and heading off into business for themselves. And any new business needs one thing: a catchy commercial.
Their first TV ad for Super Mario Bros. Plumbing feels like a wink at audience members who were concerned about Mario’s voice, since the brothers (voiced by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day) talk in thick, exaggerated Italian accents closer to their typical game voices than what they use in the rest of the movie. The ad goes old-school — it’s grainy and presented in a 1990s style. But it’s even more retro than that, and even more of an inside joke than it initially appears to be.
The commercial actually pulls from the intro theme to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, a 1989 TV series that mixed animation and live action to create something absolutely absurd. Mario and Luigi’s family isn’t impressed by their foray into TV advertising, but I’m a huge fan — the song in that ad is a bop, frankly, and it’s a callback to the earliest TV iterations of the brothers. Wrestler Lou Albano voiced Mario in the series and played him in the live-action segments, while The Jeffersons’ Danny Wells played Luigi.
Was the show good? Depends on how you define that word. But was it entertaining? Certainly! In particular, Albano and Wells took liberties in portraying the Brooklyn-based plumbers, which certainly gave the characters a unique spin.
The live-action parts, including the Mario rap that opened the show, were real highlights. The first episode in particular opens with Albano and Wells as Mario and Luigi — with spaghetti noodles and sauce on their uniforms — meeting with
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