The Super Mario Bros. Movie — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

The Brooklyn pizzeria where Mario and Luigi watch their commercial air is named Punch-Out Pizzeria, after Nintendo's boxing series that began in arcades in 1984. The walls are covered in framed headshots of the games' fighters — Glass Joe and Mr. Sandman among them — turning the whole restaurant into a Punch-Out!! shrine. It's a fitting deep cut for a Mario film: in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on the NES, Mario himself appeared as the referee, one of his earliest cameo gigs outside his own series.

Inside the pizzeria sits an arcade cabinet labeled Jump Man — a barely disguised version of 1981's Donkey Kong, complete with girders and barrels visible on screen. "Jumpman" was Mario's original name in that game, before Nintendo of America christened him Mario. The meta-joke is delicious: in this universe, Mario's real-world debut exists as a dusty arcade relic that Mario himself walks right past. It's also the machine that quietly kicks off the film's Donkey Kong thread, an entire kingdom of which shows up in act two.

The man playing the Jump Man cabinet is Giuseppe, voiced by Charles Martinet — the voice of Mario in the games from Super Mario 64 (1996) through 2023. Giuseppe uses Martinet's full classic "wahoo" Mario voice, and he's the one who tells the brothers their over-the-top commercial accents sound perfect — a wink at the accent discourse around Chris Pratt's casting. Martinet pulls double duty as Mario and Luigi's skeptical dad, this time in a naturalistic Brooklyn register. His surprise cameos were announced on the record in Nintendo's September 2021 Direct that revealed the cast.

The brothers' low-budget TV spot is set to the "Plumber Rap" — the actual theme from 1989's The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! In the ad they briefly wear yellow capes, a nod to Cape Mario and Cape Luigi from Super Mario World (1990). Illumination released the full commercial as real-world marketing, and the details held up: the on-screen number 929-55-MARIO was a working hotline with a voicemail recorded by Charlie Day's Luigi, and SMBPLUMBING.COM went live as an in-universe website. Bonus: Jeannie Elias, who voiced Princess Toadstool in the Super Show, has a cameo in the film.

The bros' sneering ex-boss Spike (voiced by Sebastian Maniscalco) isn't an invented movie bully — he's Foreman Spike from Wrecking Crew, the 1985 NES game where Mario and Luigi demolish buildings while a rival foreman sabotages them. It's one of the most obscure character pulls in the film: Spike had barely appeared anywhere in nearly four decades before landing a speaking role here. The demolition-work backstory even lines up with the brothers having worked construction with him before going solo as plumbers.

After the disastrous family dinner, Mario retreats to his room and unwinds by playing Kid Icarus (1986) on a CRT — an actual gameplay recreation, not a generic fake game. Pause the scene and the set dressing keeps giving: a Star Fox Arwing model sits above the TV, a Falcon poster nods to F-Zero, and eagle-eyed viewers have also clocked NES Baseball and a Pro Wrestling poster featuring Starman and The Amazon. It establishes Mario as a Nintendo kid in a world where Nintendo somehow exists alongside him.

Nintendo's most infamous laughing dog haunts the Brooklyn scenes. The brothers' first client has a painting of the Duck Hunt dog retrieving ducks hanging in her house, the Punch-Out Pizzeria wall includes a photo of a duck bursting from the grass exactly like the game's title screen, and near the sewer entrance there's a French restaurant called "Chasse au Canard" — literally "Duck Hunt" in French. Three separate nods to a 1984 light-gun game in one act is the kind of layered gag that proves the art department was showing off.

When Luigi's flip phone rings, it plays the unmistakable rolling-cube melody from the Nintendo GameCube boot screen (2001). It's a pure audio egg — nothing on screen signals it — and it doubles as a sly character note: the GameCube era gave Luigi his biggest solo spotlight with Luigi's Mansion as a launch title, a game the movie references again once Luigi lands in the Dark Lands. For a generation of players, that four-second jingle is instant recognition.

Peach's castle is lifted almost brick-for-brick from Super Mario 64 (1996), stained-glass Peach window included, and the score sneaks in the game's castle interior music when Mario steps inside. The throne room's paintings echo SM64's level-portrait paintings. Best of all, the Toad guards deadpan that "the princess is in another castle" — the line Toad tells Mario at the end of every fortress in the original Super Mario Bros. (1985), delivered here as a bureaucratic brush-off.

The Mushroom Kingdom's shopping district — itself styled after Universal's Super Nintendo World, complete with a Crazy Cap store from Super Mario Odyssey — includes an antique shop stocked with retired artifacts: a Boomerang Flower from Super Mario 3D Land (2011), the music box from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), and a pixelated hammer, the weapon Jumpman swung in 1981's Donkey Kong. Framing old power-ups as literal antiques is the film's cleverest bit of world-building: in this kingdom, game history is just... history.

Luigi's solo detour through the Dark Lands plays like a trailer for his own franchise. He wakes up in Bowser's spooky domain to a rendition of the Luigi's Mansion theme, creeps past undead Dry Bones and Shy Guys, and fumbles with a flickering flashlight — the signature mechanic of the 2001 GameCube game where his failing Poltergust and flashlight were half the tension. Combined with the commercial's earlier promise that the brothers service "mansions," the film seeds a Luigi's Mansion storyline it never has to say out loud.

Donkey Kong makes his entrance in the Kong arena to a reorchestrated DK Rap from Donkey Kong 64 (1999) — and it's there because Seth Rogen lobbied for it. Rogen said including the rap was important to him "as both a rap fan and a video game fan," while cheerfully calling it "objectively one of the worst rap songs of all time." Composer Grant Kirkhope's much-memed track had spent two decades as a punchline; the film weaponizes that reputation by scoring DK's peacocking showboat entrance with it.

Freeze on the Kong arena crowd and you can run a Donkey Kong Country roll call: Diddy Kong (DKC, 1994), Dixie Kong (DKC2, 1995), Swanky Kong (DKC2), and Chunky Kong (DK64, 1999) all cheer from the stands, with Cranky Kong presiding as king. On the later jungle warpath, Funky Kong and Kiddy Kong (DKC3, 1996) join the army, and Cranky's cabin matches his DKC shack. None of them are named on screen — the film trusts Rare-era fans to recognize two decades of sidekicks on sight.

When the crew builds karts for the Rainbow Road run, the selection interface — chassis, wheels, glider — mirrors the Mario Kart 8 (2014) customization screen almost UI-for-UI. The tech checks out across the series: anti-gravity wheels are MK8's headline mechanic, gliders debuted in Mario Kart 7 (2011), and the ensuing chase deploys the full item roster — bananas, green shells, Bullet Bills, and a Koopa soldier who literally becomes a Blue Shell, the first-place-seeking missile that has ended friendships since Mario Kart 64. Even drift-boosting gets an on-screen moment.

Bowser's lovesick piano ballad "Peaches" was co-written by Jack Black with directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (plus Eric Osmond and John Spiker), and Black has said much of it came together on the fly — the film's composer described it as essentially improvised. The piano itself reads as a nod to Ludwig von Koopa, the Beethoven-coiffed Koopaling from Super Mario Bros. 3. The song became a genuine chart hit, got an official music video two days after release, and spawned a fan theory that its chords hide Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" — an unconfirmed rickroll that Kotaku dutifully investigated.

Lumalee — the adorable blue Luma cheerfully monologuing about the sweet release of death in Bowser's dungeon — is voiced by Juliet Jelenic, daughter of co-director Michael Jelenic. She recorded the scratch dialogue for the storyboards, the production auditioned for a replacement, and nobody could match the dissonance of a tiny cute voice delivering existential despair, so the scratch takes shipped in the final film. The character's doom-embracing worldview is rooted in Super Mario Galaxy, where Lumas willingly sacrifice themselves to become planets and supernovas.

Sit through the credits and you'll find Nintendo's late president Satoru Iwata listed as "Former President of Nintendo" alongside current president Shuntaro Furukawa — a posthumous credit for the man who championed the Illumination partnership before his death in 2015. Fans have also spotted an Iwata lookalike hidden in the Brooklyn crowd that celebrates the brothers after the final battle, and the film's Balloon Fight nods hit differently once you know Iwata personally programmed that 1984 game. It's the movie's most heartfelt hidden layer.