Over the years, Mario has had a lot of jobs. The Italian plumber has spent very little time practicing plumbing, instead trying his hand at construction work, kart racing, tennis, soccer, baseball, a whole host of Olympic games, attending parties, turning into paper, doing RPG quests with his brother, beating the tar out of characters from other Nintendo and non-Nintendo franchises, practicing medicine, teaching typing, and more.

Barbie is similarly a Jane of all trades. In fact, she's one of the few well-known characters with a CV more packed than Mario's. She's been a lifeguard, a beekeeper, an actor, 13 varieties of chef, many different kinds of teacher, practiced just as many forms of medicine, fought in several branches of the military, and held many, many more jobs in the 63 years since her 1959 debut than I ever plan to.

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Interestingly enough, both of these characters are headed to the big screen this year. Mario and Luigi have starred in a theatrically released film before, 1993's Super Mario Bros., plus The Super Mario Bros. animated series in 1989. Barbie, too, has starred in many animated movies. But, their new films come at an interesting time for adaptations. Whereas the previous Mario movie hit in the early '90s, when video game and comic book adaptations tended to bear little resemblance to their source material, adaptations are now expected to take the source material seriously. The Last of Us is the latest example, but The Witcher, Pokemon, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and Sonic the Hedgehog have all gotten big-budget adaptations in recent years.

mario kart in the movie trailer on rainbow road

But, what does it mean to take characters like Mario and Barbie seriously? What does it even look like to take characters seriously when they're primarily defined by the outfit they're currently wearing? You can assign personality traits to both characters, to be sure, but that's largely an exercise in analyzing their functions and working backwards. A Mario player will usually die many times before they complete the game, so we think of Mario as persistent. Mario always saves Peach no matter how many times Bowser kidnaps her, all while spouting happy-go-lucky lines like "Let's a go!", so we think of him as a tireless optimist.

This is obviously a different kind of characterization than, say, the one Naughty Dog gives Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Those are characters with fixed backstories, with traumas that shape who they, and with personalities that they demonstrate in many small, tangible ways. It's easy to take those characters seriously. There are things that Joel would do and things that he wouldn't do. But Mario will do anything and Barbie is similarly hard to characterize. When a person has been a veterinarian and a Hollywood producer and a fighter pilot, how do you think seriously about their character?

The answer, usually, is that you don't. Barbie and Mario tend to be what they need to be for the adventure at hand. But, we live in the age of toys and games needing to matter. They're big money and the people who loved them as children have been told that they never have to give them up. There aren't many non-IP movies for adults playing in wide release in 2023, so movies like Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie often receive a level of thought the characters weren't designed to receive. These characters were designed to be simple avatars and vectors of wish fulfillment for kids. How seriously should we really take them?

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