Headscratchers / Super Mario Bros. (1993)

• Toad's song tells us that in Dinohattan, cars run on electricity because fossil fuels are sacred. But then, how is electricity generated in the first place? Well, since water is a scarce commodity in Dinohattan, not through hydropower. And not through thermal or nuclear power either, because they involve boiling water and using steam to move turbines. What remains? Geothermal? Possibly. But there is one cheap, disposable, renewable resource that dictators have no remorse to exploit. Manpower. Considering Koopa's attitude, electricity in Dinohattan could very well be generated by workers whose job is to use their own muscular force to move the turbines all day. Probably, had such a scene been shot with the naive vision of the 1990s, the workers would have been slaves or prisoners. But the modern cynical attitude would suggest a much more horrific alternative: a Dinohattan with a skyrocketing unemployment rate and Koopa's promise of new jobs, which he implements as gulag-like labor camps, where people are forced to produce electricity for the city and are paid a pittance, faced with the only alternative to get no money at all.
  • According to Word of God, confirmed by concept art, electricity in Dinohattan comes from the meteorite's geomagnetic energy. The meteorite chamber was supposed to be a wide, deep underground abyss, with tunnels at the two extremities, connected by a bridge high above the chasm and with a huge machine above the bridge to collect the energy. The only reason it didn't look like that in the final movie was the budget.