All unique and most-recently-edited pages, images and templates from Original Tropes and The True Tropes wikis have been copied to this wiki. The two source wikis have been redirected to this wiki. Please see the FAQ on the merge for more.
Also Mario (and Luigi) himself: Mario is a ruthless One-Man Army killing anything in his path, not caring if his foes WANT to hurt him or not, captures countless lands, and basically waged a war against a rivaling kingdom with many casualties on their side, just to rescue a princess.
Although even the enemies who don't pursue Mario if he jumps over them (instead of on them) would still hurt him if they touched him, so it's not clear whether they don't want to hurt him or they do but they're incompetent.
And also, kidnapping another country's regent wouldn't signify an act of war?
As an addendum to the above, some argue that Mario is genuinely good, but a Heroic Sociopath. He genuinely wants to save Peach, but he has too much fun basically slaughtering the equivalent to entire armies (there's some actual canonical basis for this, notice how Mario tends to sound like he's having fun in some of his ingame sound bytes?)
Peach and Bowser have the 'kidnapping' thing going on to make money, since only Mario and Luigi can get coins out of those blocks.
Or Bowser's feelings toward Peach are actually mutual.
Cracked had a lot of fun with the interpretation that Bowser is actually in love with Peach but bad at expressing it, Peach has conflicting feelings and notably never denies being the mother of Bowser Jr when Bowser claims she is. Bowser is also a Well-Intentioned Extremist, who captures the Yoshis because they're an ecological menace (they eat anything), until he finds time to find a permanent solution to the crisis, due to the fact he captures them, rather than killing them. He also the only person capable of ruling the land as he has time to build, maintain and run seven castles simultaneously, manages to conquer and subdivide the lands into more effective zones and find time to kidnap Peach. He's essentally keeps trying to perform a Benevolent Alien Invasion but it keeps getting screwed up by Mario... which, by the way, where was he while Bowser was doing this anyway?
Audience-Alienating Premise/Americans Hate Tingle: All Mario games prior to New Super Mario Bros. Wii, were never released in the former Soviet Union countries, typically with the exception of the original Super Mario Bros. that were released as bootlegs in pirated videogame multicarts that were popular in Russia and the Baltics. This is because Nintendo did not have a presence in these countries until the 2010s, leaving pre-2010 Mario games typically a hard sell there.
Base Breaker: Waluigi. Oh dear, Waluigi... His fans like him for the memes, while his haters hate him for being a filler, and a "spin-off character", like Daisy is.
Mario himself is either a beloved iconic hero or an attention-hogging Blank Slate who steals all the spotlight from Luigi, depending on who you ask.
BLAM Episode: The US Super Mario Bros 2 (known as Super Mario USA in Japan) is pretty much this, as it has nothing to do with the rest of the main platformer series and is revealed to be All Just a Dream in the end. This was because it wasn't the actual sequel to the original Super Mario Bros.. The Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2.(called Super Mario Bros.:The Lost Levels in the US) was the real sequel, directly following the previous game, while the US version was actually an entirely different game called Doki Doki Panic, only with four Mario characters added in place of DDP's characters). This was done because SMB:TLL was deemed to difficult and too similar to the original game. US players had to wait until Super Mario All Stars, a collection of remakes for the NES, came out to play The Lost Levels. So the Mario platformer series has TWO second installments, though SMB 2:TLL is the actual canon sequel while SMB 2: USA is a BLAM episode. YMMV on which you prefer though.
Demonic Spiders: The series has two main ones: Hammer Bros., and Lakitu. Hammer Bros. because they lob a barrage of hammers at you, which is jarring since you mostly jump over most hazards. Lakitu because they mostly float out of your reach and they throw the already hard-to-kill Spinies at you.
Draco in Leather Pants: Bowser. People, his redeeming qualities do not excuse the numerous times he has committed evil and has failed to learn from any of his defeats!
The Koopalings. They are quite the colorful bunch, having different personalities and different hairstyles. No wonder fans were upset when Bowser Jr. replaced them.
Rosalina has become popular for being a princess that you don't have to rescue. Not many people were happy when Lubba replaced her in Galaxy 2and she only appears in the end.
Before any of these, there was Luigi. Especially once he became one of the most rounded characters in the series. Nowadays, it's expected for him to be playable in any Mario game.
In universe example is in Mario Party Advance where Mushbert brings up that Britney surpasses Jack in popularity when it comes to Toad Force V.
Evil Is Cool/Love to Hate: Bowser is one of the most beloved and classic video game villains of all time. He's also one of the few Mario characters that have a fleshed-out personality. Even though he suffers Villain Decay intermittently, he is able to make up for it by reversing it in games like Super Mario Galaxy.
Fan Yay: Bowser is incredibly popular with the gay fandom; most notably with furries.
Fridge Logic: The manual for Super Mario Bros. 1 stated that Bowser used his dark magic to turn the people of the Mushroom Kingdom into trees and bricks and Mario spent the entire game destroying the latter. So when you think about it, Mario is actually a mass murderer.
It's never said that Mario hitting the bricks destroyed them (other than what the 8-bit pixels seemed to represent); if anything, once the bricks were broken, the people were probably returned to normal (that's the way it goes in these types of games anyway). Besides, this was never mentioned anywhere outside of the instruction manual for that one game, which is suspect as the blocks show up in almost every Mario game afterwards.
Another example of fridge logic: how do the many enemies that walk in a straight line and never change direction untill they bump into something (such as the Koopas described under "Fridge Horror" below) get between the two objects they're walking back and forth between in the first place if they can't walk or jump over them? Does Bowser really go to all the trouble of finding countless pairs of immovable objects and putting minions between them before kidnapping Peach? Ho do the authorities not start to notice this pattern and take precautions to protect Peach whenever Bowser starts dropping minions between immovable objects?
Probably the most overlooked example of this trope is the fact that the Super Mushroom would technically kill Mario if not for its beneficial result. Some brightly colored mushrooms can be poisonous.
What about what happens to the coins you have that you collected when the brick blocks turn into coins when you hit the P Switch? If it turns all coins into bricks and all bricks into coins, what happens to the coins you carry?
Game Breaker: The blue Yoshi in Super Mario World. If you grabbed a koopa shell of ANY color, you could fly anywhere and easily skip whole levels at a time!
Though to a lesser extent, the cape is also overpowered. A single swipe can kill most enemies in the game, and you can fly for as long as you like as long as you can build enough running speed.
Oh, and flying is the only time you can get hit without taking damage.
Gannon Banned: The game is called Super Mario Brothers, NOT Super Mary-Oh Brothers, as some old Mario commercials would lead you to believe.
Asking for Super Mario Bros. 4 to be made will lead irked fans to pointing out that it already exists-—only it was called Super Mario World in the US.
Mario and Luigi's last names are not Mario-—as far as Nintendo themselves are concerned, they have no last names.
Good Bad Bugs: The "small fiery Mario" glitch. If you hit Bowser and the axe at the same time at the end of an x-4 level, you'll start the next level as a large Mario who dies in one hit. Take a mushroom and you become small; take a Fire Flower and you become small and fiery.
Also, a related glitch: if you're small and you hit Bowser and the axe at the same time, Mario dies but the level still registers as a win, leaving Toad saying his "Thank You Mario/Luigi!" line to a blank screen.
There's also the fact that the correct pipes in the World 8-4 Pipe Maze will have the Pirahna Plants inhabiting them suddenly disappear as you approach them. This significantly reduces the potential aggravation of guessing the correct pipe.
If you jump on the axe just as the timer reaches zero in any castle level, you'll get a huge bonus of 50,000 points. This is because of a bug in which the timer rolls over to 999 and keeps counting down from there. However, this does not work in the NES version, since it doesn't give you a time bonus for castles. This can only be done in the "Vs." (arcade) and Super Mario All-Stars versions[1].
Daisy for some. Aside from the fact she technically only uses the line in a few games, her "Hi, I'm Daisy!" quote has become something of an online meme for her character. This is also regardless of the fact Mario characters are all known for shouting annoying one-liners, so it's likely a case of bandwagon.
Replacement Scrappy: Bowser Jr. While he is also hated for his lackluster design, (he is an Expy of Bowser's baby self) he is mostly hated for replacing the Koopalings as of Super Mario Sunshine. As of New Super Mario Bros Wii, he is forgiven by a lot of fans, as he appeared alongside all of them in the game.
Also Lubba for Rosalina.
Scrappy Mechanic: No matter how many extra lives you're gotten, in some Mario games if you save, quit, and reload your game you're back down to 4 or 5 lives.
Villain Decay: Bowser tends to go back and forth with this to a nearly unprecedented degree; though he's usually a genuine threat in the 'core' games (ranging from downright silly plots to accidentally destroying reality after nearly conquering it.. In spinoffs, though, he's typically little more than a comic-relief nuisance, a reluctant ally or even a near Woobie level Butt Monkey as in Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga.
Alternative Character Interpretation: The manual states that the Goombas are what happens to traitorous Toads. If Princess Peach has great magic powers like the above entry suggests, who do you think is carrying out their sentences?
Anticlimax Boss: The final Bowser is basically unchanged from every other one. Like the fake Bowsers in worlds 6 and 7, he tosses hammers, but that's it.
Awesome Music: The Overworld theme is probably the most well-known song in all of gaming. The Underwater theme isn't too bad either.
Unfortunate Implications: Basically, as some players noted, Mario's design resembled Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Mario is the hero of the game, and the ending of a level basically depicts Mario putting down a flag that slightly resembles the peace sign and hoisting a flag that has the Soviet Red Star, causing many unfortunate implications on Soviet support. In one Nintendo Power issue, this issue was even addressed in the mailbag section, although the staff denied the resemblance, even trying to put Mario's moustache on the Russian boxer/soldier from Rocky IV.
Brick Joke: Attempted pretty clumsily. It starts with King Koopa ordering a pizza about halfway through the movie. Later, as he's about to prepare his Goomba army, he wonders what's taking his pizza so long. Finally, as he has cornered the Mario brothers in the climax, he gets a phone call from the pizza joint that his pizza has arrived.
Complete Monster: Surprisingly enough, Koopa himself isn't this; that would be Lena, who doesn't give one shit about the safety of her own dimension in her zeal to merge it with Earth, and thus unlike Koopa she can't claim to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
Cult Classic: For any fan of the Mario series, this is a must-see. The Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive is a thriving fan community devoted to the movie that's even had exclusive interviews with members of the cast and crew.
"Somewhere My Love", the song Mario and Luigi trick the Goombas into dancing to... La, la, LA LA....
"Walk the Dinosaur".
Funny Moments: Mario and Luigi are chained as they get their picture taken, which they mistaken the cameras for guns.
Mario: Are we dead?
In addition, the dancing Goombas can also be seen as one of the few intentionally funny moments.
Ham and Cheese: Dennis Hopper's acting is okay in some scenes, but certain others are severely over-acted and full of narm.
Harsher in Hindsight: The two towers that dominate Koopa's Manhattan-inspired city, one of which looks half-destroyed (actually it's not finished construction yet but the visual effect is the same) and the other of which has a glowing stylized "K" on the side that looks like, depending on how you see it, either an explosion or a gaping hole.
Video Game Movies Suck: The Ur Example of this trope, YMMV on how much it sucks, or whether it even does. While many lament that it's so different from the games as to be In Name Only, some people do enjoy it.
A lot of people believe that if the movie wasn't named "Super Mario Bros.", but rather just a futuristic dystopic comedy, it would be given a little more slack.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Much like Jurassic Park, this film had to literally invent new technology to make much of its visual effects look as realistic as they do. Unfortunately, Jurassic Park's effects were a much more explicit focus, so it gets more attention for its influence on the industry.
Daisy appearing in the sand.
The pan over the city towards Koopa's tower. This was done by one man over a period of six months and was deemed impossible beforehand.
And the King turning back into a human.
The 2023 Animated Film[]
What the Hell, Casting Agency?: The All-Star Cast announced during the Nintendo Direct event in September 2021 was met with a good amount of mockery, especially the announcement that Chris Pratt would be the voice of Mario. This was later subverted after the release of the movie, as their performances as the characters are generally praised.
YMMV • 
Radar • 
Quotes • (
Funny • 
Heartwarming • 
Awesome) • 
Fridge • 
Characters • 
Fanfic Recs • 
Nightmare Fuel • 
Shout Out • 
Plot • 
Tear Jerker • 
Headscratchers • 
Trivia • WMG • 
Recap • 
Ho Yay • 
Image Links • 
Memes • 
Haiku • Laconic • 
Source • Setting
