Patreon Pin Up 5/29/23: Daisy (Fixed) (Patreon)

EDIT: Accidentally posted rough/unfinished versions in the line up on the first go. I felt quite the fool! 

Princess Daisy beats Captain Syrup in this month's Discord poll! To my knowledge, Daisy only ever appeared in one single mainline Mario game, that being Super Mario Land on the Game Boy. The Mario franchise was still relatively young, and I can only guess that back then Nintendo was toying with the idea of Mario having to rescue a different princess in every game. But if so, the harem idea was soon scrapped and Princess Peach/Toadstool became the default damsel for every entry. And so Daisy would have likely been forgotten had it not been for the advent of Mario sports titles! Yes, I imagine when Nintendo devs took a look at their roster and realized they only had one girl, they were thankful that they already had a second nearly identical girl in the established canon to pull from.

But I'm not here to talk about Daisy specifically, which is good because I just told you everything I know about the character. No, I finally saw the Mario Movie last week, that's why we're here. I just want to discuss my thoughts so I won't spoil anything, but if you haven't seen it and want to go in completely blind, this was your warning.

Critics of the Mario Movie lamented its paper-thin plot and shallow characters, and while I get where they're coming from, everything else about the movie was so much fun that I just didn't care. Give us a break, guys, not every animated movie has to have deep themes about trust and mortality like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish to be entertaining.

Am I biased? Yes, absolutely. I'm a lifelong Mario fan and the trailers alone were like visual relaxation therapy for me. Seeing this world I knew so well brought to new life in such a polished manner was something I was already sold on from day one. When I was growing up, video game movies were made by having an intern take two minutes to explain a game's premise to a madman, and then the final product would be a twisted artistic vision from said madman that often had shockingly little to do with the source material.

The Mario Movie feels like the extreme opposite of that scenario. Watching it, you feel that Nintendo must have been breathing down the necks of Hollywood at every single step of the creative process. Nearly everything about the presentation is 100% faithful to the games. There is not one minute that passes in this movie without a reference being made, be it as big as a character onscreen, or as small as a passing background detail or a few bars of a familiar song. This thing is fan service cocaine. I am not at all surprised that it made a bazillion dollars.

Combine those numbers with the success of the recent adaptation of The Last of Us, which had a comparable dedication to faithfulness to source material, and I think the days of wild artistic takes on video game franchises has come to a close. For good or bad, I think we'll be seeing a lot of faithful video game movies in the coming year or two, and that's fine with me. As always, let me know what you think. And just for fun what do you think the best bad video game movie was? My favorite is the Mortal Kombat movie from the 90's.