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These days, whenever an actor or filmmaker signs onto a nerdy property, their promotional tour always involves a bit of catechizing. We geeks expect the people making movies about our favorite comics and games to know everything about them, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie cast is no exception.
You might think that expectation would pose a problem for Donald Glover, who joins the movie’s cast as the voice of Yoshi, Mario’s dino pal. “I’m going to be honest: I never owned a Super Nintendo,” Glover confesses to Den of Geek. “I only owned a Nintendo, and then I won a Nintendo 64 off the radio. My dad wouldn’t buy the Super Nintendo, because we already had a 32-bit system with PlayStation,” he adds, cringing a bit as he invokes Mario’s competitor.
As much as it sounds like Glover’s throwing his dad under the Mario kart, Nintendo actually plays into a cherished memory for the actor. “The original Mario is burned into my memory,” he explains. “My dad brought it home from Service Merchandise. He worked nights, so he brought it home in the morning. I remember waking up for school, and he was just there playing it. And I was like, ‘What is this!?’
“He would try to go to sleep while we played it, but it was so new, and he didn’t understand how it worked. So every time that we would get a coin, and it would do that ‘ding ding ding’ noise, he would think it was us pressing the start button.
“He’d shout from his room, ‘You’re going to break it!’ And we were like, ‘It’s just the pennies!’”
The story gets a laugh from Glover’s co-star Benny Safdie, who joins the cast as Bowser Jr. and has his own memories of playing Mario as a kid. “My favorite was the Super Nintendo when you do the cage with all those things moving around,” he enthuses. “I’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy a lot, trying to get all the stars.”
However, Toad voice performer Keegan-Michael Key can’t quite join in with the fun. “I didn’t have a Nintendo,” he reveals. “I don’t have any memories to share of that, because I didn’t play any original NES games.”
Between The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and its 2023 predecessor The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Key has been getting a crash course in Nintendo, making up for lost time. That won’t be necessary for Donald Glover’s children, if they ever decide to follow in their father’s footsteps.
“I’m playing Super Mario Odyssey with my kids right now, and we play Mario Kart a lot,” he says. “But I’ve really been wanting to play the original again, because in Odyssey, you get to play the original Mario on walls in the game when you go down certain pipes.
“My kids think it’s so weird, but I’m like, ‘This is how it used to be!’”
Clearly, it’s Glover’s lot to explain Mario mechanics to his family, no matter if they’re from the previous generation and the next. Hopefully, that responsibility will lessen some once The Super Mario Galaxy Movie makes experts out of everyone.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is now playing in theaters worldwide.
The post Donald Glover Reveals Why Mario Is So Important in His Family appeared first on Den of Geek.
