The image of a set of keys, jangled over the head of a grasping infant, has become critical shorthand for blockbuster film adaptations that are happier to breathlessly present references to other media objects than to even attempt to stand on their own. Don’t pay attention to the story, the logic, the framing, the emotions, the themes, the message, the humor—just enjoy the sensory thrill that comes from looking at something you recognize. In pursuing this reaction, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, the sequel to Illumination’s similarly soulless 2023 box office smash, trots out more Nintendo iconography than a Smash Bros. gacha machine. But it solicits seal-claps from fanboys while also explicitly appealing to the youngest children being dragged along to the theater, unifying its approach to its multigenerational audience by treating them all like babies.
Most explicitly, this tone grows from the sheer quantity of literal babies in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Not only is its villain, Bowser Jr., a bratty little child, but there’s an extended flashback to when he was even younger, being tucked into bed by his Koopa papa before a cutesy puppet show. Bowser himself starts the movie shrunken down into a toy-like form. Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and a stray T. rex are turned into babies with a Baby Gun (which the grown babies in the audience will be quick to point out is a reference not only to the Super Scope but the Devolution Gun from the ’90s Mario movie). Princess Peach appears as a baby in a flashback alongside Rosalina, who mothers a swirling collection of manic Lumas (anthropomorphic star babies), just as Peach mothers her Toads (mushroom-headed peasant babies). Bedtime stories, pacifiers, branded pajamas, and diapers abound.
These young characters partially exist as cynical audience surrogates, there to fawn over the video game characters that a young audience simply doesn’t have close ties to in 2026. Yoshi turns up? Mario and Luigi find themselves overwhelmed by the dinosaur’s adorable, merchandisable appeal. Fox McCloud flies in from a franchise that hasn’t had a new game come out during the lifetime of this film’s target demographic? Those in the Mario universe can’t stop talking about how cool he is.
It’s here where the baby treatment crosses over between generations. With one hand, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dangles its familiar keys in front of the older crowd (Is that Mr. Game & Watch!? R.O.B.? The ending of a game I played in 1985?); with the other, it points to the diegetic reactions of its characters, in order to teach children—children who’ve had to put up with countless films and TV shows based on IP from decades prior—how to react like good little fanboys and girls in training.
But what’s missing for the kids is the same thing that’s missing for the adults who (the filmmakers hope) will smirk and cheer at hearing the musical motifs from their own childhoods: substance. Yoshi doesn’t really do anything that cute. Fox certainly doesn’t do anything cool, mostly making jokes about a game from 30 years ago. And the rest of the characters don’t even have the benefit of dialogue gassing them up. If you don’t give the young people in the crowd anything of their own to hold onto, to embrace and celebrate, your retro sales pitch comes off desperate and sweaty—as inherently uncool as anything pushed by a parent.
For the actual parents, they’re just looking for anything vaguely engaging so that their soul doesn’t completely leave their body while they dissociate in the theater for 98 minutes. “Glimpsing Birdo, the most genderqueer Mario villain” isn’t going to cut it. Illumination’s Minions bopping one another to the Donkey Kong hammer theme may initially spark the lizard brains of the older gamers in the crowd, but it may also evoke the opposite effect, encouraging existential void-gazing while considering how much recycled joy is being hocked to their offspring with all the same techniques. There might not be much difference between a mobile and a secondhand mobile, but eventually, the people stuck with all the hand-me-downs will start to resent it.
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