Super Mario Bros movie extended with 20-minutes of unseen footage

Super Mario Bros movie still
(Image credit: IMDB + Hollywood Pictures)

A fan-made extended cut of the Super Mario Bros Movie from 1993 includes never before deleted scenes.

The Super Mario Bros 1993 movie was directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and featured Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi. The film originally had a runtime of 104-minutes, but after fans added in previously undiscovered deleted scenes to make what is dubbed "The Morton Jankel Cut" (via IGN) the movie is now 125-minutes long.

While the movie saw Mario and Luigi competing against a Mafia-affiliated plumbing company, the deleted scenes include scenes such as Koopa drowning an enemy in slime, a rap scene from Iggy and Spike. IGN notes that various scenes throughout the film have been re-edited and extended as well.

The Morton Jankel Cut is available to watch on Internet Archive and features VHS sources used for most of the film. The team behind the cut explain the Internet Archive description, "We are exploring our options and further work will be done on this film later" and that this cut has been released early to see fan reactions and for the film's anniversary.

It's revealed that restoration began after The Super Mario Bros Movie Archive Team found a tape on May 15, 2019, with an extended rough cut. The quality of the image was bad though and required getting filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist on board to do "heavy restoration". Gilchrist published a commentary on his process in a video last year that you can watch above and runs for around 35-minutes.

The original film did not do too well when it launched, although as detailed on the Internet Archive, production was a rocky journey. Disney purchased the distribution rights before filming began and wanted rewrites that apparently shifted the film away from its darker cyberpunk tone that was originally intended.

There's another Mario movie in the works with Shigeru Miyamoto collaborating with  Illumination to bring an animated Super Mario Movie to our screens. Additionally, Nintendo looks to make more movies and shows involving its franchises and characters.

We could be seeing more Mario games on the way, here's when to watch the Nintendo Direct at E3.

Ben Bayliss

I'm partial to an action adventure RPG such as Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077. I enjoy the occasional open-world driving games and even those skateboarding titles. But really, if any game I'm playing has a photo mode, I'll likely be found snapping pictures of anything and everything.