Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! (1986)

Reviewed 20 May 2026

Kinda fascinating artifact as one of the earliest adaptations of a videogame to film, released just a year after the first Mario game in Japan. It's from that era of game adaptations where the film-makers treated the source material without gravitas or mealy-mouthed celebrity “gratitude”, maybe because videogames were like the nouveau riche of artistic media—lots of money moving around but zero prestige or nostalgia. You can really feel the gears whirring and grinding in the heads of the production team as they try to figure out how the hell to turn the game into a cartoony, characterful, conventional feature-length story (with a heavy debt to gag manga). The result's a similar kind of surreal to films like the 1993 Super Mario Bros. or 1994 Street Fighter: overly literal and oddly inventive at the same time.