Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros Movie made a surprise appearance on the Superbowl.
If you can’t guess what this could be, Nintendo and Illumination Studios ran a Superbowl commercial. The NFL Superbowl has been renowned for many years as the pinnacle of advertising spots, with many movies, shows, and just general products throwing their big budgets for 30 second spots during the season ending game, year after year.
The Super Mario Bros Movie commercial went nostalgic, and a little clever. They put up a commercial for the Super Mario Bros, meaning Mario and Luigi with their plumber service. This commercial was also clearly animated in the Illumination Studios style, making it the first time many Americans ever see them in that style. To cap it off, the commercial is built around the theme of The Super Mario Bros Super Show, the Plumber Rap.
The Super Mario Bros Super Show was a 1989 kids show, that featured short cartoons with Mario and Zelda, broken up by live action segments starring professional wrestling personality Lou Albano playing Mario, and actor Danny Wells as Luigi. The theme song Plumber Rap was based on the Overworld theme of the video game Super Mario Bros, as composed by Koji Kondo. TV theme composer Shuki Levy made some changes to the theme to make it a rap song, and also composed the lyrics, which were then sung by Albano and Wells.
Fans of the show were sure to get a huge nostalgia hit, but it was also very interesting if you think about what it meant in real life. The Super Mario Bros Super Show was produced by Andy Heyward, who claims he spent a lot of effort convincing Nintendo to license the property to them. Nintendo would eventually agree, for the same reasons that they produced The Wizard and gave Hollywood carte blanche to make the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie. That reason being, as Nintendo’s Bill White revealed in the David Sheff book Game Over, to raise awareness of the Mario characters. 20 years later, that theme song is doing the same thing all over again.
The commercial ends with a hotline number and a website, and here is the most interesting thing. The hotline number is real!
Thankfully the hotline isn’t an actual 1-800 number with 1-800 rates. As you can listen to in the Twitter clips below, Charlie Day is doing his Luigi voice for the recorded message. The message is less than a minute long, and directs people to text the same number they gave out, or visit the website.
As for the website? Super Mario Bros Plumbing looks just like any other US small business website, running off WordPress on AWS servers. The website has a bunch of little Easter eggs we will leave you to find here, but we will share one that you probably won’t find on your own.
The Super Mario Bros Plumbing website has a 404 page, which shows three tall green pipes. Pressing each of those pipes gives you flushing sounds. However, if you press the pipes in the order 2-3-1, the last pipe will play a segment of the Super Mario Bros overworld theme.
Why 2-3-1? This is a reference to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had its own reference to the Mario Bros, a group of brothers called the Super Deku Bros. Some of the Deku Bros are bosses, and to beat them you have to fight them in the order 2-3-1. You can get one of the Deku Bros to spoil this for you, and the bosses themselves will also refer to it.
But that’s not really the big hidden Easter egg on the site. This is:
The Super Mario Bros Movie is a theatrical exclusive, launching on April 7, 2023. You can watch the commercial below.
