Jack Black's 'Peaches' Song In The Super Mario Bros Movie Went From Idea To Full Song In Days

The moment The Super Mario Bros. Movie landed Jack Black to play the voice of Bowser, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic knew what they had to do.

"As soon as we cast Jack, our greatest desire was to get him to sing in the movie," Horvath told GameSpot.

And that they did. Several times during the course of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Bowser breaks out into song in order to wax poetic about Princess Peach, who he wants to marry. And while the song, called Peaches (watch the video here), very much has a distinctive Jack Black flavor to it, it didn't take long to get there. In fact, Horvath and Jelenic say the whole thing was a bit of a whirlwind, going from conception to more or less its final form in just a few days. Though even in that short span it evolved in a big way.

"I think, initially, I didn't imagine it to be a beautiful piano ballad," Horvath said. "One of the reasons that we had cast him as Bowser--it's a little bit against type, like, he generally doesn't play villains. He's like, a really sweet guy in a lot of his movies. But knowing that he has this sort of over-the-top, rock-and-roll persona with Tenacious D, it was like, I absolutely think he can pull it off with that sort of huge rock star energy. So I initially imagined more like metal, like a Tenacious D kind of track.

"But the way the story took us, we were like, Bowser legitimately is in love with Princess Peach. It's like, well, we need to tell the audience that, and it's boring for him to just say like, 'I love Princess Peach.' So it's just these two ideas together. It's like, aw man, he loves Peach, Jack Black is playing the character--we can tell the audience this through song, which is the best way to tell an audience anything."

So Jorvath and Jelenic were given the greenlight to make the attempt, and the pair worked with Super Mario Bros. Movie film editor Eric Osmond to quickly whip something up with Osmond on vocals. "And everybody thought it was pretty good," Horvath said. But they still had another big test to pass: they needed Jack Black himself to sign off on it.

"And then we all were like, 'OK, well, now we have to send it to Jack and if he doesn't like it. It's gonna blow up in our face.' But he loved it," Horvath said. "He thought it was great. He and his pianist, musician John Spiker, they wrote music for it. They changed up some of the lyrics to make it a little more in his voice and added a verse. So yeah, he liked it, he got into it. And he actually delivered back to us within like a week more than we ever expected."

"It was like two days," Jelenic interjected.

"Was it two days?" Horvath said, amused. "We were like, 'Ah, I really hope he likes it.' And yeah, he never even was like, 'Cool. I love it.' He just turned it around for us, sent us back a finished track and we put it in the movie."

Jelenic described the entire process as "effortless," at least relative to how difficult it was to put together, for example, the brilliant Rainbow Road chase sequence.

"I mean, there was effort, but it's one of those things where, you know, when you're doing something creative or making something, sometimes the stuff that's easiest turns out to be the best stuff," Jelenic said.

"And this was one of those experiences where it's like, we threw the song together pretty quickly. Jack--you know obviously Jack's a huge talent--he turned it around super quickly. There wasn't really any notes or anything. Everyone just loved it. It's a very sort of pure moment, I think, in the movie."