Expanding on my thoughts from yesterday, there are plenty of reasons why you should run out and rent The Wizard immediately.1) There is a bunch of footage of old video games being played by an autistic kid. I'm not sure why, but this is somehow fascinating to me, even though the clips are only 10 to 20 seconds each. In the course of the movie, he plays Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon and Ninja Gaiden prominently, not to mention the Super Mario Brothers 3 orgy at the end of the movie, which is essentially a five-minute sneak preview for the game (at least at the time).
Of course, this brings to light some of the great, silly, illogical parts of the movie. For example, when he is playing Super Mario Brothers 3, Jimmy finds the warp whistle hidden in the first fortress, which should be effing impossible unless you know where to look for it. You have to have the raccoon tail / leaf (whatever it's called) that lays you fly above the screen, on top of a wall, and into an adjacent room with the warp whistle. And for some reason, this makes Jimmy's score counter double or triple, which does not actually happen in the game! Jimmy uses this to eventually beat Lucas, and the pig-tailed girl, who serves as the Meg Griffin of the competition for Jimmy and Lucas to beat up on.
Honestly, if you don't have realism in your shameless promotional movies that have video games, what can you trust?
2) Touching on the video games again, there is also a montage of games being played in an arcade, as Jimmy is trying to learn how to beat a bunch of different games; the games in the tournament are unknown. Ninja Gaiden is the opening round game, which is actually kind of appropriate - It is a tough game, and it does have a score meter.
However, there are also several games that they practice in the arcade that clearly wouldn't be used, unless Nintendo was effing stupid. They also waste a lot of money calling the Nintendo Game Counselor line, which I'm sure made a ton of parents happy as their kids stupidly called whenever they got stuck in a game. I never really understood the point of this - Most old NES games rely on the simple formula of ducking, attacking or running past whatever thing is attacking you. It's a matter of memorizing patters and reacting, which you don't really need a "game counselor" for.
3) In a comical scene, the character played by Beau Bridges - he's related to Jimmy somehow, I think he might be his natural dad - is rambling about some shit in Zelda 2. The thing is, when the camera pans to what he is playing, he's just slashing things in some town, and it makes absolutely no sense with what he's saying. It's as if they gave him a script, then intentionally made an effort to make him look like an asshole who didn't know anything about the game he was playing. Hey, editing truck, you could have at least helped a brother out by splicing in some scenes from Zelda 2 that at least made sense for the scene.
4) Final thing for now - The Wizard was one of the last movies that had kids completely independent and not reliant on adults for things in 1980s fashion, to the point where you question if every authority in the movie is effing insane.
Rilo Kiley, Fred Savage and an autistic kid essentially hitchhike across the country, using money they win by scamming people at video games, with the goal of making it to L.A. to play in a $25,000 video game tournament. The only adult that is remotely helpful is a truck driver named Spanky that the girl knows, which is somewhat odd and creepy when you really ponder it. I don't think they really ever explain how Haley (Rilo Kiley) lives; it is implied or said that her dad is a truck driver and out the picture. Fred Savage runs away from his parents with Jimmy, his half-brother, and they are able to elude all adults in their way.
Meanwhile, there is a menacing "child finder" dude after them, because apparently in 1989, nobody would say shit if they saw three children just wandering around the country. I live in a rural area and remember being asked by cops twice where I was going after school as I was walking home or to a friend's house; I don't think I would have been able to accomplish a journey of several hundred miles with no adult interference.
Anyway, I've got to go cover a meeting, so I might do a third part to this at a future date.
The Fred Savage photo from The Wizard I found at this blog.
Awesome review and follow up, finally someone else digs this movie like I do.
ReplyDeleteI think the games played were featured on some compilation that is now super rare and worth over 10k, they augmented the real games and made them into "mini levels" and added bizarre scoring systems. The compilations were possibly involved with blockbuster video somehow and were definitely used in the real life nintendo competitions that are now long defunct, you were still right about the raccoon hat in SM3 though.
I do remember they had a brief scene where they go to the home/trailer of the girl played by Jenny Lewis.
One thing I noticed about the movie after rewatching was how competently it's directed in spite of some of the 80's movie cliches, if you go back and watch it in widescreen it really changes the whole look of the movie, lots of panoramic shots of the desert and vistas.
I see we said a lot of the same things only you're defending it. Not that I was necessarily against the original. It's a guilty pleasure for sure. I just think it could be done better.
ReplyDeleteWhat's really funny is I recently got a Wii and downloaded Super Mario 3 and Startropics. It's really fun playing through Mario after not playing it for years. All the levels are familiar but I've forgotten so many of the tricks.
@ TS - Mario 3 is still awesome; it's just really well-programmed, from a difficulty standpoint, with a good, steady build throughout the game. I'll play that and the other games on my computers via emulators from time to time.
ReplyDeletePlaying through some of the old NES games I've come to the conclusion that they don't get enough credit for difficulty. Most of the games today, much as I love them, are easy as heck to beat. A lot harder back when they largely ignored the laws of physics.
ReplyDelete@ TS - Oh definitely! I think we've both commented in the past about how unforgiving NES difficulty is. And that's overlooking the "wtf?" games like Zelda 2 and Castlevania 2, where you can just get stuck for days.
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