Miyamoto’s Best Stories And Takes From The Super Mario Bros. Movie Media Blitz

The wait is finally over: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is out. The journey here has been filled with some of the best side-splitting memes, ingenious ad campaigns, and revealing method acting from Illumination Entertainment’s star-studded Hollywood cast. However, the Super Mario Bros. movie brouhaha has been significantly lacking sound bites from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. That is, until today. Here’s a round-up of the best quotes from Miyamoto leading up to the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Read More: Miyamoto Says Don’t Worry About His Nintendo Retirement, Maybe Go Outside

Princess Peach was always supposed to be a girl boss

During a video interview with Variety, Miyamoto revealed that Princess Peach was originally meant to be a playable character in Super Mario Bros. (the original 1985 game for the Nintendo Entertainment System).

“As a video game, we needed to make it simple and easy to understand what the objective is. So she stayed the ‘damsel in distress’ for a while,” Miyamoto told Variety in reference to Peach’s evolution in the film. “But we did have desires to make her a playable character, make her have her own story, be a more powerful princess, etc. We tried to push that further for the movie, and I think it was one of our first conversations to make her the strong, powerful princess she was always meant to be.”

As you can see in this clip of Peach showing Mario the ropes, the mushroom princess is leagues ahead of the isekai’d plumber when it comes to being a force to be reckoned with.

Super Mario Bros. (1993) remains irrelevant

After Miyamoto dropped a bob-omb by announcing the movie’s cast, a very vocal minority doubt that Illumination’s film could have the same amount of cultural impact as 1993’s live-action movie. Did Nintendo care? Nah.

In an interview with Game Informer, Miyamoto dashed die-hard live-action Mario film enjoyers’ adoration against the rocks by saying, “I don’t think there’s any impact or influence that the old movie had.”

“I think the people who made the movie had put a lot of work into it, but I think the difference is that the movie that was made 30 years ago, we licensed the Mario IP and they made the movie,” Miyamoto told Game Informer. “This time, we were looking to maybe get into movies and do the movie production ourselves.”

Dr. Mario is a fraud and should not be trusted

The most annoying Super Smash Bros. Melee players, in my humble opinion, just so happen to main Dr. Mario. Like the real-life medical fraudster ‘Dr.’ Malachi Love-Robinson, Dr. Mario routinely breaks the Hippocratic oath “to do no harm” by using a myriad of pills to buff his moveset and hand players their pixelated asses. In an interview with IGN, Miyamoto finally broke the deafening silence around Dr. Mario’s history of malpractice.

“Mario’s a blue-collar, he’s a regular person,” Miyamoto told IGN in reference to Mario’s depiction in Super Mario Bros. “So, even when he becomes Dr. Mario, there’s a sort of, like, ‘shadiness,’ like can I trust this person?”

No, you can’t. Lock him up, Mr. Miyamoto.

When can we expect a new Mario game?

During Miyamoto’s Variety covershoot video interview, the game designer slyly skirted around answering the burning question on everyone’s mind: When are we getting a new Mario game? For those keeping score, the last one, Switch’s Super Mario Odyssey, hit in 2017. Since then, we’ve only gotten the surprisingly good turn-based crossover game Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. And I guess Super Nintendo World, if we’re counting amusement parks as IRL games.

“Well, all I can say is please stay tuned for future Nintendo Directs,” Miyamoto answered(?).

Guess we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for that then. Thanks, Miyamoto.