As someone who grew up with Mario jumping from one series of floating blocks to another, I never really questioned why there appear to be gravity-defying construction materials in the Mario universe. But I can absolutely see where someone unfamiliar with the Mario franchise might want to know why those blocks are floating around in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

The movie, like the games, never really explains why the Mushroom Kingdom's blocks float. However, they very nearly had an explanation that made it into the film. It's only because Illumination's CEO is "allergic to exposition" that the explanation was cut from the final release.

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In an interview with Variety, co-director Aaron Horvath shared his theory for why the Mushroom Kingdom's blocks are floating. "Our idea was that there’s a mineral that’s natural to the Mushroom Kingdom, which we call ‘floatanium,’ because it sounded funny to us," he said. "The Toads mine it and transform it into these blocks and use them for construction purposes."

Via Nintendo.

Yes, "floatanium" very nearly became part of the Mario canon, but Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri was unwilling to slow the Mario Movie down just to explain why all the blocks are floating around. After all, there's a rainbow racetrack, a bunch of walking and talking mushrooms, and a terrifying turtle-lizard-thing that breathes fire and wants to take over the universe, and none of these are ever really explained. Why would some floating blocks need 30 seconds devoted to justifying their existence? They float. End of explanation.

What us old-school Mario fans really need is an explainer on how this film ever got greenlit at all after the disastrous '90s movie. Variety noted that the first Mario movie was such a gong show that stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo would even get drunk in between shots--something that Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto would never have allowed had he known.

"If I’d have had a relationship with Miyamoto and brought him onboard, if he had been a producer and he understood what we were doing, he wouldn’t have let certain things happen," recounted Rocky Morton, co-director of the first and only live-action Mario film. "We would have been a team, and it would have been a different film."

Indeed it would have. Miyamoto told Variety that he and Nintendo learned their lesson the first time around and ensured that the animated feature would honor the games.

"We were fearful of all the failure of past IP adaptations, where there’s a license and a distance between the original creators and the creators of the films," Miyamoto said. "The fans get outraged and mad because the studios didn’t do justice to the original work. We really didn’t want a backlash."

It seems like Nintendo's oversight has been a good thing. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is well on its way to breaking video game box office records, and it's not even Friday yet.

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