Careercow Robert Chipman / Bob / Moviebob / "Movieblob" - Middle-Aged Consoomer, CWC with a Thesaurus, Ardent Male Feminist and Superior Futurist, the Twice-Fired, the Mario-Worshipper, publicly dismantled by Hot Dog Girl, now a diabetic

[UglyOldJafar]

Guy is more upset about the announcement that some studio associated with the Minions gets to make a movie then he was about his own father dying.

Let that sink in.

 

[Mola Ram]

Guy is more upset about the announcement that some studio associated with the Minions gets to make a movie then he was about his own father dying.

Let that sink in.

I really want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he's keeping his grief private. I don't know why I want to do that, other than that if I really stop to think that what you're saying is true I will assuredly come over in a totally unbecoming fit of A-logginess.

 

[BubbleButt]

Must have been awkward in the cinema with Bob snorting like an orgasoming pig whenever the film had an action scene and humming the avengers theme whenever dialogue heavy scenes were on.

I suppose the cinema already made seating arrangements since he's a regular, some sort of three seat affair with the armrests sawn off and a big bag of pop corn to stop him making noise at least some of the time.

 

[Gordon Cole]

Bob may be the most triggered and upset he’s ever been in his life.

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Holy crap, he's .

He had to see Justice League, he isn't making a dime off his BvS video, and he learned that the Mario movie's being done by Illumination. Christmas really did come early, people.

Guy is more upset about the announcement that some studio associated with the Minions gets to make a movie then he was about his own father dying.

Let that sink in.

A lot of what Bob says he hated about Justice League can also be applied to Thor: Ragnarok.

• Totally uninvolving on a plot/character level
• Feels like a feature-adaptation of a Six Flags Attraction. All poses and catchphrases, zero soul.
• It feels like they chopped out everything that wasn't an action beat, a "look from the comics!" money-shot, or a joke
• Villain? Barely worth a mention.

You're also forgetting "muh colonialism" that him and his sempais won't shut up about.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

Thank the Germans for Schadenfrude(sic).

 

[Assorted Nuts]

Holy crap, he's crashing into slumber.
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He had to see Justice League, he isn't making a dime off his BvS video, and he learned that the Mario movie's being done by Illumination. Christmas really did come early, people.

Oh no, movies he doesn't like? Truly life is hard for a Blob.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Holy crap, he's crashing into slumber.
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View attachment 313732

He had to see Justice League, he isn't making a dime off his BvS video, and he learned that the Mario movie's being done by Illumination. Christmas really did come early, people.


You're also forgetting "muh colonialism" that him and his sempais won't shut up about.

“I’m not 12...”

*is currently having an existential crisis over a cartoon movie*

Okay.

 

[Fulda's Gap]

I'm willing to bet Illumination made the lowest bid.

It's a movie for kids; so long as they see their favorite plumber they'll be happy.

This isn't the first time a shitty Mario movie was made, either.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Didn’t he write out a plot for what he invisioned a true Mario Bros movie to be? I remember it involved the line “It’s a Boston thing” right before the climax.

 

[Assorted Nuts]

What does Blob think about the live-action Mario movie anyway? Does he worship it the same as other licensed Nintendo crap like Captain or the Super Show.

 

[UglyOldJafar]

What I don't get is, why going insane over Illumination doing that movie?
I know they did the Minions. So? The Despicable Me movies are in my opinion fine in the animation department and the Minion movie was okay.

It was no masterpiece, more like a 90 minute long wacky cartoon with annoying yellow tic tacs, but so what? I know worse animated characters than the Minions and it was a better story than lets say the MLP movie.

And back on track: lets be frank: The Mario franchise has in general as much depth as the average Illumination movie anyway.
I love the Mario games, especially the RPG ones, but I am not pretending they tell the greatest game stories ever told. They do not. Most games lack any story, aside of an excuse plot that forces you to go from A to B. Even Odyseey.
I can see Mario work as a cartoon that may have a seasonal plot in parts, but as a feature length movie? I think even if Walt Disney himself came back from the grave, in his hand the feather which Shakespeare used to write his plays, using it and ink blessed by the Pope himself to draw the movie in classical style, with Don Bluth doing the character designs...

the movie would at best make back its production costs.
Franchise driven movies in the animated sector are dead.

 

[vertexwindi]

>[I ] don't post every emotional shift I experience to social media
You Tweet out when you go to fucking sleep, Bob.

 

[Gordon Cole]

 

[UglyOldJafar]

who takes the shit CinemaSins does even really that serious? 13 year olds who will grow out of it anyway?
Or have shitty internet reviewers give rise to a new wave of autistic obsession on the inter- nevermind, I answered my own question

 

[Butta Face Lopez]

As a Chad, I don't even know what CinemaSins is and I'm too goddamn Chad to Google it

 

[A Random]

What does Blob think about the live-action Mario movie anyway? Does he worship it the same as other licensed Nintendo crap like Captain or the Super Show.

Well, let's hear from the fatman himself!

HITTING THE WALL

Outside the gaming world itself, the cultural import of Mario and friends seemed to be waning. In 1991 a new cartoon based on “Super Mario World” came and went, and even my overly-forgiving eyes knew it was awful. Sonic had two series at the same time, both popular and one (running on Saturday mornings) that’s still remembered as one of the better cartoons of the 90s. Meanwhile, consoles were no longer exclusively driving the penetration of gaming franchises into the popular culture: arcades were in the beginning of what would be their last big hurrah, and mega-popular series like the aforementioned “Mortal Kombat” and “Street Fighter II” were enthralling the popular imagination. Video games had never been more visible outside of their original “niche”… but it was looking as though Mario might be slipping into the background – a bygone hero from a bygone age.

Unless, of course, he could be the one who conquered the one height of mainstream success that no other game hero had successfully surmounted: Hollywood.

In 1993 there was “Super Mario Bros: The Movie,” a live-action mess that barely resembled the games and that I prepared for with a zeal matching that for “The Wizard.” It was terrible - a generic 90s “junkyard scifi” dud in the mold of “Johnny Mnemonic” that failed so spectacularly at the box-office and so profoundly horrified Nintendo and Miyamoto that they are reputed to have turned down every American movie and TV offer since. These are things I know now, of course. When I first read an “official” confirmation of an honest-to-goodness Mario Movie in the pages of “Mario Mania” - an SMW strategy guide from Nintendo Power that included a 32-page character retrospective which I re-read often enough to qualify it as an unofficial precursor to this book – all I could feel was excitement. Finally!

That there would one day be a live-action Mario movie had been a dream and an inevitability as long as I could remember. He-Man had a movie. Superman and Batman both had movies. Hell, Teddy Ruxpin had a live-action movie! Great things got movies, Mario was the greatest thing, so Mario would get a movie, and I’d get to see the Mushroom Kingdom looking as grand and astonishing as I’d always imagined it. So when I read this official announcement from Nintendo Power—surely the only trustworthy source on such matters—I was elated not so much by discovery as by nearness: I was already waiting, and now my wait was almost over.

These were the days before the Internet, and thus there was no way for me to access any further news about The Most Important Movie Of All Time other than “it’s being made” in between first hearing about it and glimpsing the first trailers and stills over a year later. But that was okay. I knew Mario, and I’d grown up in the golden age of fantasy movies, so I knew what this movie of my dreams had to look like: a sprawling, colorful Mushroom Kingdom; Bowser’s Domain, all fire and brimstone; Mario and Luigi in their overalls and caps, charging through forests and tundra fighting live-action versions of the classic enemies; a beautiful flesh-and-blood Princess Toadstool (it would be another few years before Americans knew her real name was “Peach”); Toad… probably some kind of Jim Henson creation, or perhaps a little person in prosthetic makeup?

My mind was alive, at all times, wondering what form the characters, creatures and locations would take when finally rendered in the flesh. I couldn’t wait to see what kind of animatronic effects were going to be employed to create the Troopas – would they be animalistic, stomping around on all fours like in SMB1 and 3? Or upright-walking like in SMW? That second option might be best, I thought at the time. Upright-walking turtles had worked in the “Ninja Turtles” movies, and would be big for fight scenes. What about the power-ups? Obviously, the SMB3 super-suits wouldn’t be in the first movie; but surely they’d need to use Fire Flowers. Would Fire Mario be white and red like SMB1 and “World,” or the orange scheme from SMB3?

If only I knew…

It took over a year to see or hear anything else from it, and every tiny scrap of information that could be gleaned was less promising than the last… and only served to push me to further denial: the Mushroom Kingdom (or was it something else now?) was going to look like a modern city? Bowser/Koopa was just going to look like a human? No Troopas? The Goombas were big guys with tiny heads for some reason? Luigi with no mustache? Granted, these were the days before 2012’s “The Avengers,” where you had no reason to expect an adaptation of something like Super Mario Bros to look anywhere near close to its source… but this was ridiculous.

“No!” I’d tell myself. “It’ll work. It’ll be good. They have to change some things to make them work with real actors. This is the Mario Movie, and the Mario Movie will be great because it deserves to be – why would they make it if they didn’t understand that?” I read everything I could about it, which in those days meant magazine articles that recycled the same handful of publicity stills and self-serving quotes from the filmmakers. I convinced myself, in spite of the natural inclination toward skepticism that infused every other aspect of my life, that this was going to work. That in spite of all the revisions (was it really that different from the Koopalings having different names in the SMB3 cartoon ?) this version of Mario would simply be epic and awesome… just in a different way.

It had to be. It just had to be. That’s what I told myself as a friend and I headed in to watch it opening weekend… somehow managing to not register that neither the celebratory atmosphere that had surrounded “The Wizard” nor the large crowds for the same were decidedly not present. How could I notice anyone or anything else in the world that day? I was going to see the Mario Movie!

I was going to see “Super Mario Bros: The Movie!”

The film more-or-less follows the “lore” as it was generally understood at the time, with the details altered to make it A) filmable on a budget and B) able to ride the coattails of the dinosaur-phenomenon kicked off by “Jurassic Park.” Mario and Luigi are still plumbers from Brooklyn, but the Mushroom Kingdom is replaced by “Dinohattan,” a post-apocalyptic-looking version of NYC inhabited by the humanoid descendants of dinosaurs zapped there by the meteor that supposedly wiped the species out on Earth.

Bob Hoskins, respected British actor best known to Americans for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” was Mario (and does a reasonably decent job of it), while then mostly-unknown (outside of the NY underground comedy circuit) John Leguizamo was Luigi. Samantha Mathis was Princess Daisy (named for the female protagonist of the “Mario Land” titles on the Game Boy), a Brooklyn archaeology student who turns out to be the exiled ruler of Dinohattan, and Dennis Hopper was “President” Koopa, who’s supposed to be an evolved T-Rex but doesn’t look like one until a few seconds at the very end.

It’s a horrible, horrible movie—stage bound, badly-acted, nonsensical, and cheap-looking even for 1993. Years later, it’d come out that the production was so badly managed that the actors threw out their scripts and everything just started getting worked out as they went. Hoskins and Leguizamo would go on to publicly trash the film, which bombed at the box-office, and it felt like Mathis’ career never fully recovered—as of this writing, she most recently featured in the box-office dud “Atlas Shrugged: Part II.”

Naturally, I convinced myself that it was good.

Not only good, but great. I reviewed it, positively, in much greater detail and to much more positivity than it deserved for the school paper. I zeroed-in on the good stuff: they (eventually) wore the right colors! Live-action Yoshi! That dinosaur-humanoid evolution business was kind of interesting... wasn’t it?? There was a Bob-Omb! The ending promised a sequel, but I didn’t wait around: I made my own (animated via D-Paint on my old Amiga), imagining how the plots of SMB2 and SMB3 might be adapted into the movie’s universe.

I needed it to be good, because I needed Mario to be as big and meaningful a movie franchise as he’d been in gaming. Getting a “The Movie” was forever, it meant that the character and the story mattered beyond being some brief fad. Mario was not a Pet Rock, damn it - he was my friend, the thing that was getting me through the misery of pre-adolescence. I needed him to matter so that the time and energy I’d invested into him mattered.

But the film was a flop; a bad movie that died a quick box-office death and heralded a run of awful video-game based movies (“Double Dragon,” “Street Fighter,” etc.) of which the so-so “Mortal Kombat” was the only thing close to successful (financially, anyway). The movies (and movie audiences) had spoken: video games—even Mario—weren’t ready for the big leagues... and eventually even I had to admit it.

It was a harbinger. Things were changing… and not in a good way.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

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Yup, these sure sound like a bunch of sexists, alright.

 

[Mola Ram]

Uh.

Wow.

Any Call of Cthulhu fans here? What's the sanity check for excerpts from Brick by Brick?

 

[Gordon Cole]

Uh.

Wow.

Any Call of Cthulhu fans here? What's the sanity check for excerpts from Brick by Brick?

What's the fastest way to lose? Cause that's what reading Brick by Brick will do to you.

 

[UglyOldJafar]

Uh.

Wow.

Any Call of Cthulhu fans here? What's the sanity check for excerpts from Brick by Brick?

I have read the book and I went not insane, so it can't be that bad.
Now if you excuse me, I am going to sacrifice Will Smith and his family to Shub-Niggurath.

Serious though: The book is insane and that Mario movie part is one HUGE example for it. I get being disappointed in a movie doing a bad adaptation of some property you care about. Like I didn't think highly of Ryan Reynolds after the Green Lantern movie. But I did not feel like bob, who acts as if the actors of the movie stormed his home and raped his mother while shouting "Let's-a-go!"