JackalKiller

@whylekat Leguizamo is Colombian, not Spanish. Also, his grandfather is Italian.

@DrDrew Pinsky As an entirely unrelated concept, the '93 Super Mario Bros. really is a brilliantly original film. However, the connections to the source material are actually seen everywhere.

There's references throughout while even the story itself was influenced by the games: the King being transformed into fungus was inspired by Koopa's children transforming the 7 kings in SMB3 into creatures, while the concept of different dimensions was inspired by SMB2. The metallic egg in which Daisy was contained originally had an expanded role as a crucial element in operating the meteorite to access different dimensions. This came from the crystal egg used to open the portals in SMB2.

In the end, though, the movie is fun in its own way. It took the concept of the games and spun it in a fascinating way that people are too quick to judge as a failure. On the contrary, the film was hugely groundbreaking. It's box office-failure is the only thing that prevents people from seeing that.

@Epoque You're exactly right. We see another "realistic" take on the Mario games about once a month, and each one seems to be rife with "sly" references to drugs and Mario's failing relationship with Peach. This one was admittedly better than most, but the concept was old long ago.

I'm glad that you enjoy the original take so much. I don't care what anyone says, they had a fascinating concept to spin the games with. I've never seen another movie do what they did. It was just plain cool.

I actually help run a website devoted to the movie at smbmovie.com and frequent its fan forum. Ever been?

Kevin, there wasn't simply outrage over McCartney's casting as the role of Zuko but also on the casting of the other three white actors. All four roles are based off inherently Inuit and Asian peoples, which makes it astounding that every single person in the film would presumably be white.

The further outrage at the recasting of Zuko with Dev Patel isn't about the actor no longer being white or even about the character now being dark-skinned, but by the seemingly token gesture this appears to be. When met with criticism the production changed the villain rather than the heroes, and went with a darker-skinned ethnicity rather than the original light skin.

Shyamalan insists that he was simply trying to be ironic in his casting of dark-skinned actors as villains, but wouldn't it have been even more ironic if the heroes were dark?

Shyamalan seems to believe that his casting was fair and only sought to diversify a supposedly "undiverse" world. However, he fails to point out that he originally cast Jesse McCartney in the role as Zuko, which would have resulted in an ALL-white cast.

When called on this, he switches out the villain-role (Zuko) for Dev Patel, an Indian actor with dark-skin that is clearly the opposite of the light-skinned, East-Asian Zuko seen in the cartoon. This, at best, seems like a token effort to silence dissenters, and, at worst, is an extremely unfortunate decision when you realize the three heroes of the film are still played by white actors while the villains are dark-skinned. Whether or not this was intentional, you cannot deny how adverse this is when the original show had two of the three early heroes as dark-skinned Inuits.

In the end, Shyamalan supposes he had the best of intentions. Unfortunately, the blatant maneuvering of the original show's peoples and cultures to allow for the film to have white heroes is something that cannot be denied, nor the blatant favoring of Caucasian actors to fill those roles. If these are his intentions, I want no part of the road he's paving.