The Super Mario Galaxy Movie cast reacts to disturbing Nintendo lore

There’s a piece of Super Mario lore that the cast of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie wishes wasn’t true. During a recent interview with cast members Donald Glover, Charlie Day, and Chris Pratt, they learned, against their will, about the dark origins of the original Super Mario Bros. and the dark magic of the Koopa tribe.

That’s right: The voices behind Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi are now cursed with the knowledge that in the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES, the power-up blocks (and other inanimate objects) were made of people.

As detailed in Nintendo’s original 1985 manual for Super Mario Bros., we learn that Mushroom Kingdom residents were horribly cursed by Koopa (aka Bowser) and his “tribe of turtles” to become “stones, bricks and even field horsehair plants.” In that same manual, Nintendo added that some mushroom people “who have been turned into bricks or made invisible” will reward Mario by giving him a power boost (Power Mushroom, Fire Flower, etc.). It’s unclear whether having a power-up punched out of you by Mario has any effect on one’s condition as a cursed mushroom-person-block-thing.

Image: Nintendo

This kind of ancient video game lore may shock Hollywood’s elite. They think they’re simply making a fun children’s movie, profiting handsomely, and not promoting the dark arts of Nintendo wizards. But that doesn’t make the grim backstory of Bowser’s curse on the Mushroom Kingdom any less true.

OK, maybe it is technically less true 40 years later, because this type of information came out of Nintendo when it was a nascent video game maker. Similar to the fact that at one point Nintendo asserted that Yoshi’s full name was T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas, the details about the cursed Mushroom Kingdom residents were probably decanonized over time. This is probably why Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto shuns storytelling in Nintendo games and wants to leave character lore to the movies.

One might think that the Koopas’ ? Block curse was the work of a rogue Nintendo of America employee who slipped unofficial details into the English-language Super Mario Bros. NES manual. Not so. According to the website Legends of Localization, the original Japanese-language Super Mario Bros. Famicom manual says the same thing: blocks are people. The English-language explanation of those classic Koopa shenanigans is a direct translation.

For a longer look at our conversation with Day, Glover, and Pratt, check out our full video interview with the trio, conducted through the medium of gachapon capsules and vintage Super Mario keshi figures. (Also, yes, I did mistakenly refer to Yoshi as “Yoshi T. Munchakoopas” in the interview questions. Blame jet lag.)