Super Mario Bros. Wonder Is The Closest We’ll Ever Get To M-Rated Mario

The Mario series has flirted with the psychedelic since its early days, but with Super Mario Bros. Wonder the franchise leans fully into the trippy nature of the acrobatic plumber’s adventures. Simply hearing the premise of the original Super Mario Bros. suggests a nod to drug culture, from an adult perspective, as it involves a pair of blue-collar workers from Brooklyn who leave their mundane lives behind to journey to a magical mushroom land. With the mind-bending changes to reality resulting from Wonder Flowers, it is harder than ever to deny that Mario is a psychedelic series, and Wonder embraces that more overtly than any prior entry.