The fan community is a fickle one sometimes. We've seen less than two-and-a-half minutes of The Super Mario Bros Movie, planned for release in theaters in April of next year, but fans have already found a lot to criticize about the main character, from his vocal qualities to the way he fills out his overalls. Voice actor Chris Pratt is highly unlikely to be responsible for the latter, but the community seems sharply divided on how he's handling the former.
Earlier this month, voice actress Tara Strong publicly objected to Pratt's casting over Twitter, claiming the title role in the upcoming Super Mario Bros Movie should have gone to Charles Martinet, who has consistently provided the plumber's in-game voice since Mario Teaches Typing was released back in 1991. Even if you're unfamiliar with Strong's name, you probably know her voice — at least one of them — as she's been Raven in Teen Titans, Timmy Turner in Fairly OddParents, and Twilight Sparkle in My Little Pony, just to name a few of her 633 television and movie acting credits, so it's safe to say her words carry a little more weight in the animated film industry than the average person's.
As if the hubbub over their rightful voice of Bayonetta weren't causing enough of a stir, the fan community seems to have divided itself pretty neatly into those who stand behind Martinet, with his heavily-accented falsetto, and those who believe in giving Pratt a chance. But those insisting Pratt's voice is wrong for the role because he's not aping Martnet should remember one thing.
Martinet was not the first person to play Mario.
While his yowling "Here we go!" when jumping into one of Super Mario 64's paintings is burned into so many of our brains, Martinet actually sounds nothing like the two on-screen Marios we had in the '80s and '90s, and his cartoonish Italian accent actually stripped away a layer of Mario's (and by extension, Luigi's) identity — that of a schlubby plumber living in Brooklyn, New York.
Professional wrestler and Cyndi Lauper's dad in the "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" music video, Captain Lou Albano acted out the portly plumber in both animated and live-action segments of Mario's Saturday morning cartoons of the '80s and '90s, most notably The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Born in Rome and having spent a long portion of his adult life in New York, Albano certainly had some similarities to the backstory of the character he was portraying, all while his using a genuine Italian-American Brooklyn accent.
Now, as some people have pointed out, Pratt's not Italian, which in their minds makes him less qualified to play Mario in the more classic '80s style. But when Mario made his first jump to the silver screen in 1993, Bob Hoskins followed up with a similar voice, despite not even being American.
Kids, probably the target demo for that first Mario movie, would likely only have recognized Hoskins as the hard-nosed New York private eye from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, released five years prior, and seeing as he used a similar voice for Mario, it seemed like there was a general idea at the time of how the jumpy plumber should sound. Until Martinet's performance, Mario may have been spouting off mamma-mias, but he was doing it in throaty New Yorkese.
Unfortunately, neither of those two actors are still with us. Albano passed away of a heart attack in 2009 at the age of 76; Hoskins of pneumonia in 2014 at the age of 71.
And it's highly possible that Pratt, age 43, grew up watching both of them and used their performances to form his idea of what Mario should be. We already know from his monologue presented before the movie trailer's world premiere that he's been a Mario fan since the '80s, as he recounted his memories of feeding quarters to an arcade machine at his local laundromat, and that's one of the most '80s things a person can do.
That brings up another complaint the Internet likes to throw around: that Chris Pratt is just doing his Chris Pratt voice. Well ... is he? Mario doesn't even make an appearance in the trailer posted on animation company Illumination's YouTube page until the 1:34 mark, which is more than 65 percent of the way through, and he's neither seen nor heard for the last 27 seconds. In fact, despite playing the main character, he only has two brief lines in the entire trailer. Other than a few "oof" sounds as he tumbles and bounces off a few towering mushrooms, we've only heard Pratt utter two lines as Mario: "What is this place?" and "Mushroom Kingdom, here we come," and the latter sounds at worst like he's trying too hard to sound like a real New Yorker.
The point is, roughly half of the people who are supposedly fans of this full-length motion picture seem to be condemning it based on the seven seconds they've heard the lead actor speak, and that's a knee-jerk reaction. Three years back, gamers on the Internet forced a movie studio to change Sonic the Hedgehog after his trailer dropped, and now some people want to do it again, asking the waiter to take their meal back before they've had their first bite. There's certainly nothing wrong with Martinet's portrayal of Mario in the games, but this is a different medium, and if Pratt's performance falls flat, let it fall flat on its own merits after you've seen it.
But seriously, fix that butt or we protest. We did it once; we'll do it again.