“The Super Mario Bros.” Movie” Composer Brian Tyler – Deadline

Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

“There is something really special Mario games,” says composer Brian Tyler. As a lifelong fan of his Mario series, Tyler was excited to bring the music from all of these worlds into a new animated universe for The movie Super Mario Bros. “I realized that listening to the music outside of the game, it immediately takes you back in a different way than the movies,” he says. “With movies, you usually see them once or twice, and when you add in the playing time of whatever game you like, you’re in that universe for days.”

The main challenge was to get the iconic Mario sound, by the original game’s composer Koji Kondo, and create something familiar yet more expansive. “For me, the universe the film is in had to have the scale of a Star Wars film, but tonally Mariosays Tyler. “We ended up going outside of the sound of a game and doing a recorded full live orchestra.” In addition to the orchestra, Tyler says it was important to give the music an electronic element that would reference the video games. “Also, I used some of the sounds from game music from the 80s to the early 2000s. I would do a drum fill and some of the sounds would be on a drum kit from Mario Kartso there’s this kind of amalgamation of all these different kinds of things to make it sound really unique.”

As an avid player of Mario games, Tyler had to fight the instinct to use the iconic themes he grew up with. “I’ve never encountered a challenge like this where you negotiate with your inner nostalgia,” he says. “I tried to make sure the magical quality of the time was there, but it can’t just be fanservice where you do 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 his original creators Mario at Nintendo. “I played them this 15-minute theme suite that was all my original themes, and at the end they say, ‘This is Mario.”