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On the first night Jack stayed in the Bunker, the half-brothers watched the Super Mario Brothers movie as a bonding experience. The quality of the movie almost tore them apart.

Matt here. I remember seeing this movie for the first time at an after-school program. I must’ve been in fourth or fifth grade. I’d already heard that a lady got turned into a skeleton, which freaked me out because it sounded so unlike the Mario games I loved. My parents hadn’t taken me to see it in the theater because they’d heard it was a trainwreck.

But in the darkened classroom in the elementary school basement, me and another kid whose mom ran the program watched the Super Mario Bros. movie. It was every bit as lousy as I’d heard. I tried to console myself by being happy that Yoshi made an appearance, even if it was lousy. Watching it again for this podcast I didn’t find it as brutally awful as I had as a kid. It was more frustrating than devastating. It’s amazing how something so ill-conceived could be created and carried through without anyone stopping it, especially from a company as conservative as Nintendo.