Adapting something to the big screen for the first time is hard enough. But when it’s a franchise as big and venerated as Mario, it’s an almost impossibly tall order—one that is more likely to piss people off than win them over.
There were a lot of things that could go wrong with Illumination Entertainment’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the first animated feature based upon Nintendo’s beloved video games. Considering the franchise is so widely known, and that it already received a critically reviled live-action film 30 years ago, Illumination’s Nintendo collab faced an uphill battle toward winning people over. Other than that gigantic, dedicated fanbase, Mario games aren’t obviously cinematic material. They’re defined not by storytelling, but by satisfying platform-based gameplay. This is a franchise with a main character that just says “Wahoo!” and “Here we go!” in a horrendously stereotypical Italian accent, after all.
That left the Hollywood voice cast, featuring Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya-Taylor Joy as Peach, and Jack Black as Bowser, among others, to reinvent the wheel a little bit, as the Mario characters finally gained some robust spoken dialogue. And for many of the actors—especially Keegan-Michael Key, who plays Mario and Peach’s very shrill pal Toad—it meant figuring out a way to make the characters a little more, uh, pleasant to listen to without alienating fans completely.
When hearing Toad for the first time in Super Mario Bros., it’s hard to believe it’s actuallyKey. We’re used to him modulating his voice lower, not higher, like in his breakout sketches from Key and Peele and Mad TV. Even his past animated roles, including Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers and Toy Story 4, didn’t push Key toward that upper end of his range. You’d be forgiven, then to think that Key is simply pitched-up in the film.
Not so: That is totally Key’s own voice as Toad. We even heard him recreate it live.
“What I did to come up with the voice was use a friend of mine as a reference for the vocal pattern and rhythms,” Key told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, ahead of the film’s release last week, on how he created Toad’s new voice. But then a funny thing happened: “When I started to show that [voice] to [directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic,] they were like, ‘That’s all well and good. I like that. I also want to figure out how we can get him higher.’”
This led to Key exploring the limits of his own range, as he kept trying higher and higher-pitched tones at the directors’ behest. He happily took on the challenge of pushing his voice, something he recounted for us on the call with eerie calmness.
“We finally found a place that we liked,” Key explained, resetting his voice back to normal after his trip into cartoonish vocal territory. “We had this nice, kind of high-pitched helium-type of sound. I imagine that's how Toad would speak, if he was speaking dialogue.
“Then hopefully anytime I yell or whoop or scream, in the movie, it sounds more like those sounds that you are used to from the games,” he added.
We wouldn’t go that far, as the games’ version of Toad (voiced by Samantha Kelly in the English dubs) sounds like a very small child trying to do a deep voice. Key’s Toad is very much not that, which is probably for the best, since this is a sustained, more dialogue-heavy performance.
But even if Toad’s voice can be ear-piercing at times, it’s also one of the character’s defining traits. Key’s attempt at bringing that same energy to the character was not just a recognition of that indelible tone—it was also a move to placate those Mario fans, ready to scrutinize any small change from the games.
“It was a little nerve-wracking” to join the cast, Key said, “because these characters are precious to people. And the reason they're precious is because people attach memories, and especially good memories, to playing the games. … There’s obviously a nostalgic component to this that you want to honor, which is difficult to do, because you don't know how to do that for everybody.”
Thankfully, the movie itself does a lot of that nostalgic heavy lifting by playing to Mario’s strengths: capturing that uniquely compelling energy that Nintendo’s hit games have always boasted. Super Mario Bros. succeeds at recreating the spirit of the franchise with its same priorities: a fun, fluid sense of motion over deep storytelling.
Emulating the games in that way for the film was to both the actors’ and the movie’s benefits, said Key. “I think if a game has so much story and an actual backstory for the protagonists, then there's not a lot of room to play. Whereas here, there was a lot of room to play.”
Outside of crafting his own version of Toad’s recognizable voice, Key got to lean into the other elements of the character he identified in the script. “He has so much civic pride in where he’s from,” Key said. “[In the games,] we see him with Princess Peach all the time. But something we learn about is how much he loves [the Mushroom Kingdom,] and how he’s so willing to help Mario.”
Maybe we’ll get to see Toad break out into his own adventure in another Super Mario movie—perhaps one inspired by the character’s spinoff games, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. With The Super Mario Bros. Movie already obliterating box office records, it’s certainly not out of the question.
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