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“ | I need the rock and the Princess Daisy. Then I'll finally be able to merge our world with theirs and get rid of the mammals! | „ |
~ President Koopa talking over his scheme with Lena. |
President Koopa is the main antagonist of the 1993 live-action film Super Mario Bros., which is loosely based on the Super Mario Bros. video game series. He is the film's loose adaptation of Bowser.
He is a thoroughly corrupt and self-proclaimed "President" of Dinohattan who plots a large scale assault and takeover of Earth. Unlike his video game counterpart, Koopa, like the other inhabitants of Dinohattan, is a humanoid with dinosaur ancestry.
He was portrayed by the late Dennis Hopper, who also played Peter Vollmer in The Twilight Zone, Tom Ripley in The American Friend, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Howard Payne in Speed, the Deacon in Waterworld, Victor Drazen in 24, and George Struggs in Deadly Creatures.
Personality[]
Koopa's personality is similar to Bowser in the games at the time. However, he is shown to have a straightforward and comprehensible motive in regard to mutually merging both dimensions, citing that he intends to use Daisy to merge them for the future of his species, especially since his species has to go through several hardships that stem from the synchronous world being a nearly complete wasteland.
Despite this, Koopa still sees himself as a villainous, calculating and manipulative person; while pretending to be a lawyer for Mario and Luigi, he tells them that he is "one evil, egg-sucking son of a snake", and doesn't deny this after his true identity is revealed. He even passed out a law that arrests people for singing songs that insult him, and another law that arrests people for being plumbers.
Koopa is also shown to be a germophobic person. In his first appearance when he rants about how he rules the world overwhelmed with fungus and slime, he dunks his hands in boiling mud in an attempt to sterilize them. When he first meets the Mario brothers, he shakes their hands, but wipes his hand off with tissues afterwards; after assaulting Luigi soon afterwards, a police officer sprays his hands with disinfectant, and even later has a laboratory technician de-evolved into primordial slime simply for sneezing in his presence.
Appearance[]
Koopa is a middle-aged man with sea green eyes and blonde hair with streaks of gray shaped into a crown who dresses in a black business uniform. Although he is human in appearance, he is actually a highly evolved Tyrannosaurus rex.
After he was de-evolved by the Mario brothers, he gained eyes with slit pupils, spikes on his head, a reptilian tongue and his face morphing into being more reptilian. Near the end of the film, he's de-evolved into a semi-humanoid tyrannosaur before morphing into his true dinosaur form that resembles a gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex.
History[]
Becoming President[]
Koopa was born in the city of Dinohattan, in a parallel universe created 65 million years ago, when the famous asteroid struck planet Earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Despite their humanoid appearance, Koopa and the rest of his people were actually descended from dinosaurs that survived the extinction event in this parallel dimension. Koopa himself is a descendent of Tyrannosaurus rex the most infamous carnivore of all time. Life in this new world was not pleasant or easy, as the world largely consisted of a barren wasteland.
Nothing is known about Koopa's life before he became president. Given that he was introduced wearing a military uniform, he probably was probably originally a soldier in King Bowser's army. Eventually, Koopa launched a successful coup against the unsuspecting King. Using a special machine (which he called a devo) that he and his allies had created, Koopa de-evolved Bowser. The process rewrote the Kings DNA, transforming him into one of his early ancestors, in Bowser's case primordial fungus. Despite this, Bowser was able to retain some measure of his conciousness and took up residence within the machine. This forced Koopa to build another chamber and de-evolution machine following his take over. As the years passed, Bowser expanded his new form all over the city, until finally most of Dinohattan was coated in a thick layer of fungus, much to the germaphobic Koopa's ire.
With the King vanquished, Koopa became the undisbuted master of his world. Koopa proved to be an ineffective ruler, more akin to a tyrannical dictator. He ruled his people with an iron-fist and had absolute authority. He proved unable to solve many of the issues relating to food or water. Anybody that spoke out against him was strapped into his devo machine and mutated into a goomba, which then became a member of his own private army. Aware of the parallel dimensions, Koopa planned to use his army to overthrow humanity and take control of what he believed to be a much better world.
There was however, a small hitch. In order to access the other dimension, Koopa needed a shard of rock, which had broken off from the meteorite that divided the dimensions 65 million years ago. Only by uniting "The rock" with the rest of the asteroid, could the two worlds become one again. To make matters worse, the only people capable of accomplishing this feat, were those of the royal bloodline.
Following her husbands fate, Bowser's wife took both the fragment and their egg (which later hatched into the Princess Daisy) to the human world, leaving both of them at a convent in Brooklyn. Koopa managed to follow her through means unspecified, whereupon he confronted the former Queen in the sewers. He demanded to the location of the rock but would get no information out of her. As the unstable tunnel started to collapse, the former Queen in a final effort to protect both her daughter and the human world, knocked one of the support beams into Koopa, knocking him back and causing the tunnel to collapse. The subsequent cave-in killed her. Koopa however, survived and returned to his home dimension.
Meeting the Mario Brothers[]
Despite Daisy's mother's sacrifice, Koopa was eventually able to gain access to the human world again. This was due to the actions of the corporation owner Anthomy Scapelli, whose construction team unintentionally cleared the blockage and weakened the barrier between the dimensions. As such, Koopa was able to send his cousins Iggy and Spike to Brooklyn, where the duo were ordered to find Princess Daisy and bring her to him. Unfortunately, this turned out to be quite bothersome for the corrupt King, as Iggy and Spike were not very intelligent or compentant henchmen. Over a number of months, they kidnapped five innocent women, who Koopa was forced to keep locked up within his tower, to prevent word of either his plans or existence from leaking back to the human world.
Then, one day, whilst moaning to his girlfriend Lena about how lucky the mammals have it, whilst their dimension gets worse every day, Iggy and Spike finally brought him good news; they had finally captured Daisy. Elated, Koopa asked his cousins for the rock, only to discover that they did not have it. During Daisy's abduction, the pair were followed by the brothers Mario and Luigi, the latter of whom managed to grab the rock from Daisy's person as she tried to escape from her captors. Learning that the fragment that held the key to his dominion was in the hand of a couple of plumbers, he had Lena put out a "Plumber alert". The police and citizens were then offered 2,000 gold coins in exchange for the Mario brothers captor.
Mario and Luigi are apprehended not long afterwards and imprisoned. They eventually seen by Koopa who is disguised as a lawyer named Larry Lazard. When he asks the plumbers about the meteorite piece, he doesn't get the answer he wants so he orders his men to take them to the evolution chamber to be de-evolved.
The two plumbers watch as Koopa de-evolves a citizen named Toad into a goomba as a punishment for singing songs protesting his reign. However, Mario and Luigi end up shoving him into the evolution chair and set the dial to de-evolve him too. Fortunately, his men stop the process, but the damage is done as some of Koopa's previous Tyrannosaurus features have returned. Furious, he swears the plumbers will die.
Later Koopa is mad with Iggy, so he has him apparently de-evolved, instead Koopa gives him higher intelligence because he always knew his minions were moronic and Spike seems happy with his seeming promotion and his companion's fate, until Koopa reveals he had the test programmed for both of them and although Spike screams in protest, he actually benefits from the upgrading, he becomes more intelligent like his cousin. Koopa orders the two to set off and kill or capture the Mario brothers. They do so.
Koopa gets into an argumentative discussion with Lena, his girlfriend, because Lena wants to take control and become the chosen one to merge the dimensions, but Koopa wants to do it himself and kill everyone else. Koopa betrays Lena and when Spike and Iggy return from their mission (having actually befriended the Mario brothers) Koopa orders their execution in his anger. However, Spike and Iggy escape by siding with Daisy. This sparks a rebellion against Koopa.
Finally, Koopa ambushes Daisy and steals the meteorite shard, planning to cause the portal. Daisy confronts Koopa about betraying her father, the King, and "killing" him but Koopa reveals the King's still alive, albeit in fungus form. Koopa imprisons Daisy and the plumbers, but delightfully orders a pizza to celebrate his success. Lena, enraged by Koopa's betrayal, electrocutes herself to death when trying to open the portal. Koopa stands to prepare the portal and announces to the city of Dinohattan that he's making history, then humorously asks where his pizza is. Then the portal is opened, and Koopa steps inside, getting transported, with his bodyguard Goombas, to the city of Manhattan. Koopa is overjoyed at "being home" and announces that he will turn everyone into monkeys. He does with the boss of the construction site, shrinking him into a monkey. Koopa then famously mocks him with "Monkey!".
However, Mario and Luigi escape their cells with Daisy and the other captives, and they pull Koopa back into the dinosaur city. An epic battle ensues in the center of Dinohattan, but when Koopa gets the upper hand, Mario sets off a Bob-omb which walks through the city. A taxi driver narrowly hits it, and tersely waits until the bomb walks by.
Mario and Luigi then arm themselves with De-evolve guns and shoot Koopa mutating him into a humanoid Tyrannosaur. Suddenly the Bob-omb that Mario activated earlier explodes underneath the platform where Koopa is standing, knocking him into an empty building tank.
There is sudden silence and Mario and Luigi go over to the place where Koopa fell. Suddenly with a monstrous roar, Koopa appears again in his true dinosaur form, scaring the plumbers and some of the other citizens. The Mario Brothers then use the guns again, this time turning Koopa into "primordial slime" - the lowest form of life which drips out of the tank and spills into the street below. With Koopa finally gone, everyone cheers. The citizens then begin destroying all his voting posters to erase his evil memory.
Quotes[]
“ | Where's the rock?! | „ |
~ President Koopa's first spoken lines. |
“ | Monkey! | „ |
~ President Koopa when he tried to devolve Mario with a devolution gun and instead turned a random business man into said animal. |
“ | Here's what's logical to me: If you do not return with the plumbers and the rock, I shall personally kill you. | „ |
~ President Koopa talking to Iggy and Spike. |
“ | I'LL KILL THAT PLUMBER! | „ |
~ President Koopa |
“ | Hiddy ho mammals. | „ |
~ President Koopa |
“ | Give me the rock, you fool. It's mine! Give me that rock! | „ |
~ President Koopa |
“ | And now, I'm gonna make a monkey outta you, plumber! | „ |
~ President Koopa |
“ | YOU PLUMBERS! | „ |
~ President Koopa's last words before getting de-evolved by Mario and Luigi and turned into primordial slime. |
Trivia[]
- Throughout the film, billboards of President Koopa are seen.
- King Koopa's de-evolution gun is a Super Scope, a bazooka-like accessory for the Super Nintendo.
- In an early concept art, King Koopa was originally going to wear armor that resembled his gaming counterpart.
- In a deleted scene, Koopa had one of his workers de-evolve in primordial slime for sneezing, which was supposed to explain why there was slime on the floor after Mario shoved him on the chair.
- If you look closely in the introduction scene, Daisy's mother appears to wearing a uniform very similiar to the goomba's. Although not confirmed, it is possible that Koopa originally intended to de-evolve her just like he did with her husband.
- Dennis Hopper has said that he did not enjoy working on the film due to its known troubled production and heavy rewrites and, alongside Bob Hoskins, (who portrayed Mario in the film) admitted that it was the only movie in his career that he regretted.
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Ultra Pukupuku |
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Bowser (KC Mario) |
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