The Super Mario Bros. Movie: A “Common” Complication
Well… after seeing the Super Mario Bros. Movie achieve over 1.3 BILLION dollars in box office money before turning its’ attention to streaming and physical media releases, it is safe to say that the long-running challenge of turning video games into successful movies has been broken by icons such as Sonic and Mario in their respective cinematic adventures. The Super Mario Bros. movie took theaters by storm and is now available to be watched pretty much anywhere a person would like to view it, and its’ victory is well-earned. The world of the Mushroom Kingdom was so successfully translated to the silver screen that it will take multiple viewings to catch all the visual Easter eggs and musical cues that paid homage to pretty much every iteration of Mario’s history. But the lead up to this release was anything but smooth… while the first trailer was warmly embraced by every Nintendo fan who has every picked up a controller, the reception was decidedly less enthusiastic when Mario spoke for the first time WITHOUT his iconic voice or accent. “Mamma Mia” indeed…
After years of voicing everyone’s favorite plumbing protagonist throughout the gaming series, prolific Nintendo voice artist Charles Martinet was benched in favor of Chris Pratt, a more recognizable (and bankable) actor thanks to his well-publicized roles in box-office hits such as the Jurassic World trilogy, any Marvel movie featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as his successful voice-acting work in the Lego Movie series. With an extensive history of playing a lovable “everyman” character across different television shows and movies alike, Pratt was challenged with delivering the voice work for one of the most well-known gaming characters of all time… and after hearing his interpretation of Mario’s voice, a very vocal part of the Nintendo fanbase were decidedly less than supportive of his take on Mario’s voice. It was… well, let’s just say a less stylized version of the Mario voice that we have come to know and love. Chris Pratt basically performed his version of Mario as… Chris Pratt. But after watching this film in both the theater as well as at home, I have a very straight-forward opinion on this matter… the movie simply WORKS, and after about 30 seconds of watching it, I totally forgot (or at least stopped caring) who was providing the real-world voice behind each character because it is just SO well done. And apparently so did the rest of the audience who happily gave the studio over a BILLION dollars of their money for the purpose of enjoying this movie over and over again… and in the end I am more than just satisfied with the voice work of the movie. I can’t wait to see where the studio takes this franchise next… and I am more than happy to have Pratt’s under-stated and effective voice acting along for the ride.
All of this fuss about Mario’s voice got me thinking about another iconic voice that often comes in a different form than many of us were expecting or would prefer… and I include myself in that group. For many years of my life, I would read the stories of these larger-than-life Biblical legends and wish I could hear from God the way that they did. Throughout the Bible I would read the accounts of Moses and his burning bush (Exodus 3), Gideon and his fleece (Judges 6:36-40), or young Samuel literally HEARING the Lord calling to him (1 Samuel 3)… and if I am being honest, I would get a little bit jealous. I wanted to hear and see those massive spectacles… I wanted to feel “special” by hearing the Father call out my name in the night or speak to me at the top of a mountain. I would seek to get a direct answer to my questions similar to the way Gideon laid a fleece out on the ground and received a very visual confirmation of the Lord’s direction. I prayed for a massive and Divine answer to my prayers the same way Elijah called literal fire down from the sky. But the skies above me remained blue, my fleece blanket was as dry as a bowl of Frosted Flakes without milk, and my bushes only burned if I set them on fire (which should NOT be attempted without proper adult supervision and a consultation of your local HOA guidelines). Similar to the frustration of the gaming audience who was not satisfied with hearing Mario’s voice coming in any other than the way they were prepared to receive it, I had a VERY specific idea of how I wanted to hear and receive the Lord’s voice. Let’s jump down the warp pipe together and see what we can figure out what I was missing.
If you are anything like me, you have prayed MANY prayers in your life seeking to “hear the Lord’s voice” in many different situations. From smaller dilemma’s such as what career path we should choose to the larger life-defining decisions such as who we should marry or what His calling for our life is, it sure would be nice if He just made these things obvious. For years I would cry out to the Lord for purpose, direction, or simply answers to whatever predicament I got myself into… and I would leave each time without seeing any of the local flora spontaneously combust. I mean, that is good for them I suppose… but I was still looking for something a little more definitive. I would go to church and pray that the Lord would have a specific “word of guidance” for me, flip to random pages in the Bible hoping to see a clear “Yes” or “No” printed on the page, or turn on the radio and hope to hear a song that would tell me exactly what I needed to hear. I had a very specific idea of how the Lord was supposed to “speak” to me, so I would go the places where I thought I might find Him in search of the answers I was seeking. But I didn’t “hear” anything like a loud audible voice from the Lord calling me by name… I didn’t “see” the words printed on the page that clearly said “move here, marry her, work there, and serve Me in this manner”. And because the word of the Lord didn’t come to me in the manner I wanted to see and hear it, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. The fault was never with the Lord… and as I look at all of the fantastical ways that the Lord spoke to the others, I saw that there was a pattern that emerged in each of their circumstances that I didn’t see the first time through. Let’s see if we can spot a “common” theme…
1 Samuel 3:1-10 Now the boy Samuel ministered to the Lord before Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no widespread revelation. And it came to pass at that time, while Eli was lying down in his place, and when his eyes had begun to grow so dim that he could not see, and before the lamp of God went out in the tabernacle of the Lord where the ark of God was, and while Samuel was lying down, that the Lord called Samuel. And he answered, “Here I am!” So he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” And he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” And he went and lay down. Then the Lord called yet again, “Samuel!” So Samuel arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” He answered, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” (Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, nor was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him.) And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. So he arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you did call me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord had called the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and it shall be, if He calls you, that you must say, ‘Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.’ ”. So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood and called as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel answered, “Speak, for Your servant hears.”
Exodus 3:1-4 Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
Judges 6:36-40 So Gideon said to God, “If You will save Israel by my hand as You have said— look, I shall put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece only, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that You will save Israel by my hand, as You have said.” And it was so. When he rose early the next morning and squeezed the fleece together, he wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowlful of water. Then Gideon said to God, “Do not be angry with me, but let me speak just once more: Let me test, I pray, just once more with the fleece; let it now be dry only on the fleece, but on all the ground let there be dew.” And God did so that night. It was dry on the fleece only, but there was dew on all the ground.
Hmmmm. On first glance, there isn’t a lot that connects these, so let’s widen the net. Let’s see… the Lord used a donkey to speak to Balaam (Numbers 22), He provided a ram stuck in some foliage as a solution to Abraham and Isaac’s predicament (Genesis 22)… even the original miracles that the Lord gave to Moses during his burning bush experience seem to have something in common if we look beyond the surface and see the answer hidden in plain sight (Exodus 4). Let’s take a closer look at what the Lord said to Moses for our final clue on this predicament…
Exodus 4:1-8 Then Moses answered and said, “But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice; suppose they say, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you.’ ”. So the Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A rod. And He said, “Cast it on the ground.” So he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand), “that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.” Furthermore the Lord said to him, “Now put your hand in your bosom.” And he put his hand in his bosom, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous, like snow. And He said, “Put your hand in your bosom again.” So he put his hand in his bosom again, and drew it out of his bosom, and behold, it was restored like his other flesh. “Then it will be, if they do not believe you, nor heed the message of the first sign, that they may believe the message of the latter sign.
The answer within the unique ways the Lord spoke in each of these circumstances was hidden to me for years as I tried to find His voice in a similarly dynamic fashion… but the reality of how the Lord had been speaking to me over the years finally became clear in these verses. He came to Moses in the burning bush because he was in a desert area with a bush in it… He made Moses’s rod a means of providing a miraculous demonstration because it was what was IN MOSES’S HAND at the time. There wasn’t anything special about the rod… it was just a stick. But it was what was present at the time, so it was what the Lord chose to use. Gideon used a fleece because that was what he had access to at that moment. The Lord didn’t send a random donkey to Balaam… he used the one he was already riding. And the Lord had prepared the “ram solution” for Abraham and Isaac to be right where they were right when they needed it… in each of these prayers for guidance, deliverance, or provision the Lord answered in miraculous ways using His supernatural powers in combination with what was already present in the environment. And because the environments for each of these individuals were different, the way the Lord spoke to each of them were unique as well. They simply had to be prepared and open for the Lord to use what they had previously considered “common” to be His means of speaking to them.
The Lord’s voice will come to us with supernatural wisdom and guidance beyond our ability to comprehend, but His means of speaking to us in our situations will often come differently than the way we would prefer or even in a manner that He has used to speak to others. He will speak to us through His written Word… but it won’t directly say “move to Alaska” in there anywhere. He will guide us into understanding His truth through His ministers, but they won’t typically point to us in the middle of their sermon and say, “the Lord wants y’all two to get hitched”. The bushes we are walking past may simply sway in the breeze instead of catching ablaze, and that’s probably for the best with how strict the arson laws are. But if we are truly listening for His voice and praying with a willingness to hear what He has to say instead of merely what we want to hear, He has a LOT to say through these seemingly “common” means of communication such as spending time in Biblical study (2 Timothy 2:15), listening to the voices of those ministers that He has gifted with His Word (1 Corinthians 1:21), and combining these with our prayer life as we diligently seek to find His voice in all of these “common” places that we often take for granted (Hebrews 11:6).
There was a version of Mario’s voice that everyone expected to hear in the Super Mario Bros. movie that didn’t show up (except in a small cameo appearance)… but that didn’t end up having a negative impact on the movie at all. As a matter of fact, the voice acting faded into the background so sufficiently that within minutes it was simply the vehicle that was used to convey the ACTUAL story. Sure, it wasn’t the voice everyone was expecting or demanding… but it turned out to be EXACTLY what this movie needed. And in the ways that the Lord chooses to answer our prayers, His voice may come to us in a variety of different methods that lack the iconic design of His “burning bush” example or even a talking donkey. It may come in the stillness of a moment while we are reading a chapter in Psalms for the hundredth time when we suddenly see a verse differently than we have ever seen it before… or it may arrive as a confirmation in our spirit while listening to a sermon. But it won’t be the situation or environment that makes His answer remarkable… it will be the very commonness of the circumstances that we are in that will make His direction the star of the story rather than the means by which it arrived.
Let’s not turn our noses up at the way the Lord answers our prayers simply because He didn’t send His answer with thunder and trumpets… sometimes His answer to our prayers for rain come in the form of a cloud as small as a man’s hand (1 Kings 18:41-45). And while He is fully capable of answering with fire from heaven, He seems to prefer the intimacy of using a still, small voice instead (1 Kings 19:11-13). Just as the very lack of originality in Mario’s voice ended up working just fine in the Super Mario Bros. movie to keep the focus on the story being told, the Lord may not write the answer to our prayers in the clouds. He is actually speaking directly to our hearts through His Spirit to remind us of His teachings and guide us in a far better way than any bush, donkey, or walking stick ever could (John 14:26).
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