THB #348: What To Make Of The Mario Opening

The late great Stephen Stucker has been gone for over 35 years now… but this answer to “What do you make of this,’ written by Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker for Airplane! in 1980 remains the right answer for events like this.

Or maybe it should be, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!”

I always start with the obvious… audiences - especially young ones who still imagine that Mario & Co are living creatures - loved what they saw in the marketing for this movie. That simple.

Go one step deeper… the movie that Illumination’s Chris Meledandri and Team Nintendo decided they wanted to make was the one that the marketing team at Universal understood, embraced, and had the firepower to execute at the highest level.

I am not a Mario kid. I played Donkey Kong in actual arcades and when I got a game platform, it was SEGA. I love the crushingly bad and magnificently great 1993 movie from Jankel & Morton. It is a complete mess. But the Goombas swaying in the elevator is pure Chapli…