backSuper Mario Bros.: The Movie (DVD) - Page 4
Third attempted speed run - 1:44:29

Author: Mike Fireball
Average Rating: - 911 votes
Keywords: Super Mario Bros.; Achieving perfection; Not my president wristbands

Author's comments:
Because improvement is so often a relative concept, it's often difficult for us to truly know if we're truly making improvements that the world can appreciate with us. With the speed at which time passes, it becomes harder to immediately determine which aspects about ourselves, our work & our world we are improving, & which will end up being regarded as mistakes.

People with different beliefs have different views of improvement. One man's security of otherworldly salvation is another whole community's destroyed buildings.

What? Preachy? No, I'm not talking about 9/11. I'm still talking about King Koopa's attempt to unite the two dimensions.

Oh, yeah. They do look a lot alike. I guess I see your point.

Does reinventing the story of a beloved character improve it? It's hard to say. For global artistic acclaim, it's rarely recognized as a good idea to change existing details rather than simply add your own. The movie is rarely as good as the book, or the video game. Usually that's because books are a lot longer than 2 to 3 hours' worth of storytelling can provide. Sometimes the writers forget how much they truly have to work with & change too much. Comic book writers & screenwriters fall victim to this all the time, & now Batman has more plot holes than a story about Captain Swiss Cheese Man. Some say that this is what makes Batman legendary. Others who spend their time trying to improve a universal timeline of Batman lose sleep at night. And people laugh at them & call them obsessive for being passionate about something.

I am passionate about Nintendo. I have been since I was eight years old & first played Super Mario Bros. I spent the next few years of my life trying to improve my skill in the game and my understanding of its universe whenever I wasn't playing it. I had my desk in school moved next to the teacher's for making too many crayon drawings of Mario & Luigi when I was supposed to be doing seatwork or taking a test or otherwise paying attention to whatever everybody else in the fucking classroom was doing. I sang the theme song out loud while I was playing outside with my friends, or throwing a ball around in the garage by myself. I was laughed at for being obsessed with a hairy Italian guy's adventures through toadstool land.

Years later, when I was in college & nostalgia became cool & hip, my childhood obsession helped improve my social status. I could remember everything like it happened yesterday, & my peers enjoyed my endless rants, that I became obsessed with entertaining my friends, & sought an outlet with which to do so regularly. I began to learn how to make web pages & write articles about things I remembered. It became my passion, my obsession, to give my friends things to read. Then, when other writers began getting bored with reading about things people remembered, I became obsessed with learning how to tweak my writing style, so I could still write about the same subjects when I felt the need to & still entertain people I looked up to.

Then I became obsessed with improving my speed run on a game that I remebered well, & now, I'm obsessed with whittling this stupid movie down to the parts worth watching so I can make a joke about how one time I beat the game it's based on really fast. And now we're back to where we've started. An hour & 44 1/2 minutes' worth of film, & a question as to why to attempt speed runs.

People attempt speed runs in a chance at achieving perfection. It's a simple goal, really. Most, if not all major religions & philosophies are somewhat based around the attempt to become perfect. It's what life's all about, right?

Someone I look up to wrote a beautiful novel, & I am now obsessed with writing something better. I'm obsessed with coming up with the perfect "big idea," that I often forget to to run with the little ideas. Someone I love encourages me to write more little things by feeding me new subjects & ideas, & I have become obsessed with looking forward to them & attempting to write something perfect. And then I start to unreasonably feel like shit for not wanting them to stop.

And that's when you know that you've crossed the line from self improvement into improvement in the eyes of others. It's about wanting to be told you're perfect by somebody else, when you know full well that it's the worst mistake they can make, because then you'd actually start believing it.

My name is Mike, & I'm obsessed with entertaining you. I'm obsessed with trying to make you giggle. I'm obsessed with trying to take a stupid little idea & turn it into a big, greatly unrelated idea. Just like the writers of the Super Mario Bros. movie. I am them, & they are me. Please be gentle.

And for fuck's sake, slow down & enjoy what's been created for you.

Mike: mike@progressiveboink.com
Progressive Boink Main Page | Archives | Mike's Archives