Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [50]
Nintendo also rejiggered a Japanese golf game, Mario Golf, as NES Open Tournament Golf. The American release had fewer courses, easier holes, and more replayability, thanks to adding prize money for good performance. It was a microcosm of the difference between what Japan wanted—hard simulation games to be studied and then discarded—and the United States—fun arcade-style endeavors that could be replayed over and over.
Assuming, of course, that America wanted Nintendo at all, instead of Sega.
12 – MARIO’S GALAXY
SPINOFFS GALORE
Dustin Hoffman—two-time best actor Oscar winner, six-time nominee—wanted to play Super Mario. That there would be a movie made about Mario was eventual: it couldn’t be worse than action movies about paintball (Gotcha!), gymnastics (Gymkata), or skateboarding (Gleaming the Cube). For pity’s sake, the Garbage Pail Kids and Howard the Duck had movies.
And one of the greatest actors in the world wanted to play him. It was too bad. Nintendo wanted Danny DeVito: you couldn’t get a better physical match. And DeVito was in more family friendly movies: kids knew the Penguin from Batman Returns more than Carl Bernstein or Ratso Rizzo.
But Danny DeVito wasn’t interested: he was directing, producing, and acting in Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson as the union leader. Nintendo’s producers signed another comic actor, who like DeVito was trying to move beyond just comedy. They landed him for five million dollars: he was taller and thinner than Mario, and he wasn’t Italian, but he did have dark hair and a family film pedigree. Tom Hanks it was.
Nintendo, in perhaps not the best use of its seasoned technology mindset, didn’t want to pay five million for its lead. It wanted Bob Hoskins, a versatile British actor the approximate size and shape of Mario, who was asking for less. Kids knew him from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Hook. So Nintendo went with Hoskins, and in the first of many dire signs, fired Tom Hanks for not being a bankable movie star. (This could have made his career: would Hanks have won Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump—would he have even been cast—if he was fresh in people’s minds as Mr. Super Mario?)
For Luigi, producers picked a rising star named John Leguizamo, also great with impressions, who passed over a starring sitcom deal for the role. The film used Princess Daisy (of the Game Boy’s Super Mario Land) instead of Princess Toadstool as the heroine, probably because Daisy wasn’t called Toadstool. Daisy was written as Luigi’s love interest, as played by Samantha Mathis. (She and Leguizamo dated during filming.)
King Koopa went to Dennis Hopper, an old hand at playing villains. (And a step up from Mr. Belvedere.) But this King Koopa wasn’t a big evil turtle but, strangely, a human who had evolved from a Tyrannosaurus rex. The whole movie had a devolution theme, with the parallel world Mario and Luigi go into being attacked by biological forces of decay. It’s way more David Cronenberg or David Lynch than Walt Disney.
The directors, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, seemed like a fine choice on paper. The British partners had cut their teeth directing New Wave videos for Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads. They also created Max Headroom, that definitive eighties character, an emblem for the bizarre world we thought computers would make. After capably directing a standard thriller (DOA), they were ready to handle a big budget (forty-eight million dollars, a lot in those days), a large cast, and a lot of action and special effects.
The set for the alternate universe “Dinohattan” was the interior of an old cement warehouse outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. It was big and crowded, with lots of extras dressed up