The original SUPER MARIO BROS. The film’s concept was inspired by RAIN MAN

The original 1993 Super Mario Bros. the movie had an interesting and crazy development and production history. It wasn’t the easiest film to make. Husband and wife filmmaking couple Rocky Morton AND Annabel Jankel he had some experience developing this film, and when it was all done the film was trashed by the critics and their film careers were destroyed.

It didn’t help that they were difficult to work with on set and the movie script was constantly being rewritten, and you can read all about that craziness here. I actually liked the movie they ended up making and the fact that it served as a prequel story that inspired the video game.

It’s funny, the first original film script was written by Rain Man screenwriter Barry Marrowand his story was actually inspired by Rain Man.

Producer Roland Joffe explained that he and his production partner Jake Eberts fought hard to get the rights Super Mario Bros. and when he went to Nintendo to make his proposal to the president of Nintendo Hiroshi Wayauchi, came in with a storyboard and plot. Joffe explained, “I said, ‘This isn’t going to be the story, but it’s going to be a story that has some of these elements in it.’ I was improvising.

Nintendo obviously trusted him with this mid-launch attempt, and they got the rights for $2 million. After getting the rights, Joffe explained, “We needed to find a way in this story to bring the game to life, that gives everything some kind of reality and creates a myth of its own. The game is a strange mixture of Japanese fairy tales and fragments of modern America.

He wondered, “How do we capture this wonderful blend of images, inputs, and quirks?” Then Morrow enters the picture. He brought aspects of his film Rain Man to the two main plumber characters.

The LA Times states: “The first draft established Mario Mario as the older brother, Luigi as the naïve brother. Together, the blue collar team formed a dysfunctional family relationship. Their story would be a prequel related to the adventure that led to the Mario brothers’ “super” video game status.

The only known story details are that it centers around a ring that gets lost in a tube, which “somehow kicks off an existential journey where Mario and Luigi bonded as brothers and eventually become super. Mario is described as the brains while Luigi is ostensibly a savant.

Speaking of that script, Fred Caruso said: “It was more of a serious drama than a funny comedy. We were looking for the same audience that liked it ET as well as ghost Buster as well as Terminator II AND Batman.” They basically want to make sure the movie contains the elements of a blockbuster movie.

After Morrow delivered his draft, the first rewrite came Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure co-author And Solomon. They hoped he would be able to add the comedic elements to the story they were looking for. Not that it did the movie any good, because once the directors got on board the project, they basically threw the script out and were rewriting the movie every day!

It was explained that at least nine writers worked on the script, which “had now become as dense as the nearby Wilmington phone book, rainbow-colored with rewritten pages. The only missing page color is the one from the original draft. There are no blank pages left.

During the early process of developing a script king, however, Joffe was inspired Max height. He explained: “We made some mistakes. We tried different ways that didn’t work, that felt too medieval or somehow just wasn’t the right thing. I felt the project was taking a wrong turn. And that’s when I started thinking about Max height.”

Joffe was a fan of the TV show, so he took a trip to Rome to meet two of the creators of Headroom, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. Joffe recalls their immediate description of what their version of the Super Mario story would have been, saying, “65 million years ago, when the meteor struck Earth where Brooklyn is today, it drove a small group of dinosaurs into a sub -size, and evolved into something similar to us: humans are descended from reptiles.

That’s pretty much what they ended up running with! The film follows Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi as they “get the shock of their lives when they discover a parallel world populated by the intelligent descendants of dinosaurs. It seems that they weren’t destroyed by a meteor millions of years ago but hurled into another dimension and, now, they plan to rule our world. It’s up to our unlikely heroes to fight the evil King Koopa and his Goomba guards, free the beautiful Princess Daisy and save mankind in this unforgettable adventure.

I’d be curious to know what the initial one is like Rain Man version of the script has been revealed, but the script is said to be lost.