An Interview With the Man Who Spent Countless Hours Restoring the em Super Mario Bros. /em Movie

When skeptics make the case that making a film adaptation of a video game is never a good idea, the Super Mario Bros. movie tends to be Exhibit A. Starring Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, the 1993 box-office flop is certainly bizarre, complete with sentient ooze, a baby raptor standing in for Yoshi, and frightening "Goombas" with giant bodies and tiny scaly heads. But it's also, in this critic's opinion, one that merits revisiting, not just because it's not as awful as it's remembered to be, but because there's a new restoration of the film. The "Morton-Jankel Cut," as it's called, is the passion project of the Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive team--Ryan Parente, Steven Applebaum, and Ryan Hoss--who reached out to filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist to restore the film after discovering a VHS containing 20 minutes of previously unseen footage. The extended cut of the movie, which you can watch for free on the Internet Archive, is even wilder than the theatrical version, including a scene where President Koopa (Dennis Hopper) "de-evolves" a man into slime, the implication that he suffers from dementia, and a musical interlude where Iggy and Spike (Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson) break into a regicidal rap at the Boom Boom Bar. To learn more about how the restoration came together, we spoke to Gilchrist about the biggest challenges he faced, what it was like to sink countless of into a movie frequently named as one of the worst video-game adaptations of all time, and why he considers this new version superior to the theatrical cut. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.