Critics correctly identified the movie as "dumb," but thought it would still be a hit because kids must like dumb stuff, right? Except that the bleak set design, posters, and everything else seemed to be explicitly trying to distance the movie from the source material. In a hilarious disconnect between children who liked Mario and adults talking about Mario, NYT critic Michael Specter wrote:
"The city, a future-shock melding of Times Square and downtown, is called Dinohattan. And the despot, the evil King Koopa, has to find a way to merge the rest of New York -- which was sheared off from Dinohattan in a meteor blast 65 million years earlier -- with his desiccated, reptilian empire.
Does any of this sound familiar?
If so, you are probably a 12-year-old boy, or one of the many Super Mario maniacs who sometimes act like 12-year-olds boys."
For the record, no, that doesn't sound familiar. Except for "King Koopa," none of that sounded like anything anyone had ever associated with "Mario." Honestly I think I would have liked Mario Bros. the movie a lot more if it were just a dumb, silly little movie about heroic plumbers, instead of some sort of bleak sci-fi prequel.
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