25 Facts You Didn’t Know About Mario #5 – #1

Super Mario Bros., the movie not the game, was the first movie based on a video game franchise… and it was horrible! Video game movies have totally sucked ever since. Ok, the first Mortal Kombat was pretty cool.

Strangely enough, Miyamoto agreed that the Super Mario Bros. movie was horrible, but not for the reasons we think. Miyamoto once told Edge Online that the movie was too much like the game and that’s why it failed. He would have rather seen it become an entertaining movie on its own merits, rather than being a movie about a video game.

If you try really, really, really hard, you can, in fact, jump over the flagpole in the original Super Mario Bros. without ending the level. Unfortunately, there isn’t much beyond it. There’s no secret level or hidden bonus. The game simply doesn’t know how to handle your new location, as you were never supposed to jump over it in the first place. Instead, you’ll just run forever with the castle you passed up in the background until the timer runs out and you die.

Mario’s wardrobe and facial features were all designed as a way to get around early graphical limitations of consoles. He was given a moustache because the limited amount of pixel space made it hard to draw a mouth. He was given a hat because it was difficult to draw realistic looking hair. He was given overalls so the player could tell that he was swinging his hands back and forth as he was walking or running, as they would pass over the yellow buttons on the front.

Finally, we have all heard the 'Mario is a druggie' joke by now. “He wanders through a bizarre world eating mushrooms and smoking flowers while turtles and living bullets try to kill him. He’s trippin' balls, man!” It’s an old and not very funny joke but there is some truth to it. Mario’s ability to grow and shrink through the usage of mushrooms was inspired by Alice in Wonderland according to a 2005 interview Miyamoto had with Business Week. Alice in Wonderland has frequently been read as an allegory for drug use so, in an indirect way, the mushrooms of the Mario series really are inspired by hallucinatory drugs. And those are your 25 Facts You Didn't Know About Mario.