Fairy Tale Spotlight: Super Mario Bros. [Book Review]

"Super Mario Bros." is a book written by Todd Strasser. It is the novelization of the 1993 movie of the same name and was published at the same exact time. If I had known this book existed earlier, I would have read this one a long time ago. Apparently it is based on the original version of the script! It also has the Nintendo Seal on the back, which is a first for me as far as book reading. The movie DVD doesn't even have that.

I actually like this movie and have defended it. Some people say that it is actually a good film but not a good Super Mario film, but I don't agree. I think that if you were going to do a human version of the game, this is about as good as you could expect. Children responded positively to the film when it came out. It was the adults and later generations that did not understand it. Even so, the movie didn't make money, so we never got another one. (And we wanted another one.)

The book follows the film pretty closely, but it does deviate occasionally. Some scenes were added or changed slightly. The elevator goomba dancing scene doesn't happen, although the elevator scene does occur. They just don't dance. However they do dance later when Toad (in the form of a goomba) plays music on his harmonica. I feel that both scenes are necessary for it to be funny though, because it shows that the goombas like music.

Probably the oddest inclusion in the book was that the good king (the one that got turned into a fungus) was named Bowser. It feels like the people who made the script just sort of threw names around without fully knowing the context. This was thankfully omitted from the film.

"Super Mario Bros." is a painfully easy read. It feels like I am just reading scenes from a comedy 90's film. And even though there are some intriguing differences, it is not really better than the movie. For that reason, I don't really recommend the book if you can get ahold of the film, which isn't hard to do. That said, however, it was a good novelty, and I don't regret it. If anything, I am just amazed that the book even exists. Super Mario was actually novelized!

This blog was written on October 15, 2025.

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