Secondhand Nostalgia: The Wizard

Last night The Boy and I had a few drinks and watched The Wizard, as part of his continuing need to share the fundamental pop culture influences of his youth.

I mentioned this in my bio, but I have basically no gaming credentials. Unlike The Boy, who grew up playing Mario Bros in the original Japanese on a Famicom in his basement, World of Warcraft is my first MMO, and one of my first games, period. So watching a camped-up 1989 kiddie Rain Man of my generation's gaming youth was sort of bizarre.

The basic plot involves Fred Savage rescuing his savant-like younger brother from a mental institution and traveling from Utah to Los Angeles to compete in the National Video Game Championships. To do this, they spend hours on the phone with Nintendo support getting a list of every possible game that might appear in the finals (all, say, 100 of them), and then sitting wonder-boy Jimmy in front of Play Choice 10 machines in Reno casinos to play them all.

The film is loosely put together at best: passable child acting strung together with stock footage of highway America, constantly interspersed with product placement from Universal Studios and Nintendo. All of which adds up to a certain campy charm, at least if you've drunk enough to appreciate it. We nearly died laughing when the kids' arch-nemesis unboxed his NES peripherals and uttered the quiet, almost-reverent line: "I love my Power Glove." You could almost hear the (TM) on the end.

Call it naive, call it an early example of shameless commercial creep, but you've got to love this simplicity of pandering to the 80s child fan base: hitchhike your way across country on underage gambling revenue, and Super Mario Brothers 3 will bring your broken family back together!

And that's all I have to say about that. Back to WoW tomorrow.