One of the best running gags out there The Super Mario Bros. movie is also an extremely disturbing one – and a clear reference to a specific Mario game, as so often in the film.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for one recurring cameo/recurring joke in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.]
Deep in Bowser’s dungeon, there is a small blue glowing star-shaped creature who gleefully, vocally craves death, nothingness and emptiness.
This little critter is a Luma, introduced in the Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy. Lumas are star-shaped creatures with the potential to be reborn as planets and other celestial bodies. So, as Polygon’s own Michael McWhertor pointed out when the Luma first appeared in a trailer for The SuperMario Brothers Moviethis joke is 100% accurate:
Luma’s references to “the sweet relief” of death are more than just comic relief, they are accurate to the Luma species. At the end of Super Mario Galaxy, a cluster of Luma enthusiastically sacrifices itself to save the galaxy by being sucked into a black hole created by Bowser. These guys absolutely Love dying!
The Luma is never mentioned in the film, but is credited as “Lumalee”, and voiced by Juliet Jelenic, the daughter of co-director Michael Jelenic. Knowing that makes the joke even funnier, as does the fact that none of this backstory is mentioned in the film. Lumalee is just there, in Bowser’s dungeon, with a cadre of other inmates, spraying nihilistic bon mots. To the uninitiated, it is a most peculiar joke. For Mario die-hards, it’s an extremely good deep cut.
But Lumalee’s non-sequiturs about oblivion also serve to emphasize how safe the rest of the world is The Super Mario Bros. movie plays his gags. While the film aims to please, with references aplenty, it’s surprisingly light on jokes. Much of the action unfolds in a straightforward manner, with most of the laughs derived from pratfalls. In other words, many of his jokes could work in many other movie contexts, and only a few stem from these individual characters. (The one major exception is Donkey Kong’s open contempt for Mario.)
Part of that can be attributed to a desire to create The Super Mario Bros. movie extra accessible to Mario first-timers, but as the Luma gag shows, writers can do a lot of weird with their jokes, and they’ll land just fine – think Jack Black’s performance as Bowser, for example. Or actually another performance by Jack Black.
Like the status quo bucking game it came from, into the Luma The Super Mario Bros. movie is a risk – a cute character who craves death (in a fun way!) in a children’s movie – that shows off the potential range you can experience in a Mario story. Ultimately, which is the biggest barrier in the public consciousness about Mario – How manythose unfamiliar with the source material may think, can you really do with a guy who just jumps on things? The answer is: quite a lot! And it would be nice if there were more things like the Luma in this movie to show that.
The Super Mario Bros. movie now playing in theaters.