Inexplicable (Comic) Book Review: Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Land comics rule

While I've written at length about The Wizard here and here, and everyone is in agreement that the Super Mario Brothers movie sucked, there is one Mario-themed production that was shockingly good: The comic book series.

Besides the example to the right, you can find a bunch of page scans on this website. (Note: Clicking on any of the images will make them full-size, so that you can actually read them.) I'm not actually sure how I ever came across them. I dimly recall an aunt buying me the big red "Best Of" book that I still have to this day, but I'm not sure how I got an additional copy of it, or several other issues, or the four Game Boy issues that were about Super Mario Land.

However, the key thing about all of them is their surprising sophistication. Like some of the better cartoons to follow - SpongeBob Squarepants, Shrek - there was a lot of references in there that would fly over the head of a kid. You know, like how all the flowers in the king's garden are named Bud. There were pop culture references that you wouldn't get as a kid, along with puns that required a somewhat-advanced vocabulary.

As part of the moving into a new apartment, I was re-reading the "Best Of" book I had and chuckling to myself here and there. Most of the humor still holds up. Also worth noting is the artwork, which is what appealed to me most as a kid. The characters and backgrounds are vivid and bright, even more so than the Super Mario Brothers cartoon that was also pretty solid. The comic book series comes the best at recapturing the artwork of the second and third games of the Super Mario Brothers series.

So, if you see a copy lingering around a used book store, by all means pick it up. It's the perfect sort of odd purchase that you'll probably like, or it makes a great unique gift for someone who's into video games. (My other recommendations on this front: Game Over, an incredible biography by David Sheff about the rise of Nintendo, and The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven Kent, an exhaustive look at the video game industry shortly before the launch of the PS2 and X-Box.) It also might make for a good investment, since they go for $10 to $40 online, it seems.

As I said at the start of this entry, all the comic images are coming from this website, which has a ton of archived comics related to the whole series. Really, really good stuff! And, I haven't forgotten that I owe y'all a Baggage review - I'm at work now, so I'll check my DVR and have it up after I get home.

Dear NES, how did I ever beat anything on you?

Back in the day, I used to be a voracious devourer of video games. (To some extent, I still am; this entry is significantly delayed because I was powering through the end of Final Fantasy: Dissidia.) Of course, my first game was Super Mario Brothers, followed closely by Duck Hunt and World Class Track Meet, since all three were on the same cartridge. This game was so prevalent that used game stores refused to even give you $1 for it, and actively turned me away when I just tried to give them my copy.

From an age I can't even remember, to about 16 or 17 (when the pursuit of and mostly failure of getting girls took over), I played anything I could get my hands on, with an emphasis on RPGs and adventures. At this point, I had a NES, Game Boy, SNES, N64 and PSX (in roughly that order), and once I hit 18 I picked up a PSX and Genesis on the cheap. I picked up a PS2 my senior year of high school, and this carried me all the way through college.

However, reflecting back on all of this gaming, two questions sprung to mind. The first is relatively minor - How the heck was I ever exposed to a NES in the first place? I dimly recall that my friend Brian had a NES, along with a couple dozen games, but I also remember that I also had one at this point because I would always try to borrow games from him. (Back in the day, the only way to get new games was to shell out $50 for them, bum them from friends, rent them from Stop and Shop, or look through the classifieds. Funcoland wasn't around in Rhode Island until I was 17 or 18.)

I have no other memories of my early gaming, except that it happened, and that one night my day snuck a rental copy of Super Mario Brothers 2 in under his coat, which I had been nuts about playing. Its release date was October 1988, meaning I was around 4 or 5 at the time.

Secondly: How the heck did I ever actually beat any of these old RPGs and adventure games? I did have a subscription to Nintendo Power, but only for a couple years. The Super C issue was my first in May / June 1990, and I never even owned that game. I'm positive that the magazine helped me through some tricky parts in Castlevania 2, and it and my parents helped me with Shadowgate. (Incidentally, this is the only game they both ever got really into. My mom played and beat the original Dragon Warrior, which came free with Nintendo Power for a little bit.)

However, I distinctly recall beating Zelda 2 on my own, which required doing esoteric things like finding magic to turn yourself into a fairy to get through certain keyholes. The same thing happened for Zelda 1, although my aunt did show me how to use bombs. (Give me a break - I was like 5.)

The later Dragon Warrior games? All me, with no help from guides or Nintendo Power, and in the case of the second one, no instruction manual. The third one did contain a nice little guide in it, but it was fairly linear anyway. The second one was a monstrous ordeal, where you basically had to sail your little ship around the world and hope you didn't accidentally land on an island way too tough for you.

Past the NES generation, games began to self-regulate and clean up their act a bit. While you could get stuck in Final Fantasy 2/4 if you didn't play for a long time, and thus forget what your current task was, generally the people in your party could tip you off. The same thing goes for the third installment, which was also much more linear than people want to claim. This gameplay clarity made it a lot more frustrating when a game was a throwback, like Breath of Fire 2, which had plodding pacing and randomly made you use characters that sucked (looking in your direction, Sten and Jean).

Wherein I link to neat things

I don't really have time to write about the awesome Modern Family episode I saw last night yet, so instead, please settle for a couple links to some neat things I saw other people link to on the Internetz. (I'm so original like that.)

- This is a super awesome version of Super Mario Brothers. You can play the standard game as Mario... Or as Samus Aran from Metroid, complete with bombs and a blaster! Other options include the Contra guy, Mega Man, Link and Simon Belmont. (Another silly-fun video linked on that page: Life in 8-bit.)

- One high school or AAU team hits a three with a second left, to take a lead, and they think they've won the game. Uh, whoops!

- And finally, I have no clue why, but it is incredibly compelling to watch this girl play Shadowgate with her boyfriend. Beating Shadowgate was one of my biggest accomplishments as a kid, since I did it mostly via trial and error, and some scant hints in Nintendo Power magazine. I also played The Uninvited, which wasn't quite as good Deja Vu, a send-up of Raymond Chandler and other detective types. (Also neat: 25 things you might not have known about the NES.)

Inexplicable Movie Review: The Wizard (again)

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.

Inexplicable Movie Review: The Wizard

The Wizard is a common punching bag for movie reviewers, but really, when the movie dropped in 1989, it was noticeable for two very cool reasons, at least to my five-year-old mind:

1) The Power Glove. The scene with Lukas is rightfully mocked now, but at the time, the Power Glove looked like the coolest effing thing just about ever. According to a pretty trustworthy source, the Angry Video Game Nerd, it is god damn awful to actually play a game with, but hey, it still does look cool.

2) The preview of Super Mario Brothers 3, which was a good and proper sequel to the original game, as opposed to the weird game known as Super Mario Brothers 2 in the states. For some reason, I remember getting SMB3 relatively early in my youth, which was rare because I normally only got bargain-priced games. I somehow managed to avoid getting the ultimate horrible bargain game, Home Alone, at least.

Anyway, looking at the history of video game movies, you'd be hard pressed to say that The Wizard was in the bottom five. Yeah, it was essentially a 90-minute advertisement for Nintendo, but at least it was an enjoyable ad with decent actors like Fred Savage and Christian Slater and Beau Bridges and the girl who would become Rilo Kiley. While none of them are really award winners, they give at least capable performances.

The Wizard is just kind of an average movie to me, especially when compared to other "kids" movies of the time frame - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Honey I Shrunk Every God Damn Thing Ever don't hold up as well either. The Wizard is also not a colossal cluster eff, like most video game movies, excluding Mortal Kombat, which is shocking from its sheer competence. But, that's a discussion for another time, and another review.

(Actually, I might expand on this whole entry at some point... I feel like I'm rushing things a bit, whereas it would be good to REALLY get into all of The Wizard's amazing parts.)