The Super Mario Bros. Movie is well on its way to warping into theaters with an earlier release date, and so far, things have been looking promising. One controversial decision that people have been skeptical of since its announcement is the casting of Chris Pratt as Mario Mario (is that last name canon?). The directors of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath, have now expounded on their reasoning to cast Pratt as the cultural icon.
According to Collider, the directors weren’t going so much for the known performance by Mario staple, Charles Martinet, but were looking to bring Pratt’s everyman qualities to the role.
“It’s a bit of an origin tale. It’s the story of Mario becoming Super Mario. At the outset Mario and his brother Luigi are plumbers in Brooklyn, blue-collar guys… from a family of Italian immigrants. When you play the game, if you don’t give up, Mario will succeed. So we transferred that player experience from the game to a characteristic that [movie] Mario would have. For us, Pratt’s casting made total sense. He’s really good at playing a blue-collar hero with a ton of heart. For the way that Mario is characterized in our film, he’s perfect for it.”
Although original Mario voice, Martinet, isn’t featured in his signature role, he still lends his vocal talents by voicing a number of supporting characters in the film. The rest of the voice cast starring alongside Pratt is Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Armisen, and Kenneth Michael Richardson.
Audiences love Pratt as Star-lord in Guardians of the Galaxy and have enjoyed him as the former raptor wrangler in the Jurassic World movies. However, outside of The Lego Movie, viewers weren’t sure of Pratt’s vocal talent range and have waited for the result of his Mario voice. The first exposure to it in the teaser trailer seemed to reflect Pratt’s normal speaking voice. This comes off the heels of Pratt saying his Mario voice is “unlike anything you’ve heard before.” A new trailer and a clip have eased people into it a bit more, with a hint of Brooklyn in his voice and the signature “Wahoo!” at high-pitched glory.
Let’s not also forget Captain Lou Albano’s interpretation of the character where he used his normal, deep voice with a slight Italian accent intertwined, classically greeting the audience as “paisanos.”