Disney's upcoming animated movie Wreck-It Ralph features cameos from all sorts of existing video game characters, from M. Bison to Altered Beast's Neff. Yet there's one character conspicuous by his absence.


Mario.

The biggest video game character on the planet will not be in the flick, and before you go thinking that's just a licensing thing, know that his arch-enemy Bowser will be there.


So why does the bad guy make the cut and not the good guy?

"The hard thing was, we were trying to work out the right way to use a character like Mario", producer Clark Spencer told Total Film. "It had to be organic to the film, we didn't want to just paste him in there. For Bowser, it made perfect sense for him to be a member of the Bad Anon group. For Mario himself we couldn't think of the right way to incorporate him into the film, and so we didn't do it."

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That's not to say companies like Nintendo didn't have a say in the film. They had a lot of say.

"The games companies were very specific - there's a scene in which Bowser drinks a cup of coffee, and they were very specific about how Bowser would drink coffee", Spencer says. He later adds "We had a scene where we wanted the rings to come out of Sonic, and SEGA said the only way that happens is if he falls over, and we didn't have him fall over in the scene, so we actually went back and re-animated it."


Wreck-It Ralph's Skrillex cameo revealed [Total Film]