Fans Are Roasting Chris Pratt's Mario Voice With A Hilarious Comparison We Can't Unhear

The teaser trailer for "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" dropped yesterday, which means that the internet has a new cultural artifact to pick apart. Some viewers are already voicing a nagging feeling that the animation just isn't measuring up somehow. The voices have proven to be somewhat more polarizing. Reaction to Jack Black's rendition of big bad Bowser has been positive. Keegan-Michael Key, already a voice-acting veteran, seems to have brought Toad to life well enough. Most of the voices — from Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach to Charlie Day as Luigi — haven't made it into the short trailer.

Then, of course, there's Chris Pratt. The choice to cast the erstwhile raptor-tamer as everyone's favorite Brooklyn plumber has invited its fair share of head-scratching. There was always the possibility, of course, that he would end up surprising everyone. Now that the voice has finally hit everyone's ears, the confusion has more or less remained along with downright derision.

Mario only gets two lines — a dazed "What is this place?" and an excited "Mushroom Kingdom, here we come!" — but it's been enough. Variety has published a compilation of social media hot takes that have been less than complimentary to Pratt's rendition. Some have asked why Mario sounds like Sonic the Hedgehog, which, if accurate, would be a bit of an embarrassment. To have the face of Nintendo sound like the face of Sega would be, to put it mildly, a faux pas.

Other complaints are that Chris Pratt's Mario simply sounds like, well, Chris Pratt. "[W]ho would have thought that chris pratt's big secret voice in the mario movie would be his normal speaking voice, asked @HardDriveMag. That, by itself, is a fairly withering criticism. But there's one comparison which, now that it's been made, we cannot seem to get out of our heads.

"Someone said this sounds like Linda Belcher and now I can't unhear it," tweeted @NinjaPotts. They're tweeting in reply to the short clip of Mario's "Mushroom Kingdom" quote. Linda, voiced by John Roberts, is, of course, the well-known, enthusiastic, and spontaneous matriarch of the Belcher family on "Bob's Burgers," wife to Bob (H. Jon Benjamin), mother to Louise (Kristen Schaal), Gene (Eugene Mirman), and Tina (Dan Mintz).

How, in the name of all that is logical, do we get from Mario to Linda from "Bob's Burgers?" Well, at first, it does sound like Chris Pratt is just putting his voice in a higher register, albeit with a Brooklyn accent. But the timbre of the voice, the specific lilt, the almost grating optimism ... and there it is. Mario may as well be getting voiced by John Roberts instead of Pratt because he now sounds just like Linda Belcher. It sounds like Mario is about to order a Dutch baby in a roadside diner. It sounds like he's about to sing about his Christmas dream. It sounds like he's about to narrate a fight between two raccoons.

And just when you think you can just about parse Pratt-Mario from Linda, in swoops @DavidToons_ with a two-second clip of that very same line, spoken by a smiling Linda wearing Mario's red cap and overalls. "Chris sounds like Linda from Bob's Burgers," they wrote, "so as an animator: this had to be done." Fair enough, though now it's really lodged in our brains. We can't stop imagining Linda bouncing on mushrooms, stomping on Little Goombas, and kicking Koopa Troopa shells across the ground. Hopefully, it all passes before "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" hits theaters on April 7, 2023.