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Do mushrooms grow from dead Marios? Chris Pratt and Charlie Day weigh in on morbid fan theory
Well, that's one explanation for how the Mushroom Kingdom got so...mushroomy.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie hits theaters in less than two weeks, and based on everything we've seen it promises to be a brightly colored, light-hearted journey into video game paradise with almost no dark side whatsoever. That's right, it's Mario! It's fun, and it's definitely not a world built on a dark, gruesome secret. Right?
RELATED: Chris Pratt makes use of his Mario voice while traveling through London with a mini-Mario
Last week, a Mario fan account on Twitter resurfaced a piece of art from a 1990s tie-in manga featuring one of the game's signature mushrooms sprouting up out of the soil, with a root system reaching down beneath the ground and connecting to...Mario's corpse. That's right, there's an actual Mario manga offering the idea that mushrooms are grown from all the Marios who die every time you, the player, can't get past that one Piranha Plant with the weird timing.
Since the image resurfaced, it's spread like fungus (too soon?) among fans, and even made its way onto the Super Mario Bros. Movie press tour. ComicBook.com's Brandon Davis recently showed the image to Mario and Luigi themselves, Chris Pratt and Charlie Day, and got them both to respond to the idea that the Mushroom Kingdom's chief crop is fertilized by their characters' past lives.
"That makes me want to eat mushrooms even less. That's really amazing that you found that," Pratt said.
Day added, "That makes me wonder if they're having burials for these characters because he's in the Earth with that mushroom growing out of his back. That's dark, man. Don't show that to my kid."
So now, when you take your kids to see the Super Mario Bros. Movie, you're going to have to fight the urge to tell them what's under the ground, pushing up all of those pretty shrooms. And you thought The Last of Us was the only gruesome fungus story sprouting in pop culture right now.
The film co-stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, and Seth Rogen.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is in theaters Apr. 5. Pick up tickets now.
