Super Mario Bros. (1993) | Rocky Morton & Annabel Jankel

Super Mario Bros. features the emergence of an alternate dimension caused by (what is now known as) Brooklyn being struck by a meteorite millions of years ago.  In this alternate dimension, humans evolved from lizards, rather than monkeys, as believed in our own realm.  There is also only one city, Dinohattan, surrounded by endless desert, and currently presided over by the evil Koopa (Hopper, Red Rock West).  President Koopa (Dennis Hopper) is out to get a powerful rock crystal, a fragment of the original meteorite, that he needs to merge the two dimensions, giving him more realms to conquer. Here is where we meet our heroes, a couple of plumbers named Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi Mario (John Leguizamo), who, in pursuit of a kidnapped new friend in a paleontology student named Daisy (Samantha Mathis), who happens to have the rock in the form of a necklace, find a portal into the Dinohattan dimension.  Dangers lurk all around, as the brave brothers must battle the mighty Koopa and his lizard horde to rescue Daisy and thwart Koopa’s evil plans to destroy their world. 

Double Dragon (1994) | James Yukich

Set in the futuristic year of 2007, in a city dubbed New Angeles, after having been reconstructed after a giant earthquake that happened a decade before in Southern California, where gangs and criminals mostly have their run of the city streets at night. Outside of the ineffective New Angeles Police Department, a vigilante group called the Power Corps, with direction from a teenage girl named Marian (Alyssa Milano), is the only organized force willing to take on the evil forces around the town. She knows talent when she sees it, so when she stumbles across a couple of martial-artist orphaned brothers named Jimmy (Mark Dacascos) and Billy (Scott Wolf) Lee, she recruits them for the cause of good. Their top adversary is a megalomaniac tycoon named Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick), aka ‘The Shadow Master’, who has become quite powerful in all but taking completely over the streets, utilizing his ability to change into shadow form and take over the bodies of others. The Lee brothers and their guardian Satori (Julia Nickson) have half of a powerful, mystical ancient Chinese medallion, while Koga has the other, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get his avaricious hands on it.

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994)

In this animated adventure expanded from the video game, M. Bison is a megalomaniacal warlord from Thailand with dreams of world domination. Bison runs a super-secret organization of drug smugglers, weapons runners, and an international terror and crime syndicate called “Shadowlaw”. Fueling Shadowlaw is a massive drug-running operation and a diabolical plan to become the most military force in the world through the use of ultra-powerful street fighters. Bison has his tech team devise a squad of cyborgs to do reconnaissance to find the best fighters in the world to recruit into his organization as part of a super army better than any individual nation’s.

Because the Japanese Shotokan karate master named Ryu has bested Sagat in the Street Fighter Tournament, it marks him as perhaps the world’s best, and someone from which Bison can build an army of super-street fighters. Ryu’s best friend from San Francisco, Ken Masters, another street fighter who studied the same master (making him the closest fighter to being Ryu’s equal) is kidnapped by Bison for brainwashing experiments to convert street fighters to his political assassins, starting with his effort to try to take down the world-wandering Ryu. Vengeful Chun Li and her colleagues at Interpol are trying to take down the operation, as does US Air Force Captain Guile, who is out to take down Bison for killing a friend.

Street Fighter (1994) | Steven E. de Souza

In the Southeast Asian country of Shadaloo, where General M. Bison (Raul Julia) has been waging a war with the A.N. (the Allied Nations — a U.N.-like military force) after he has taken several dozen A.N. hostages, putting them up for a ransom of $20 billion dollars.  Leading the A.N. counterattack is United States Colonel William F. Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a headstrong and gifted fighter that Bison can’t wait to challenge in hand-to-hand combat.  Many others would converge at Bison’s stronghold, including television reporter Chun-Li Zang (Ming-Na), arms dealer Victor Sagat (Wes Studi), and a couple of roguish martial artists named Ken (Damian Chapa) and Ryu (Byron Mann).

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) | John R. Leonetti

In this sequel to 1995’s Mortal Kombat, portals between Outworld and Earth are illegally opened by Outworld’s emperor Shao Kahn, who has decided the rules of “Mortal Kombat” need not apply to him. This leaves the world’s mightiest fighters only six days to vanquish this new threat and close the portals or lose Earthrealm to the powers of evil.  They return to Outworld to fight for humanity’s fate.

Mortal Kombat (1995) | Paul W.S. Anderson

The debut episode of “To the 90s and Beyond” podcast!

In the film, there is a gathering of Earth’s top fighters every generation to compete for the fate of the planet to keep the evil forces from Outworld from gaining dominion.  It seems that if Outworld’s fighters defeat Earth in one more tournament, Earth will be theirs.  The current generation’s elite are rounded up, including monk fighter Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Hollywood action hero Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and military operative Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson), to join forces with Earth’s defending thunder god Rayden (Christopher Lambert) in fighting to the death against the outlandish, deadly creatures from the planet of darkness, headed by the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Paul W.S. Anderson directs.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) | Jeff Fowler

Sonic the Hedgehog (voiced by Ben Schwartz) flees homeworld due to possessing powers that make him a fugitive carrying a bad full of rings that are portals to new dimensions, is typical road-movie adventure comedy we’ve seen many times in a variety of forms. Sonic ends up teleporting to Earth, specifically the flyspeck town of Green Hills, Montana, where he encounters a sheriff so bored with the town’s lack of crims that he’s taken to having conversations with his donuts, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), who is hoping to not make another day a waste by waiting patiently to nail someone speeding. He gets it in Sonic, who clocks in at a speed that makes Tom question his radar gun. Tom dreams of doing some real crime-fighting, with a goal to move him and Maddie (Tika Sumpter), his ever-supportive veterinarian wife, to San Francisco to join their more active police department. It turns out when Sonic loses all of his other rings through an open portal atop the city’s Transamerica Pyramid, he’ll have to tag along as well.

However, when Sonic’s energy burst ends up causing a massive power outage to the entire Pacific Northwest region of the United States, the government sends in a secret weapon, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), a mad, megalomaniacal genius with an army of sophisticated flying drones who tenaciously will find a way to exterminate the blue alien thing once and for all. Robotnik chases Tom and his new companion Sonic as they make their way to California.