The animated film Super Mario Bros. from 1986 is being restored in 4K

Long ago, in one of the first Total recall features I wrote for this site, I covered The great mission to save Princess Peach!, the first and in many ways the best Nintendo movie ever made.

Here is what I wrote at the time:

The plot of the film is quite classic. Two plumbers (who for some reason work in a grocery store) are drawn into a world of video games, starring just about every villain in the franchise you can think of, and must save a princess (and kick it off). Bowser’s ass) while they’re in there.

Spoilers: they save the day. Fun fact: The movie also foreshadows perhaps Mario’s greatest boss encounter, as Mario 64’s “grab Bowser by the tail” movement actually makes its debut in Great Mission. It had decent animation, a nice “cover all the bases” plot (in terms of getting all the characters and locations in the game) and a few pub-trivia-esque voice actors including Mario being the narrator. of Sega Rally 2 and Luigi being, brilliantly, Telemachus of Ulysses 31.

Interestingly, however, I closed this article with:

While it may have come out on top of Mario-mania, featuring renowned voice actors and doing quite well when it hits theaters in Japan (it even had its own line of cash products), in 2012, the film never existed.

It was released once on VHS in Japan, and that’s it. No international release. No DVD output. Nothing. Unless you want to pay for a mint for a Japanese video tape, in fact the only way you can watch it is on YouTube.

And hey, what do you know, Carnivol did just that. Working for years on the project, and starting with a few VHS copies, they eventually got their hands on a 16mm cinema version of the film and have since managed to restore the original reel and convert the film to 4K. . .

It is not a small side project either; Carnivol estimates that in total the efforts to obtain, digitize and restore this film have cost them in the order of 20,000 USD.

Below are the current (and unfinished) results of this project, a Verry much higher version of the film than those previously available:

Compare that to the version I shared in 2012, which … well, looks like crap in comparison:

As beautiful as Carnivol’s work is, it is still incomplete, and in order to finalize the whole project, they are handing over the raw files and working on someone who hopefully can finish the job. . .

The entire movie was uploaded in the first video above, but if you want to watch it all and understand what’s going on, you should know that there are only automatic subtitles, and in this case it is not. are not … works fine.