So, this is interesting.
I recently came across a site that has the entire pre-production development of Super Mario Bros. up for viewing, from the initial pitch to the ungodly number of screenplay drafts to the liner notes, and revisions. And, I've got to say - this actually could've been a really, really good film, and I can see now why the film ended up being such a narrative mess, in its finished incarnation.
Each of the separate drafts are so entirely divergent from one another in terms of style and influence - running the gamut from The Princess Bride-esque fantasy that does actually come a lot from the games to something very unabashedly adult and cynical, with Die Hard and Mad Max as its predecessors (which includes one of my favorite one liners in a while, but I'll get to that in a minute). Alone, these are all actually really competent screenplays and adaptations of a relatively plotless game - the problem is, this film had about twenty-nine thousand writers, and rather than having each successive draft gradually develop and build up some kind of concrete narrative, they've all done their own thing.
In an attempt to hastily unify them, and you can see this in the late-term revisions, the light tone is pulled from one and stitched together with the set-pieces of another. Dialogue is reduced in complexity, and - it seems that the writers were all told to downplay the evolution of the characters as it took up screen-time in what they saw as mainly a toyetic film. In each draft of the screenplay, everything is pretty concretely drawn out - Mario is a cynic who who is ashamed of his family business and the fact that he's pulling Luigi into it as well and ruining whatever prospects his life might have in the future. Luigi is a New Age youth raised in Brooklyn with Brooklyn values. Even Koopa gets paid a lot of attention, with some pretty pointed and creepy sequences.
All this stuff was actually important to the work, early in the production, as strange as that sounds - being a Mario film. Alas, what could have been.
One of my favorite sequences comes as the end of the second draft, from early 1992. It's the climactic face-off between Mario and Koopa - this time, taking place on the Brooklyn Bridge. This scene is a lot more interesting than the finished draft, with Koopa fully reptile and climbing all over the bridge structures, breathing fire at Mario and choking him with his tongue. So, it all comes to a head, and Koopa says something like, "what can you do? You're just a plumber."
And, Mario's like ". . .you're goddamn right, you slimy piece of shit." AND THEN HE SHOOTS HIM IN THE FACE WITH HIS BOOT.
It's a great scene, shame we'll never see it.
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Quoting Winston* 
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