Remember when we learned Chris Pratt would voice Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie? Remember all the anger and jokes? Well, safe to say, none of that mattered. The film is already a box office smash after less than a week. It’s setting all sorts of records and we’re certainly going to get sequels with him still in the role. But it turns out his performance should tick us off, just not for the reason anyone predicted. We’re angry the studio didn’t allow Pratt and Charlie Day to do their original voices for the Mario characters, the ones that had them sounding like they were on The Sopranos and Goodfellas.
Oh madone! You hear about this thing? It’s upsetting us a little bit. A little bit. Pratt and his big screen plumbing brother Day, who voiced Luigi, told Entertainment Weekly about voices they tried early in the process of making the Super Mario Bros. movie. The film’s stewards nixed them for being too thick.
Day was told to sound “maybe a little less” like a Goodfellas character. Meanwhile, Pratt’s attempts at an Italian accent initially got him a note to sound “a little” less like he comes from New Jersey. Specifically, Pratt heard he was “doing a Tony Soprano thing.”
To paraphrase the late, great James Gandolfini’s fictional mobster, “No, no, no. We don’t want any of that California bullshit.” We want Italian mafiosos Mario and Luigi. For all the consternation about Pratt’s casting, his Mario voice was totally fine! If anything, we wish it was actively more absurd. And you can’t get any more absurd than two video game plumbers who sound like they’re going to whack Bowser before they spend the night with their goomahs. Or, in this case, goombas.
Good thing they’ll have sequels to let us hear those mobster accents. And they better, because we promise we won’t fahgetaboutit.