i've had a blog post i've been writing on and off for two weeks - i made it to the finals of a flesh and blood tournament, i went to a convention in Memphis with some friends, i went on the first romantic date i've been on in years, and yet before any of that, I'm going to publish a blog post on fucking The Super Mario Galaxy Movie of all things before I talk about things actually important to my life. Because I'm mad. It's that simple.

I am a fan of video games. I am also a fan of good video games. That means I've played almost every first-party Nintendo game released in the years 1981-2015, because Nintendo as a developer has historically had very, very few misses. With each new generation of consoles, they constantly pushed the envelope not only in what was possible technologically, but what was fun, what was good game design and what wasn't. Much like how Quake and Half-Life permanently changed the landscape for FPS games to follow, it's hard to imagine an adventure game without the influence of early Zelda titles. In the current day and age, video games are now enjoyed by such a large portion of the population I'm not even going to bother looking it up, I'm just going to assume it's >50%. And yet, we still are not able to get good adaptations on the big screen. Why exactly is that?

Today some friends dragged me to go see The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. I just got home from watching it. I was actually dreading it earlier in the day - at one point, I said in frustration that I would rather "lay on the floor and stare up at the ceiling for 3 hours" (I know that's not really much of an anecdote, but I was being realistic). But I went anyways. I almost wish I could have gone in completely blind, with unbridled hopes, but unfortunately I have an Internet connection and social media. So let's talk about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

If I could summarize my thoughts in one single sentence, it's that watching this movie felt like watching YouTube Shorts. I saw someone say online that it felt like it was created for the sole purpose of being watched on a child's iPad in the back seat of a car, and I wholeheartedly agree. First off, this movie is a treat for the eyes. It's gorgeous. I don't watch a lot of animated movies, but this movie probably had the highest pure graphical fidelity of any movie I've ever seen. Second off, this movie possessed a few moments that captured my attention. That's about the only positives I have to say about it. I found it to be uninspired, trite, generic, and a downright mockery of the games that came before it. The pacing is off the rails - there is not a single minute in the entire runtime where you're allowed to sit with something. There is always a quip, a jumpcut, or something happening for the sake of something happening. Characters act in whatever way will further the plot the most efficiently. Yoshi is in it, for some reason. He doesn't really do anything the entire film, except for a 5-minute Yoshi's Island segment that legitimately feels like a Family Guy cutaway. Despite being The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I feel the same way about Rosalina - she doesn't *do* anything, she doesn't *get* to do anything, she has almost no interactions with any characters - she is a walking magical battery for the Death Cannon That Kills Everything, which is a trope I'd only seen about a hundred times by the time I was 10 years old. I certainly didn't expect it to be an 'adaptation' of Super Mario Galaxy like many did - how do you even adapt a collectathon - but I expected something cohesive at the very least. The movie is chock-full of homages and references: the storybook from the opening of Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door, the paintbrush from Super Mario Sunshine, the Super Scope from Real Life, the Pikmin from Pikmin, the list goes on. None of these references ever add anything to the movie beyond just being things to point at and say, "Look!" One 'reference' that I felt was painfully bizarre and out-of-place was Fox McCloud, the starfighter pilot from Star Fox.

Let's talk a little bit about Fox. Star Fox is an old rail shooter from 1993 that released about two years after the Super Nintendo hit shelves. It made use of a special chip in order to render fully 3D polygonal graphics in a world dominated by 2D sprite-based games. You play as Fox McCloud, and you and your team of three other anthropomorphic animals take to the sky to defend your planet from an evil scientist. It was a huge success and got a handful of sequels but hasn't seen a proper mainline title release in almost a decade. So where exactly is the connection between Mario and Fox? There isn't one. So Fox shows up in this movie, immediately explains his entire backstory (his 'warp drive' or whatever malfunctioned and now he's in the Mario world. Genius), makes a joke about 'barrel rolls'†, and offers Princess Peach safe passage to the galaxy she needs to go to. Perfect. Except he just doesn't go away. He keeps hanging around. He's on screen for what felt like 15 minutes and probably actually was that long, and he never does anything beyond looking cool and piloting a spaceship. He just feels so weird and out of place, probably because he is, except instead of that being the point like with Frog in Chrono Trigger the movie expects you to take this guy as seriously as you can for a kids slop movie. I actually heard a lot of people liked this guy's inclusion in the movie, which doesn't make sense to me, but it is what it is.

In a perfect world, I would go into more detail about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and the parts I liked, and why I liked them, and the parts I didn't like, and why I didn't like them, but the more I write, the more my motivation wanes. This movie could have been so much more with so much little effort. It takes the same amount of time to voice act and animate directionless slop than it does to create something cohesive, and sensical, and still with just as much whimsy and enjoyability for the children. And yet, as I'm in the theater, and I'm watching Bowser Jr. paint a bad guy with his paint brush, which is exactly the same thing he did in Super Mario Sunshine twenty-five years ago, and I'm rolling my eyes, I notice a child and his mother walking back from the bathroom. And almost immediately my anger towards The Super Mario Galaxy Movie disappears. Instead, I envision myself a father bringing his two daughters to the movies, and I am happy. I think about the disgustingly ugly animated movies I watched over the years that were also terrible, and I smile. I'm not making excuses for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. I'm still very dissapointed in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and what it could have been. I'm still very sad that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie took a game with the motifs and melancholy of Super Mario Galaxy and turned it into TikTok: The Film. But all of it now seems meaningless. The End.

† An average man might be unsure why this is a point of contention for me. In Star Fox 64, you are able to perform a 'barrel roll' (which is actually an Aileron roll) by double tapping the Z button. This evasive manuver helps you shake off lock-on targeting and dodge enemy fire. In the first mission of the game, your military superior Peppy Hare instructs you to 'Do a barrel roll!' in a voice that is equal parts amusing and annoying, and for some reason this caught on as an Internet meme in the mid 2000's. To make a barrel roll joke two decades later is so far beyond out of touch that it makes me angry thinking about it.