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“There’s something really special about Mario games,” says composer Brian Tyler. As a lifelong fan of the Mario series, Tyler was excited to bring the music from all of those worlds into a new animated universe for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. “I realized by hearing the music outside of the game, it immediately takes you back in a way that’s different from movies,” he says. “With movies, you typically see them once or twice, whereas when you add together the playtime of any game you like, you’re in that universe for days.”
The main challenge was to take the iconic Mario sound, from the original game’s composer Koji Kondo, and create something familiar but more expansive. “To me, the universe that the movie is in had to have the scale of a Star Wars movie, but tonally Mario,” says Tyler. “We ended up going outside of the sound of a game and into doing a recorded full live orchestra.” In addition to the orchestra, Tyler says it was important to still give the score an electronic element that would reference back to the video games. “On top of that I used some of the sounds from the music of the games from the ’80s to early 2000s. I’d be doing a drum fill and some of the sounds would be on a drum kit from Mario Kart, so there’s this kind of merging of all these different kinds of things to make it sound really unique.”
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As an avid player of Mario games, Tyler had to fight off the instinct to use the iconic themes that he grew up with. “I’ve never encountered a challenge like that where you’re negotiating with your inner nostalgic,” he says. “I tried to make sure that magical quality of the time was there, but it can’t just be fan service where you’re doing everything as a nostalgic dopamine hit, but then it doesn’t really work dramatically.”
In the end, Tyler says the biggest compliment he received was from the original creators of Mario at Nintendo. “I played them this 15-minute theme suite that was all original themes of mine, and by the end they’re like, ‘This is Mario.’”
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