One of the highlights of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was its soundtrack, which pulled from different eras of Mario to highlight the entire soundscape that is Nintendo’s flagship franchise. While The Super Mario Bros. Movie included a bunch of licensed songs to “spice” things up, the Galaxy Movie was 95% Koji Kondo works, so it was certainly more aurally pleasing. In a rather shocking discovery, though, it turns out the film’s composer wrote most of the score from his hospital bed and didn’t tell anyone from the production team.
In an interview with Men’s Journal, composer Brian Tyler revealed that he wrote the majority of the Galaxy Movie’s score from the hospital. “I was writing this music when I was actually in the hospital because I didn’t want to let anyone down,” Tyler said. “They didn’t know. I didn’t tell them. I wrote a lot of the main themes from there.”
For those unfamiliar with Tyler, he is a legendary composer with plenty of films under his belt. While scoring the 2025 film Nuremberg, Tyler suffered a double brain hemorrhage that should have killed him. Miraculously, he survived, and maybe it was because he felt an obligation to do right by Kondo for the Galaxy Movie.
In the interview, Tyler reveals, “I know Koji Kondo from working on the last film, and then there are other people I’ve worked with, like the composer for the Super Mario Galaxy games. I got to know them and the whole gang at Nintendo, including the head of Nintendo… In fact, Koji Kondo got inducted into The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame at the 27th Dice Awards in Las Vegas. When they asked him, ‘Who do you want to tell the story of your life and career up on stage?’ He was like, ‘Brian Tyler.’”
The interview is chock-full of tidbits about Tyler’s philosophy for approaching the score to both Mario films, which is fascinating to read.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
