The new Adam Sandler movie, Pixels brings back several iconic video game characters from the ‘80s, including Pac-Man, Centipede, and Donkey Kong as avatars of an alien attack. But Pixels almost ended with an appearance from one of the biggest icons of them all: Mario!

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

As originally scripted, the Pixels movie would have had a post-credits scene that started at the Washington Monument, which survived the alien attack with some damage. At the top of the Monument would be none other than Mario – from his Donkey Kong incarnation, instead of the Super Mario Bros. arcade game. The last moment of the film would have been a close up of Mario’s face as he smiled before cutting to black.

That version of the ending made it as far as the testing phase before Pixels director Christopher Colombus ultimately went in a different direction.

“We tried it,” said Colombus. “There was a moment we even did a previs of it, we thought it was interesting but we wanted to kind of use him somewhere else. I don’t want to spoil the fact that he maybe somewhere else in the film but … that ironically is a bigger moment for the audience than the ending with Mario.”

Columbus also noted that he was not able to secure the rights to Mr. T and Michael Jackson’s likenesses for the film’s finale. But he did get Daryl Hall and John Oates to appear as themselves!

“Hall and Oates, we basically did a motion-capture thing on both of their faces to recreate them,” explained Columbus. “Because we were dealing with old MTV footage, and the footage quality was not that great. We actually had a Madonna look-alike do Madonna’s lines for her.”

Video game fans, would have rather seen Mario in the post-credits scene Pixels instead of his fast appearance in the movie itself? Jump down to our comment section and let us know!

HT: ScreenCrush