 So I was reading The Guardian this morning, and I came across an article critiquing Chris Pratt's voice in the Super Mario Bros movie teaser. And if The Guardian, supposedly the United Kingdom's highest of brown newspapers, is reporting on Chris Pratt's controversial voice in the Super Mario Bros movie, you know that the discussion has gone mainstream. So, to add to the existing enormous pile of hot takes, reactions and angry rants, I give my own opinion, it's fine. It's not great, it's not terrible, given that we've only had about four seconds of voiced Mario at the point of making this video, it feels early to make a definitive decision, but it's fine. What I find more interesting about the teaser, and this is connected to the voice, is that it's bringing back an element of Mario lore that hasn't been around for about two decades. The idea that Mario is an immigrant to the Mushroom Kingdom. We see his bumpy arrival, then see him blown away by the majesty of all the Toadstools. This was once upon a time a core part of the Mario mythos, turning up in various different forms in different adaptations. Over in Japan, the anime Super Mario Bros. The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach features Mario playing a video game before being sucked into the game when Princess Peach asked for his help. In America, the Super Mario Bros. Super show envisioned Mario and Luigi as Italian-American plumbers from Brooklyn who are walked into the Mushroom Kingdom by accident. This idea returned for the first Super Mario Bros. movie. The idea of Mario and Luigi as newcomers to Dino Hatten is the whole point of the film. In recent years, though, Nintendo has been very hesitant to give the Mario series any concrete backstory, or indeed any plot of any kind when it can be avoided. Clearly something about Rosalina's backstory scared them. The idea of New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey, bringing with it ordinarily proportioned human beings, appeared to be the death knell of the idea that Mario has ever been simply a regular human in regular New York. This is a shame, because the idea of Mario as a blue-collar immigrant has always been a driving force within the games from a thematical standpoint. You all know how much we love to find a moral in any story, and the moral of the original Super Mario Bros. has a lot more weight to it when you take the game as a story about a humble immigrant laborer doing battle against the monster king, saving an entire kingdom from invasion and in doing so finding acceptance and a place for himself in his new home. If we are to get shades of these themes within the Super Mario Bros. movie, with Mario arriving from elsewhere in a Narnia-esque situation, then giving him an accent that places him as a New Yorker fits within the driving force of the story, the traditional New York fairy tale having always been about the possibilities and opportunities provided by immigration. Even if the film doesn't feature New York as Mario's original home at all, which is entirely possible if not fairly probable, the small choice of an accent carries with it a lot of subtle foreshadowing for the plot. Now, the big question is whether a man from the Midwest is really the best choice to play a Brooklynite. But then, the very British Tom Holland has been playing a Queensboy in the Spider-Man films for years, so you can see why the producers on the Mario movie might have thought they could have gone away with this. Plus, there's no guarantee that this incarnation of Mario will be from Brooklyn anyway, even if Chris Pratt's attempt at an accent seemingly pays homage to the Super Mario Bros. Super show. Would Chris Pratt have been my first choice for an Italian-American New Yorker Mario? Definitely not. My first choice would have been the New Jersey-born Danny DeVito, but then Danny DeVito would also have been my first choice for Dr. Robotnik and Detective Pikachu. In both of these previous cases, an unorthodox casting choice ultimately turned out to be popular enough. I will be interested to see whether Chris Pratt can win over fans once we've heard more than eight words from him. In the meantime, he's fine. I'm too tired to muster up any strong feelings, either way. I'm not overwhelmed with any particular emotion, nor am I underwhelmed. I am simply overwhelmed. Being simply overwhelmed is not what the internet wants on a subject like this, though. Algorithms are designed to reward engagement, and the easiest way to get engagement is to be either tremendously positive, or, and this is the easier path, tremendously negative. The internet is fueled by hate, as we all know. Yet, while I'm not exactly the president of the Chris Pratt fan club, I do somewhat see what the creatives behind the Mario movie were thinking when hiring him as Mario. Besides thinking whether right or wrong that a cartoon aimed at children will perform better at the box office if it has a famous face attached to use for promotion. I can't say that I'm a fan of that particular line of thought, especially as Mario is already a famous face.