The Super Mario Bros. movie is one of the most infamous cases of a bad video game adaptation. The 1993 film was a flop commercially and critically, but many Nintendo fans can’t help but love it anyway. If you enjoy it for the beautiful trainwreck it is, you’ll be happy to know there’s more of it now than ever! An extended cut has just been released online, restoring over 20 minutes’ worth of deleted scenes.
Super Mario Bros. movie extended cut
On May 15, 2019, the official Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive team acquired a tape with a rough cut of the film featuring additional scenes. Over the past two years, they’ve been trickling out deleted scenes, including a political rap railing against the Koopa government. Unfortunately, the newly unearthed footage was of poor quality. To address this, the team recruited director/editor/artist Garrett Gilchrist to restore the footage. The result is a new and improved Super Mario Bros. movie extended cut with a run time of 125 minutes!
Okayhttps://t.co/nCIDh8h4LA https://t.co/UB2D8lIo51 pic.twitter.com/kINIqSH5yL
— Garrett Gilchrist (@TygerbugGarrett) June 1, 2021
Restoring the deleted scenes
For the Super Mario Bros. movie extended cut restoration, Gilchrist used Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, EBSynth, the Remini Photo app, Topaz AI Gigapixel, Virtualdub, EBSynth, and other tools, over a period of several weeks. He painted out dirt, splices, ghosting, and damage frame by frame in many scenes, using Photoshop. The 60fps VHS was carefully adjusted down to 24fps, noise reduced and color graded. A low-quality VHS of early concept trailers was also provided.
The Super Mario Bros. movie extended cut is technically still in development, as Gilchrist continues to make improvements. However, they wanted to release a version of it to the public in celebration of the film’s recent anniversary on May 28. If you’d like to learn more about the restoration process, you can check out the restoration commentary video.
