What if we told you the FIRST Super Mario movie… wasn’t the one you remember? Long before the billion dollar success of 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie, and well before the notorious 1993 adaptation, there was a bizarre, nearly forgotten anime released only in Japan: Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach. A film so strange, so off-model, and so wildly misunderstood, it never even made it to Western audiences… until now. How did Nintendo allow this to happen? Why does it feel nothing like Mario? And how did we go from this… to one of the most successful animated films of all time?