While some Nintendo fans have come away from The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dreaming of a future Star Fox spin-off or a third Super Mario animated movie with an expanded character roster, one scene in the film stuck with me above all others. I'm talking about the suicide roller coaster created by Bowser Jr., one of the film's more bizarre pieces of engineering.

Koopa architecture and engineering have long been fascinations of mine, especially since Nintendo introduced the impossible flying machines piloted by Koopalings in Super Mario Bros. 3. Over the past 40 years, Bowser's army corps of engineers has pulled off seemingly physically and financially impossible stunts, filling huge castles with hostile architecture elements like spinning fire bars, spike traps, and lava pits, and populating them with dangerous wildlife like Thwomps and Piranha Plants. But the suicide coaster seen on Planet Bowser in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is on another level. It has awakened in me many new questions about Koopa Troopas and the nature of........

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