Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! Review Part I

Marquee Poster for Super Mario Bros anime movie

Before you read this article, I feel like I should confess something. This article was something I wrote about 3 years ago for a blog that is now long gone. More specifically, it was an article I still hold some pride and attachment to because of how hard it was to write about a movie that literally had no commentary or information on. Most of the words in this article is mostly the same as what appeared in that old blog, but I’ve since restructured and cleaned up the wording since I’m a much better blogger than what I was 3 years ago. Enjoy the article.

What can be said about Mario that hasn’t been said before? He is one of the most famous corporate mascots in history, he is unarguably the most well-known and recognized video game character in general (both by gamers and non-gamers alike), and he has been in too many video games to even count. Over the years, Mario has been involved in many different kinds of media and merchandise over the years; from toys, clothing, even cereal products. The most well-known media adaptations of Mario (other than video games) is the Saturday morning cartoon from the early ’90s dubbed “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show” and the horribly painful and shitty live-action Super Mario Bros. movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo (you read that right).  If any of you get curious and decide to search and watch this stuff…don’t, unless you are either a media masochist of some kind or genuinely enjoy bad movies.

However, the sands of time often hide many treasures just waiting to be unearthed and revealed to the world. Although many things about Mario are very well-known, there is one piece of media, the existence of which is something that very few gamers or average people are even aware of.

The aforementioned “media” is a full-feature length anime movie released in Japan only, and in theaters. It is called Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! From what I understand, this movie is so obscure that the only people who are aware of it are either people who surf the internet a lot or anime fans on the level of either Anime World Order (a podcast you should all check out) or Mike Toole (a columnist on Anime News Network whose work you readers should read all of). It’s a shame not many people know of this, as it’s an okay movie and interesting piece forgotten of history. Normally, the way I would review a movie is by delving into the movie itself and giving my two-sense about it, but this movie is a special case so I’m gonna split it into two parts. Part one being about what little of the production and distribution histories that I can find about this movie, and part two being about the content of the movie itself.

As I stated above, there is very little is known about the production or the business aspects of how it was made. However after a lot of deep digging on the internet, I constructed together how I think everything went regarding the creation of this movie. Do not take this as fact, because we don’t really know the facts other than the names of the people involved and the studio’s involvement with the picture.

Lets go back to September of 1985, the Famicom (Japanese version of the original Nintendo) is already out and has just produced its first huge hit, Super Mario Bros; the latter of which was released on September 13, 1985. The game proved to be so popular, that a one-shot joint company known as Holly Planning Production/Grouper Production (I’ll refer to them as Grouper from now on) apparently contacted Nintendo. They asked them if they could make a Mario anime movie for the summer of 1986, which Nintendo agreed to do. After they got the green-light, Grouper got the animation department of Japanese entertainment mogul Toei to actually make it. This cannot be considered a tie-in-film because it was set for release in June of 1986, roughly a half-year after the release of the original Super Mario Bros. game. The director of this film is Masami Hata, an anime director and artist primarily for Sanrio (the company best known for Hello Kitty). I assume he was hired through Toei to direct this movie. To those of you who don’t know, Hata is known amongst hardcore anime fans as the man who directed fantastic anime productions such as Legend of Sirius (known as Sea Prince and the Fire Child in the USA), Princess Knight, and the nightmare fuel filled short (seriously) film known as Chirin no Suzu (known as Ringing Bell in America). As good as most of these productions are, they are relatively unknown amongst most modern anime fans, which is a crying shame as they are wonderful, and Hata is one of the grandmasters of anime since the beginning…but I digress.

A promotional cel of Mario and Peach holding...phone cards...? WhatisthisIdonteven

With about the normal amount of time an anime takes to make back in those days (roughly 7-8 months), they released the movie on June 20, 1986. Nothing is known about how well the film did, so I can’t say how popular it was in theaters. One of the more interesting things about this movie is that they released this on VHS in rental stores only, through a video rental service known as VAP Video. You gotta understand that rental movies were a big market back then, but some rental stores thought of a rather dumb idea (both financially and in terms of popularity) to sell movies only in rental stores and not in the regular home market, and this movie was one of the casualties of this dumb business decision. Because of this, this movie got the obscure reputation that it now possesses, plus it being distributed in extremely small quantities really hurt it’s reputation. These tapes can run up to $200 on auction sites because of how rare this movie and this tape really is. Sadly though, it doesn’t have any DVD release. The strangest aspect about this film in my estimation is that Nintendo either knowingly or unintentionally refuses to acknowledge this movie’s existence.

Front side of the Mario Anime Tape Cover

The actual tape itself (not mine since I don't legitimately own it).

Well this is the end of Part I where I review the actual movie. Stay tuned for Part II which should be up relatively quickly.