The Besties - The original Mario movie is totally bonkers [Resties]

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

The Super Mario Bros. Movie hits theaters next month, but before you see Chris Pratt's rendition of the plumber, why not revisit the original Mario movie? Yes, it's time to watch the all-but-lost 1993 cult classic, starring Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario, and Dennis Hopper as Bowser. Considering the difficulty of finding a copy of Nintendo's wild first foray into film, our recap and breakdown may be the closest you come to a trip to Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel's Blade Runner-inspired version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Russ Frustig. Welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. I apologize if I sound unusual. I have a throat infection. This week, we're talking about a movie. Not a video game. A movie based on a video game.

We're talking about the Super Mario Brothers movie from 1993. Not to be confused with the new one. This is a live-action movie starring none other than Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo. I am so excited that we are doing this. But before we do it, there was a little detail in this movie that I'm not sure that you picked up. No. And I was curious if maybe if you felt like you were able to enjoy it on a level that

I couldn't. And that is, this is a movie about New Yorkers. It is a movie about Brooklyn. And I'm curious, were there like maybe words that they said them, but I couldn't hear them, you know, like how a dog can hear sounds that I can't hear. Well, I will say this this and we'll talk about it as we talk about the movie proper but the perhaps the most authentic moment of the movie from a new

yorker perspective is there's some women that get kidnapped and taken to koopa koopa's kingdom and mario goes to save them and one of the girls has very clearly a Queens accent, which I think most people outside of New York maybe can't identify the difference between Queens and Brooklyn. And I'm like, that's not a Brooklyn accent. That's a Queens accent. But then one of the other characters is like, oh, don't worry about her. She's from Queens. And I was like, oh, snap. They did it right.

Good for them. Can I tell you something? What? So I watched this movie with Steph, my wife, who surprisingly really enjoyed it. The movie ends. Five seconds pass. She looks at me and she goes, I think Fresh is going to talk about that Queens line. No way.

I am not joking. You can text her. I love it. I love it it i do live in queens so i have a lot of queens yeah you well and and and you know what they're very nice because uh like where are you from they're like oh we're from brooklyn except for her she's from queens that's okay yeah yeah they're like they're accepting of it, you know? Yeah. How about we take a break and we can actually dive into this movie? It's very lucky she wasn't from Staten Island, because that would have gone another way. That would have been embarrassing. She's from Manhasset.

See you on the other side. So, the Super Mario Brothers movie. Yeah, why did this happen, by the way? Because, Chris Plant, you messaged me a couple weeks ago, and you were like, what do I have to do to get you to do an episode about the Mario Brothers movie from 1993? And, like, granted, there is a new Mario movie coming out, but it's still, what, a month away? So we're early on it. So what was the impetus?

There's a lot of Mario happening, right? Yes. The theme park just opened. And Universal Studios Hollywood. The movie is on the way. The press cycle for the movie is already in full force, right? Yeah. So we want to get out ahead of time.

The other reality is this movie will now just fully disappear. There can be only one. Yeah. Which I kind of say is a joke, but also I don't know if you've tried to Google it. If Nintendo agreed to do this new Super Mario Bros. movie just to erase the SEO of the old Super Mario Bros. movie, I would believe it. And I would say that they've achieved it. Yeah. It is a hard object to find yeah this

movie um it effectively is not released anywhere anytime and probably will not be ever again if if you know nintendo can have their way and that is because it is a deeply strange film it is and you can find clips online on YouTube and various other places. But the actual, like, watch the movie from beginning to end, you really have to go to the darkest corners of the internet to find it. Or like Australia and buying a Blu-ray from there. That's what I meant. Yeah. Australia is the darkest corners of the internet from my perspective.

But I wanted to talk about it because if if this is our eulogy right if this is our final farewell to this movie before it gets lost to the sands of time um i thought it deserved a loving eulogy from people who care about it well i thought it deserved an honest eulogy i don't know about a loving i mean going into it i didn't know about a loving eulogy because i honestly hadn't seen it it's been probably 25 years since i saw it and the last time i saw it was probably a random saturday on hbo and i like flipped it but like i had like fleeting memories of it but i had not sat through it start to finish until this moment as as oldies i think it's on us to kind of set the table the the stakes the

setting for when this movie came out because if for our younger listeners you know you see uh people talking about last of us being out and they're like hey they can make good uh video game movies but but i don't know if everybody fully comprehends what bad video game movies were. Like, just what that was. Well, not only bad. I mean, this was literally the first one. The first one, yes. This is before the Tomb Raider movie, before fucking Uncharted with Spider-Man in it.

Right, but people think those are bad. Those are just generic crappy movies. Right. This, like, set a new, I don't even know it's set a rubric for like okay we're gonna make a video game movie it's gonna be this it's gonna be chaos and it is the deep the weirdest fucking shit i've ever witnessed on film and the like uh i have so much to say about this movie i'm very excited yes talking about okay so yeah you want it you want to dive in you want to start with a little let's do it and i'm gonna just we're gonna start in the

best place to start which is basically the very first scene of the movie and i'm not even i'm not even talking there's like an introduction to the movie that they clearly tacked on in post-production where they felt like it needed more explanation and more setup so there's like a really bad new york accent guy saying like hey back then there was the dinosaurs and they got killed by a comet and then but it turns out the dinosaurs were still alive and then the actual movie starts i'm gonna ignore that intro part because it's just very clearly tacked on and talk about the very first scene of the movie which which blew my fucking mind out of my ears. You know what?

It didn't stop after that. The very first day of the movie features a woman dressed in like a fantasy robe running through the rainy streets of New York city at night, clutching what appears to be like a futuristic bassinet. It's like, you know, in her arms and she runs up to the doorway of a church and, you know, in her arms. And she runs up to the doorway of a church. And, you know, very traditional scene.

The woman leaves the bassinet in front of the church and runs away. And then for some reason climbs down into the sewers and runs off into the fog in the sewers. And then we cut back to the bassinet. back to the bassinet the classic image of the nuns opening the door taking the bassinet inside slowly opening it up and revealing an enormous like ostrich sized egg like a yoshi egg like a yoshi egg but without the circles on it it's just like a of like a plain colored egg and then pause and now you're thinking surely there's a y thinking, surely there's a Yoshi inside. Surely there's a Yoshi. And this is the origin story of a Yoshi.

Great origin story for Yoshi. Okay, okay. Turns out, there's actually a human baby inside of that egg, and the nuns react with terror, and there's a dramatic shot of stained glass and Jesus looking on as this human baby is born from within what must be a demonic egg. Yes. And then the movie starts. And that is, well, it's Daisy. Yeah, that's Daisy. Because, well, again, this is so 1993.

Yeah. This is Super Mario 2, Super Mario 3, Super Mario World. That window of the Mario universe. It's really like Mario has pretty much made a shitload of money and is about to make a shitload more because they're on the verge of releasing the third game. But just say there is no story for Mario. I mean, not that there's a- Yeah, it's bullshit. No, no, no. Not that there's a lot of story now. There's not a mean not that there's bullshit well no no no not that there's

a lot of story now a lot but there's there's way more now like we know yeah we you know nintendo knows the difference between daisy and peach and paulina or whoever right yeah and and they know the difference between king bowser and king koopa like There's not just this weird kind of mishmash of like, I don't know. You're taking issue with the fact that this is Daisy. I'm not taking issue. I'm just saying the character is called Daisy, but kind of represents an amalgam of Daisy, Princess Peach, that sort of character. Right. And to be clear, Daisy first appeared in the Game Boy Mario game, right? Princess Daisy was in Super Mario Land.

Sure. She's in the green dress, I believe, whereas Peach is in the pink dress. Yellow. So she is in the, it's not like they pulled the name out of thin air. Like, she does exist. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I'm not, again, I'm not blaming them. I'm just, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying these people had so little to work with. Like, they didn't have a ton to work with. They didn't have a ton to work with, and even Nintendo, this isn't like, you know, now we're like, oh, we have a, you know, a clear character Bible and we know everything that we want from this thing. I think, like, there was still confusion on what these things were.

Okay, how much do you want to go into the actual production of this movie? Oh, we have to. We have to go so far into it. And I think to start it off, you need to know this from the jump. Plant sent me a really terrific Australian-made documentary on the making of this movie. Australian made documentary on the making of this movie. And within that documentary, one of the producers basically talks about the process of getting the rights to make this movie from Nintendo. You know, you picture an image of an IP these days, and how protective companies are, especially video game companies are of IP, what they allow and don't allow why it needs to

be true to the franchise versus not. And so you have that in your head but back then because there was no standard for it the way it's presented is that the producer basically went to the president of nintendo back in 1992 whatever it was and was like i want to make a video i want to make a movie based on your popular video game, Super Mario Brothers. And the president was like, yeah, but we could go with all these other big name studios. You're a pretty small studio in comparison. And the guy was like, yeah, but I'm here and they're not. And the president of Nintendo was like, oh, okay. No, that's a good point. He was like convinced. It was like a pride move. And he was convinced. And from there on out, once Nintendo agreed, they were like, we don't really care what you do.

We're making video games. You guys do whatever you want. And man, is that so fucking clear in this entire movie? I think they also assumed you'll make a Hollywood movie. I mean, it is a Hollywood movie. I mean, it was made by people who have money in Hollywood. That is by definition true. And from like a budget standpoint, it's a Hollywood movie.

Like it's big. Yes, but like, okay, so if I were Nintendo and I was like, you can go and do this, I'd be like, I wonder who they're going to get to direct it. I don't know. Probably some, like, animation or kids director, right? And the producers instead are like, what if we got the people who invented Max Headroom? Right. And that to me is the whole reason this movie is as deeply as weird as it is. Because from there, it all branches out right and 100 and if

they had not made that decision early on and they had said like hey we're gonna make a kid's movie um it would be a totally different film but the problem is so for people who don't know max had room max had room is quote big thing like i'm i'm moving my fingies around when I say quote here. The first CGI character, holy CGI character, like personality, like a VTuber today. Yes. And he would introduce music videos as one of his many duties. But the reality is it was actually just an actor wearing a prosthetics uh with really awful lighting and a green screen behind him uh so it was entirely fabricated but it was deeply deeply weird i mean like now it would feel like pop art or like avant-garde art

not like uh something that would be on tv yeah and they saw that like if you found like a really bizarre tiktok channel that like had 16 views on it yes and then you decided they should make the mario movie yes that yes that is what it feels like and and they are like this rules like we are gonna make you know we're gonna use all of this trippy psychedelic imagery of this game and use it as a jumping off point to make like some truly bizarre fantasy um about two you know about a dino that 65 million years ago the human uh path of evolution and the lizard path of evolution split and those two realities can get merged together into one evil universe run by King Koopa. Yes.

Wild. Wild. Super fucking wild. And the script gets written as that. The script gets written by this pair of writers who I believe are British writers who would go on to write Across the Universe, that Trippie Beals movie. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

It gets written. Everybody signs on to the movie for this script. And then behind the director's back, behind the back of, like, everyone involved in this, the producers get cold feet and are like, yeah, we can't make this. This is, what are we doing? This is like an adult avant-garde experimental film using the mario ip um no we can't do that and they get new writers to basically rewrite the whole script and everyone shows up to set and i think it's like carolina or wherever and that is when the directors the actors everyone figure out what movie they're actually expected to

bake. Yeah. That it's bonkers. I mean, the sets are built. These massive sets have been constructed. Five stories of a steelworks is where they built the entire like Dino Topple, Dino York is what it's called. They like couldn't, they didn't have anything big enough, like in studio space.

So they found abandoned steelworks and just built it in that. It's it's nuts. And as a result, what you end up having with this movie and part of what I love about it is a it's like they filmed a children's movie on the set of Blade Runner. Yes. filmed a children's movie on the set of blade runner yes like like it has that aesthetic that like weird quasi noir futuristic aesthetic you know why it has that aesthetic no because it's the same designer it's the designer of peewee's big top adventure or whatever in in blade runner and was who originally was uh wanted the job and the studio was like no way you made peewee in blade runner that's not a match for this and then uh whoever they hired bailed out and they called them back and was like yeah whatever just do it and and boy did he do just that okay so

suffice it to say there this whole production is like kind of a cluster of all these different ideas and people and scripts and nintendo doesn't give a fuck so do whatever you want and in my memory i remember it being deeply weird but i didn't remember being as entertained as i was while watching this film as I am today. And because of that, I think it deserves a real renaissance. I mean, I agree. It's a shame that we're eulogizing it and it will never be seen after this podcast is recorded. Don't you think like if TikTok was made aware of this, don't you think it would run rampant?

I mean, especially right now, would hope you know like it it just feels it feels like it crosses so many fandoms like i think the john leguizamo of it is like all just profoundly charming he's like peak peak leguizamo in this bob hoshins is just like become kind of like a bit of like a criterion channel kind of character like letterboxd people are obsessed with with old sweet bob i mean certainly people know him from who who framed roger rabbit he's probably his biggest movie dennis dennis hopper is basically doing his best blue velvet in this movie trying to like method act king koopa everybody is going for it and in knowing how disastrous it was behind the scenes it does give me a lot of respect for everyone involved that like the the amount of commitment here feels infinitely higher than anything you see

in an mcu movie over like the past, I don't know, five years. Everyone does lean into it and I think that's the only reason it works is because everyone is like game, which is shocking because like, you know, we talked about production issues. Like Bob Hoskins broke his hand very early in the movie. For most of the movie

he has a cast designed to look like a hand and they like painted it his skin color just to convince you that he didn't have a broken hand for most of the movie okay should we give a little bit of like a basic plot outline here because okay but we need to it could go on for 15 minutes so how do we like sprint through the plot i'm gonna try to do it okay i believe in you. Okay. So we talked about Daisy.

She catches from an egg 20 years ago by, uh, an evil, uh, uh, real estate developer is digging a hole somewhere in New York and they find, I guess a meteorite. And we also hear in the background that a bunch of girls are getting stolen,

uh, and disappearing, whatever it is. Meanwhile, two plumbers, Mario and Luigi, who are brothers. can you say no can you say their full names sure mario mario and luigi mario are brothers uh despite a 30 year age difference and um they kind of run into daisy who is now grown up and is a paleontologist who's studying the meteorite that's down there and they find their ways down there eventually and get sucked into a portal and end up in dino york which is an

alternate dimension wherein as plant alluded to dinosaurs essentially evolved in parallel with the humans on the in our dimension the dinosaurs unfortunately are like effectively underground they have very limited resources they're miserable and they're ruled by king in our dimension. The dinosaurs, unfortunately, are effectively underground. They have very limited resources. They're miserable, and they're ruled by King Koopa, as played by Dennis Hopper, with an iron fist.

It's like a fascist regime. And King Koopa goes around de-evolving people and turning them into Goombas, which, if you think they look anything like the Goombas from the video game, you'd be very wrong. They actually look like stormtrotroopers with tiny tiny heads and uh with like kind of nazi imagery tied to them yeah like part shrunken head from beetle juice right part nazi right meanwhile uh

mary and luigi are in this uh weird space and they're trying to recover this missing piece of the meteorite that daisy was keeping around her neck because it has the power to like cause the two worlds to merge and then dino york and our new york will fuse together and all hell will break loose so they're trying to stop king cooper from doing that and uh there's this issue with de-evolving where like king koopa is trying to like use these beams to de-evolve humans into apes i guess uh well he wants to merge the two realities and take over right he wants to take over he wants to be the ruler of everything and we have all the best resources stuff like that uh so there's like a lot of conflict also there's a lot of mushrooms around or specifically fungus around because king koopa de-evolved the previous king and turned him into a mushroom for some reason.

I don't know why he evolved from mushrooms, but he turned them into a mushroom. And that mushroom sentient king, who's just like fungus all around, keeps trying to help the Mario Brothers in their goal of stopping King koopa by giving them like ba-bombs and various other things throughout the world um they they team up with uh a goomba who was formerly toad who got turned into a goomba but still remembers the ability to play harmonica and um any other beats I'm missing? I mean, that's basically... Okay, but the end, they eventually fuse the two worlds very briefly.

King Koopa ends up in the human world. He uses his evolution ray on the evil real estate developer from the beginning, turns him into a monkey. Everyone's like, oh no, you're a monkey now, boss. And then Luigi, using his plumber powers manages to take the piece out of the meteorite unfusing the worlds and um everything is saved i think that's basically it yeah i mean that's it

you did leave the part out where um Koopa destroys the Twin Towers. Well, I think I feel like the implication was that they were destroyed in Dino York. So the Twin Towers are visible. Obviously, it's not 93. They're visible both in Dino York and in New York. In Dino York, they've got a big hole in them, which is creepy. And when the worlds merge, Dino York's Twin Towers sort of like come over, but then they come back, so it's fine.

Do you have a favorite scene from the movie? Do I have a favorite scene? I mean, you did describe one I love already, which is anything involving the abducted women from Brooklyn is great. And Bob Hoskins, you know, hanging out with them is a delight. But I would have to say my very favorite scene is when John Leguizamo meets his girlfriend's dad. Which, Daisy here, her dad is the previous king, right? The fungus king.

Who has been so fully devolved that now he is just a fungus that is spread across the entire city. And a bulb of fungus hangs over his throne. I believe in the documentary, someone describes it as a testicle. I think John Leguizamo describes it as a testicle. I think John Leguizamo describes it as a testicle. Yes. And when John Leguizamo meets this giant fungi testicle, his reaction is like, oh, nice to meet you. Yes.

He just replays it so straight. Well, he plays it like, oh, I really like your daughter. I hope we can get along kind of thing. Yeah. It really made me sad in a way. This movie bombed as hard as it did because if it had been in a different dino world and it had been a huge success, how many likable john leguizamo of vehicles would we have gotten you know i'm sad there are a couple there's some you know like a lot of his big roles were like supporting roles and yeah you know the big hit romeo and juliet really freak is the like

big one right yeah the pest the pest i'm sorry. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I wanted to specifically call out another John Leguizamo scene that I thought was pretty great. There's a scene wherein Mary and Luigi are hiding in an elevator. They need to take an elevator up. And suddenly they're surrounded by Goombas, who I guess don't see them because they're in the back of the elevator. And they're like, how do we get out of this? And Luigi hears the M the music playing in the

elevator which of course there is even in dino york there's music and realizes that if he sways the goombas side to side to the time to the timing of the music they might start dancing and then they do and that's how they get out of the situation is he just like fools the Goombas into dancing. Not only that, that comes back later where there's like an a PA announcement saying like, oh, King Koopa, the Goombas are dancing again. So fucking great. That that that that callback happens like right before king koopa gets like blasted in the face by a flying boot yes well oh you should mention we should mention the boots okay so you would think in a movie that's based on a franchise like this there would be direct visual representation of that franchise and there are a couple mario and and Luigi do wear red and green overalls, but not exactly like they're on the game, but pretty close.

And there are two objects in the movie. We'll test your knowledge. Which two objects in the movie are exactly as they appear in the video game? The bomb. Yeah, that's one of them, correct. And the

bullet bill bullet bill is also there yeah and both both of them play pretty major uh parts in the movie but bomb specifically like is like the most terrifying explosive known to mankind like everyone's terrified whenever anyone gets a bomb and the bullet bill ties into the boots that chris plant mentioned because apparently in this recreation of mario brothers the only way to jump as high as the mario brothers doing the video game is if you get like super cybernetic like moon boots moon boots that are powered by explosives in the form of bullet bills that you slot into them.

And then sometimes they, like, use the boots as projectile weapons. Fucking bizarre. But it's amazing to me that, like, they have so many opportunities to make direct visual connections to, like, for example, Toad. There's a character in the movie named Toad. He has a shaved—he's like a human. He's not like Toad appears. He does have a shaved head. They could have easily shaved his head in a pattern that matches Toad's head in Super Mario Bros. 2,

which was already out by the time this movie came out. No, they went with a random ass spiral for no reason. You know what it feels like? It feels like this movie, like somebody had a minute, they were running out the restaurant, and like, hey, I need you to make a Mario movie. And you're like, oh, shit, can you write down what you know about Mario? And they had one minute in a napkin and a little pen, and they just wrote down key words. They're like, you know, like lots of mushrooms and super jump powers. Yeah.

And then the fire alarm went off in the restaurant and the sprinklers came on so all the notes were all blurred yeah i mean it's wild how much stuff in this movie are like yeah i guess if you had never seen a single image of mario and somebody described it to you i can see how you could get this it's yeah if you fed a Wikipedia entry through like six layers of Google Translate, you might get something like this. Yeah, and I mean, I like that. I think that's what I like about this movie. I feel bad for people involved who made it because I think it would be really hard to,

I just think it sounds like a miserable experience to have had an entire script that you thought you were making and it's already i'm sure a little scary being like the first people to turn a video game into a movie i'm sure that you were a bit of a punch line in hollywood for that alone even before you know day one of shoots um and and i'm sorry for like every part involved. Like I get why the producers got cold feet and decided, hey, we need to tweak this. But also it was too late. And I get why the Max Headroom directors saw this as an opportunity to do something really interesting and weird. Because like why not? There's no story.

It was based off of the Mario games. Like there's nothing for them to work with, and there's no precedent. But the real case of everybody was on totally different pages. I liked on that documentary that the final co-writers were like, yeah, we played Super Mario Bros. 2. So, like, cool. Even they were playing the wrong Mario. Like, they were playing the wrong mario like they were playing the one that is the weirdest of the mario games so it kind of makes sense actually yeah i mean it's

definitely the yeah the the most upsetting um yeah uh did you know that danny devito was supposed to play mario well i did because the documentary pretty amazing yeah that that was a real shocker yeah i here's what i'm gonna say it is unquestionably a mess of a movie but i've seen a lot of messes of movies over the years and the fact of the matter is i'd rather a mess of a movie that is not boring and this movie is not boring than a boring you know kind of well made movie and yeah at no point was i bored while watching this i was like completely like how why where why who gave them this much money outrageous it is if you can if you have a way to watch this movie again please do yourself a favor

because even though it won't necessarily scratch the itch of wow i love mario and i want to see him in various things it's just like a weird fucking movie that's like commits fully also it brought love together oh yeah yeah the lance henriksen part oh yeah yeah the the king i think the title is actually king bowser which is even more confusing. But the good king is played by none other than Lance Henriksen, famous for playing Bishop in Aliens. Yeah, he gets re-evolved back into his normal form. His human form. He comes back to life. He had the great idea of filling his fist up with Rice Krispies, and then he coughs them out when he comes back into reality,

as if he just had a whole bunch of fungus rotting in his throat. Very clever thing. But on the documentary, he's like, yeah, you know, I was only on set for a little bit of time, but it was really nice. I had to wake up from a millionaire sleep and I opened my eyes and I saw this makeup artist with the best legs I've ever seen on a woman. And I was like, whoa, where is this going? And he's like, yeah, I married her a year later and they're still married. Love it. Great. So nice. Happy for you, Lance. It wasn't what I

expected to get in this this documentary but you know he found love in a hopeless place good for them one more closing homage to richard edson whose mother was my second grade math teacher oh really yeah did you like that the the documentary ends with him uh comparing him an action figure of him to other great jewish action figures yeah it was very fun what a delight what a joy um uh i also love that uh bob hoskinson died the day before they recorded the interview with him with edson who plays one of the the goons um and edson just like could not stop kind of just chuckling about how funny it was that he was having to talk about this movie that bob hoxton's like openly hated cool should we

take a quick break and we can answer some questions on the other side let's do it okay welcome back to the rest use where we talk about movies and stuff um i i have a handful of questions uh some from uh the previous best you know you know you don't need the context here here's what i'm gonna say this one's from viking i know i'm probably late for this episode but on the subject of nintendo i've been thinking a lot uh about nintendo's plans for the year after Tears of the Kingdom. If they're launching a new console next year, what are the big launch titles?

Prime 4 and the next Mario? Would love to hear your thoughts. Did this person say they're launching a new console next year? If they're launching. Oh, if they're launching. Okay. Okay, so yeah, I mean, it was mentioned, but i think if they launch a new console next year which i guess is decently likely i know we have a bet about it if i remember correctly their

logic on twitter was like hey we're mostly getting like dlc and expansions for the rest of the year so it feels like nintendo would be sitting on stuff. But that's kind of Nintendo's thing. Often we don't know about what we're getting until a couple months before. Yeah, I wouldn't make assumptions necessarily. I think if a new console launches, my thinking is there's two launch games for it.

One of them is Metroid Prime 4, and one of them is whatever the Mario platformer is that is the follow-up to Odyssey that seems like guaranteed gangbusters success on their part and a very very very strong way to launch a new console I would not have

agreed with you on Metroid Prime 4 except the fact that they're not planning to make or at least the rumor is they're not planning to make remasters of Prime 2 and 3 which makes me think oh okay this prime one remaster was basically marketing a year ahead of yeah of getting people ready and remembering hey why they love these things um so that makes me think you're probably right i think the guess of the next Mario coming out is like 110%. It's got to be, right?

Yeah. We had a bet about that, what was it, last year about Mario platformers, and we're already overdue. Yeah, and I think like a new 3D Mario platformer, right? Yeah. Which, to be clear, I don't think is a guarantee with new Nintendo hardware. No, I don't think so. Not at all. It didn't launch.

The Switch didn't launch with Mario Odyssey. It came out the same year. It was in launch window, but it wasn't launched. Yes, but even that doesn't happen with every new Nintendo hardware. That's true. GameCube didn't have one. You don't always get one of these, yeah. Unless you count Luigi's Mansion,

which I don't. No. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I would throw. Oh, wait. When did Sunshine come out?

No, that was after GameCube's launch. Yeah. I could see something... I could see something like a Kid Icarus remake being thrown in there. Yeah, people have talked about a revival of that 3DS

Kid Icarus game, which I don't really care for. Yeah. I think there'll be something weird like that. Some sort of mostly dormant Nintendo brand that is in there for the fans

and what what do we think uh do we think mario kart 9 no right not after all i i feel like that's like they're just never they're just gonna keep throwing dlc on this thing forever now they sell so many copies of the fucking game the last one one. Yeah. I mean, I do not get the business logic of what they're doing with 8 going into 9. Because it really feels like they have an install base of hundreds of millions. Like it's sold so many copies that they're just making more money off those people. So I think it makes total sense. I have a quick question for you do you think the follow-up to the switch whatever it is will be pretty much the same as the switch or do you think it will do some like weird ass nintendo shit i'll give you

the the comparison is it going to be the jump from like Game Boy color to Game Boy advance? Or is it going to be the jump from like the GameCube to the Wii? I think, I think Game Boy to Game Boy advance. I think so. I think not. I think they have gotten themselves on a little bit of a pickle that they, as a company,

haven't liked being in the past though. I think they like being innovators and toy makers and you know blue ocean philosophy and all that stuff and i think the problem that they're in now and kind of no fault of their own is like in the age of digital media where most of the time you are buying your stuff digitally like you do not own a hard copy of it you cannot just play it indefinitely forever means that they have to whatever they create next should have to play whatever is available right now right like backwards compatibility is just becoming increasingly a thing sure what scares me is we don't have any reason to believe that nintendo will actually do that yeah nintendo

has always loved the idea of you buying the same game yet again on a different platform and that is like very worrying for me as somebody who has bought most of my games for the switch digitally and now that we're getting to the end of the cycle i'm starting to get a little anxious that like oh is this it like did i did i make a big mistake am i not gonna have access to these games in like five to ten years i mean you will if you keep that sd card yeah i mean yeah nothing precarious about that at all yeah right um uh yeah i don't know what what do. What do you think it'll look like? I think it'll be, uh, not a revolution, but just a cleaner version of the Switch. Yeah, I mean...

And I think it will have back compatibility. I just cannot fathom. And also, for what it's worth, I know people give them a lot of shit about it, but, like, consider that the DS could run GBA games, the 3DS could run gba games the 3ds could run ds games like physical like they in the physical media era they they were okay about backwards compatibility at least one generation back um so yeah i don't know they just built such a huge digital marketplace that they didn't have ever before on any other platform that was this

successful and so i i just think they need to keep doing that yeah yeah i think that's right um a very important question from uh zoe i actually do have an egg steam question instead of letting the water run on the cooking side of the pan has rust tried flipping the pan upside down that way you still get the satisfaction of seeing steam but you don't have to worry about ruining the non-stick coating okay so i'll have an update for here okay i do not use non-stick pans anymore oh yeah i haven't basically since the egg steam situation happened uh and i started reading more about like pfas and various other horrible disease causing uh chemicals that are in non-stick cookware i just stopped using them and now i just use cast iron or not cast iron, whatever the stainless steel is all I use for everything.

Interesting. You know, what about ceramic? I don't, I mean, I don't use ceramic. It seems like kind of a pain in the ass, but. There it is. I gotta, I gotta get you switched. I'm gonna take care of it. Oh boy.

It's gonna make your life so much easier. But yeah, no, I don't know if that changes anything. It's a good idea though. I like that idea. I know there were some concerns about warping, which I assume stainless steel would also have that problem. Obviously, stainless steel harder to not have the egg stick, but I've gotten pretty good at it. What is it, like butter, olive oil? I use olive oil, and you just have to make sure the pan is hot enough.

That's it. Really? You want it to be more hot? Yeah, more hot yeah more hot because then the the stainless steel molecules get bigger so that the cracks in the pan become smaller cracks and the cracks are how the egg sticks that like little molecules of egg get in the cracks and they live in there and then they're stuck to the pan but if the molecule if the cracks are smaller they can't get in there can't get in those carasses wow you really did your research i really did i genuinely did my research you got

really freaked out about that pfas i did that's understandable um uh well i think that's it we have um some other stuff that like other recommendations we do should i do mine yeah i want to i want to hear you talk about this okay so uh it's going to be one more movie i know we already talked about a movie but it's actually relevant the movie i'm going to talk about is called streets of fire streets of fire came out in 1984 it is a the subtitle is describes it as a quote rock and roll fable and it is directed by walter hill who very well known famous uh both director and producer of many many movies um the closest comparison i would say this is the warriors but imagine the warriors if it was a musical and and the super mario brothers movie yeah and it imagined the warriors if it imagined a world where the 1980s and the 1950s merged from

a fashion and culture standpoint such that all chaos reigns. And you have a movie that is like this like fog infused, like neon lights, like rainy streets, guys like greasers on motorcycles stealing women into the night. stealing women into the night that would later inspire many video games, including Streets of Rage and like Bad Dudes and Double Drag and stuff like that. A lot of those games were inspired by this movie that totally flopped in the U.S. but made it to Japan and was like kind of a hit in Japan. So it ended up being a big inspiration. The movie is a pretty much. I didn't know that. Yeah.

being a big inspiration. The movie is a pretty much. I didn't know that. Yeah. The movie is pretty much a disaster. Start to finish from like a structural narrative standpoint, but because of the visuals being so fucking bonkers. And I, again,

the Mario movie is like a perfect example. They are very similar in terms of how much they go for it in terms of visuals. It kind of makes up for it. also helps the movie is like exactly 90 minutes long so it's not too much of a a slog but like as a like well edited well storied piece of media it is certainly not that it is barely comprehensible and that's okay because it is just like kind of this bizarre romp the um main bad guy is willem dafoe a young ish willem dafoe uh wearing at one time he wears a all leather set of overalls but is wearing no shirt on yes and that's his look for the scene and he just plays it completely straight

as he like walks through the gang's hideout he looks like one minute he looks like the fonds the next minute he looks like david bowie yeah he really david bowie's interpretation of the fonds yeah there's a scene where um the lead character who's played by a gentleman named michael perry who you probably don't even recognize. He didn't, I think. He is the weakest part of the film. He is certainly the weakest part of the movie, but there's a scene where he is in a diner, and some street

toughs make their way into the diner, and he decides he has to take care of business, and so he stands up from his chair, and he's wearing a duster, and beneath the duster is a denim shirt he removes the duster to reveal he is wearing suspenders the denim shirt but the denim shirt has no arms no sleeves on it they've been cut off and he proceeds to kick a shitload of ass

within that diner that's that sort of scene happens quite a number of times. Yeah. Including a very bizarre scene with Ed Begley Jr. who like mugs the main characters at one point and then never shows up again. Rick Moranis is great. Rick Moranis does a very good job playing like kind of an assholey Rick Moranis, which is a real departure for him. But he does a very good job.

Bill Paxton briefly does the bill paxton thing yeah bill paxton plays like a bartender that keeps showing up at random times it is it's a really weird movie i think the mary brothers movie is a much better movie from a watchability standpoint because this movie has like a lot of slow bits to it like anytime there's not like a fight or explosions anytime it's just talking it's pretty fucking weak but uh this is just like an alternate universe where this movie was a huge success it was

originally planned as a three movie series because the movie tanked so poorly at the beginning it just died right on the vine but yeah yeah it's pretty unbelievable that it exists chris plant recommended this movie so props to you chris plant thank you i i i absolutely adore this movie i personally think it's extremely watchable i agree i agree it's slow but it is um

i have like my like it's a after midnight movie yeah you where it's like, if you watch it at the right time and then the right frame of mind, it's actually perfect. It's kind of fine. If you fall asleep for 10 minutes and then wake up, like you really haven't missed anything realistically. Yeah. Because it will, when,

when you need to wake up, it's going to wake you up. Yeah. It's going to be super loud. There's going to be a concert. Diane Lane is going to be like singing her heart out. God, great music, great soundtrack. I mean, going to be like singing her heart out. God. Great music.

Great soundtrack. I mean, it should be because it's a rock and roll fable, but it's a great soundtrack. And if you're looking at it, you can actually stream it now, which used to be a bit more difficult. And there's a like 4K Blu-ray coming out, I think, this month. And I, hey, I recommend it. I'm just going to say if you're going to watch a movie that's all about the visuals, why not? Go for it.

I think Mario movie first. That is never coming out on 4K. Miyamoto himself will ensure that that won't happen. Very quickly from me, my recommendation is To Sleep With Anger. It is a 1990 dramedy comedy. It's by Charles Burnett. And it stars Danny Glover in this absolutely terrifying role. He is this kind of like drifter friend of a family who comes to town and basically stays with these old friends from the South who are now living in Los Angeles. And he is like the devil incarnate.

You know just somebody who just has such bad vibes, but you can't quite pin him down? Danny Glover does? Danny Glover in this movie. Wow. Yeah. And he plays so hard against type. wow yeah and and he like plays so nice so hard against type and and the casting is brilliant because in with anybody else you'd be like why are they letting this person stay in their house like this person is so evil he is ruining everything for everyone and i i i don't i

like don't want to spoil any of it. I just want to say that it is un-fucking-believably good. It is so good, and I can't believe it took me this long to watch it. It's on Movie right now, but I think there is a Criterion release. I think it's probably on Criterion Channel or wherever. I'm sure it's in a lot of places. It was distributed by Samuel Goldwyn, so I assume that it has like decent access

to streaming rights but I really really really recommend it if you like kind of like family dramas you like Danny Glover like whatsoever and if you like a good ending to a movie

I feel like a lot of movies most movies don't have great endings a lot of movies, most movies don't have great endings. You know, a lot of movies have really great setups. They can have fun little middle parts, but it's really hard to stick a landing. And this movie, man, like the entire final half hour of this movie is gold. Just one of those movies that you like leave so happy that you watched it. Okay. Yeah.

So I strongly recommend it. And that's it. I think we did watched it. Okay. Wow. Yeah, so I strongly recommend it. And that's it. I think we did another episode. Yay. Yay. Well, thank you all for listening.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. His name is Russ Frushtick, and this has been The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties!

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