The day the set of the Super Mario Bros. movie was filled with strippers (real, not animated)

Yeah Super Mario Bros.: The Movie It was one of the most anticipated movie releases of 2023 and, almost effortlessly, it has slipped to the top of the best and most successful video game movies of all time, it’s because the bar was so low. To the animated film Illumination, which translates better than anyone else the unique experience of playing a Super Mario —although that is another topic—, it was enough for him to do it just a little better than its predecessor: the latest film based on the Italian-American plumber, an absolute madness live action with dinosaurs and police repression that we still have nightmares about. And if anyone thought that the good taste in the mouth that, in general, the character’s new movie has left was going to finally erase and completely the traumatic memory of that other Super Mario Bros. (from 1993), he was wrong. The cursed adaptation of the Nintendo hero continues to give unpleasant anecdotes even today: the last one, the one about how one day, without eating or drinking it, the set of the movie of Super Mario Bros. was filled with strippers.

John Leguizamo, the Luigi of 1993: “The movie of Super Mario Bros. that we shot was even darker than what was released“

While Super Mario Bros.: The Moviethe new adaptation of the video game character, gladly approaches the barrier of one billion dollars collected at the worldwide box office, the version live action —Super Mario Bros. plain, without “the movie”, so that we understand each other— It was hit in a loud way on the billboards. And it was not for less: the tape was excessively adult and dark for what one would expect from a story based on the Mario games. However, as recently recounted by John Leguizamo, the actor who played a flesh and blood adolescent Luigi in 1993, what they shot was even darker than what ended up being released in movie theaters.

And that is already saying. The film, which barely relied on the universe created by video games —because plot, what is called plot, they have never had the installments of the plumber for video consoles either—, had Bob Hoskins and Leguizamo as protagonists, playing, respectively, an adult Mario and a prepubescent Luigi. The couple—it was never entirely clear if they were brothers, father and son or uncle and nephew—found themselves transported to a much changed Mushroom World, with a dystopian look to it. Mad Max and ruled by a tyrannical reptilian army. To give you an idea, Denis Hopper gave life to Bowser and his characterization did not go beyond dyeing his hair blonde and making him some curious braids.

Faced with this panorama, it was difficult to find a detail that could make the story of the film Super Mario Bros. of 1993 even murkier than it already was. But Leguizamo has achieved it by revealing an anecdote from the filming that, surely, nobody wanted to know. “At the party scene”, Leguizamo tells in an interview with GQ, all those women were strippers from North Carolina to those who put in the setdressed in costumes and the most provocative garments”. Later, the actor confesses that “at Disney they were not happy [con lo rodado] and they had to cut a lot and fix it with the bad CGI technology that was out there at the time.” I wonder why it could be.

However, John Leguizamo is totally proud of the old Mario movie. In fact, he has publicly spoken out against the new animated adaptation on several occasions, criticizing that they have not included any Latino professional in the cast —as he did with him, of Colombian origin, in 1993. Although he is much more in favor of his version than Illumination’s, the interpreter has stated that he would consider appearing in a sequel to Super Mario Bros.: The Movie if they “start doing the right thing and add more inclusion.”