Sophia Michaels
It’s-a-here, Mario trailer: Nintendo and animation studio Illumination have shared the first teaser for Super Mario Bros. Movie, featuring the beloved video game mustachioed plumber as voiced by Chris Pratt.
The trailer opens with Bowser (voiced by Jack Black) and his army of koopas invading an ice world inhabited by penguins, which the giant fire-breathing turtle — or dragon? whatever creature Bowser is — easily pummels and takes possession of one of those stars that makes Mario invincible for 30 seconds in the video game.
The action then cuts to Mario inexplicably being dumped in the Mushroom Kingdom, where he encounters Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and some potentially lethal shrooms. For all the uproar about Pratt voicing the Italian-American plumber, the actor doesn’t sound too Pratt-y in his two lines of dialogue that are revealed in the trailer; Pratt doesn’t give Mario a cartoonish accent which is a positive, nor does he sound exactly like the lead character in The Lego Movie that he also voiced.
The preview ends with Luigi (Charlie Day) outrunning a bunch of skeleton koopas, or “Dry Bones,” as the MarioWiki refers to them.
As part of the Nintendo Direct presentation before the trailer’s unveiling, Pratt and Black spoke briefly about their roles. “Growing up, I spent hours of my life stomping koopa troopas,” Pratt said via video, adding that he used to play the Mario arcade game before it came to Nintendo. Black added that he learned to fire-breath like Bowser by taking lessons from Gene Simmons from Kiss.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie, out April 7 in theaters, boasts an all-star voice cast that includes Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong, Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek and Sebastian Maniscalco as Spike.
