Looking Back at Dennis Hopper as King Koopa & Super Mario Bros. The Movie

final days hopper Looking Back at Dennis Hopper as King Koopa & Super Mario Bros. The Movie

Dennis Hopper passed away May 29th, 2010 with complications of advanced Prostate Cancer, appearing in over 160 movies, some of his most memorable roles included Speed, The Last Ride, Rebel Without a Cause and Apocalypse Now. On March 26th, Dennis Hopper was given the 2,403rd star on the  Hollywood Walk of Fame. Here’s our review of Super Mario Bros. The Movie to honor the man behind King Koopa.

What would life be without popular video games being turned into big screen movies? Well probably way better but we wouldn’t have so many jokes to be made. Who could ever forget one of the first highly-anticipated video game movie, Super Mario Bros.

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Let’s take a look back at Super Mario Bros. the Movie, Bob Hoskins portrayed the iconic chubby plumber Mario. Yes, his first name’s Mario and his last name’s also Mario (not the most idealistic way to name a character, but they needed something) who lived in the normal world with his brother Luigi (you guessed it, last name Mario also) played by the latino comedian John Lequizamo. Nothing was wrong with Lequizamo playing the part and he did pretty well; but really, Luigi, the pasta loving Italian skinny brother, is latino? Well how could this get any better you ask? Well Mario’s love interest is a college student named Daisy and one day she finds some dinosaur bones and everything starts to go crazy.

King Koopa (played by Dennis Hopper) has his henchman kidnap women in the human world to find the princess who holds the key for uniting the underground world of dinosaurs with the humans world, aka New York.

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Eventually Mario and Luigi leave the safety of New York and go underground into Koopa’s kingdom, which no signs of an evil castle, mushrooms, piranha  plants, mini goombas and a clean blue backgrounds. What we get instead was a ghetto city underground looking like a mix of an old school, torn down Harlem mixed in with the dome city in Total Recall, and all the dinosaurs have semi-evolved into human looking creatures, other than Yoshi and the Goombas, which have large human bodies with small shaped heads.

We make our way into the battles now, mostly at the end of the movie, Mario and Luigi change from normal street clothes into the Red and Green outfits they were famous for (with no real reason how they were able to get such perfect outfits). Guns are heavily used in this movie and Mario and Luigi get equipped with a special boot attachment that allows them to super jump, and how do they defeat an angry King Koopa? With a mini bob-omb and a devolution gun to turn Koopa into a goo. What an anticlimactic battle.

While the movie failed horribly, it did start the trend of video games being turned into big screen movies. It will be one of Dennis Hoppers most remembered roles, and while his acting was pretty good in the first half of the movie, no amount of good acting could save that movie from bombing.

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