Luigi’s Nightmare is one of the more amusing shorts to come along in a while since it’s kind of a vindication of a few theories that have been laughingly thrown out into the open a time or two. Mario and Luigi have for a long time been two of the most loved characters in all of gaming despite the fact that Mario has taken a lot of the credit. His brother Luigi was one of the characters that a lot of people didn’t want to play as in Super Mario Bros. 2 and his fame has been somewhat up and down ever since. But what if their fame was never anything real?
If you look at it from a serious standpoint this short film is kind of depressing since it shows Mario and Luigi as two old, decrepit men that still believe that they’re in the game to rescue Princess Peach, defeat Bowser, and more or less be the heroes of the land. The reality of it is that the ‘power-ups’ they’ve been grabbing onto are nothing more than pills they’ve been popping for so long that their bodies have finally developed a high tolerance rate that has suddenly been affect Luigi as he’s seen the ‘scary place’ far too often for his liking. So it comes down to Toad telling him to lay off the power-ups for a while, which might sound like sage advice, except for the fact that drug users don’t typically go cold turkey all at once without some very adverse affects. Once Luigi goes off the ‘scary place’ that most people know as the real world comes crashing back in and Luigi just can’t handle it until Mario shows up with his plastic baggie of ‘power-ups’ that turn out to be the pills they’ve been popping for so many years to make it seem like they’re living the dream.
The reference to Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn’t a mistake since if you’ve ever played the game you’d know that at the end the entire thing turned out to be nothing more than a dream. The screen fades away to show Mario fast asleep in his bed, the entire game just one big goose egg that had no ramifications on the character at all. Some people liked it, some didn’t, but it makes sense as it can go along with this short film. Mario would want to have that feeling back again that he was the hero and was doing what he could in order to save a kingdom. Of course by the time that story caught up to this film Mario would understand just how things were and what was waiting for him when the pills wore off. Obviously though he kept Luigi a little more medicated than that, as his visits back to the ‘scary place’ truly freaked him out.
It’s kind of a depressing way to look at an old favorite but really it’s kind of funny in a very dark, morbid way as well. You can almost see Luigi sitting their ‘listening’ to a lamp think it was Toad.
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