The Wizard (1989) - by J. Molotov

The first thing I want everyone to know about this movie is that it is essentially a commercial for Super Mario 3.

Do you remember the frenzy that the release of Super Mario 2 caused? All the kids in my school were freaking out and lying and bragging about whose cousin had already gotten it when the stores were sold out and it wasn’t even really a Mario game. Once the first Mario Brothers did so well, the makers realized they’d better hurry up and get a sequel out there into the clutches of the clamoring mob. So instead of taking the time to program a whole new game, they took another Japanese game with different characters and put in Mario and Luigi, the Toadstool and that bitch Princess and voilà: Mario 2. That’s why the entire game is totally different, with different bad guys, different animation, different goals. We didn’t notice this as children because we were craaaaazy with excitement for another game that featured Italian blue-collar workers as the protagonists. We were susceptible to the ol’ bait and switch back then.

But after the repeated wild success for the Mario franchise with Mario 2, the programmers decided it was time to do right by us. They went back to the original framework and crafted possibly the finest video game to date: Mario 3. And in order to drive up the frenzy to absolutely astronomical proportions, they decided that the way to unveil their marvelous creation was that it was to be the centerpiece of a videogame competition at the climax of a movie starring Fred Savage, the Paul Newman of 1980s children’s film.

What I will never understand about this movie is how they came up with the plot. The movie’s raison d’etre was to promote a video game. The story they decided to give us is about a young child, Jimmy, who has witnessed the drowning of his twin sister. The consequences of witnessing her death are that a) he exhibits autistic-like behavior to the point that the authorities want to take him away from his family because they think that the family is unqualified to care for him and b) he becomes a videogame prodigy. Jimmy and his brother (Fred Savage) hitchhike across the country, escaping from their broken family and a runaway-child hunter and eventually finding their purpose when they learn of a videogame tournament that they believe winning will prove that Jimmy doesn’t need to be in an institution. I mean, that’s some heavy shit. 

Jimmy is a sad, withdrawn child, carrying around his little lunchbox full of drowned-twin-sister mementos, only capable of interaction within the pixelated world of videogames.  He and his brother meet a red-headed drifter girl along the highways who joins their journey. Fred Savage and the red-head use his deceptive appearance and uncanny videogame skills to hustle people along the way, at one point even forcing him to compete with a prototypical hot-shot asshole kid who has no understanding of the horrible life he’s led. The mother and stepfather are egging on the obviously bad man they’ve hired to chase down the children, and the hapless father and Christian Slater are lagging behind, just trying to understand why this nondescript grey box has turned their lives updside down. Certainly this was a lot to cope with for the hordes of maniac children who must have descended on the theaters to see this movie because Nintendo ruled their lives (and I will bet you $10,000 that they showed the part with the Power Glove in the trailer).

Of course, what happened to me was that I promptly forgot all the finer plot points and only remembered the awesomeness. I can only assume that sort of bad-memory repression happened to the rest of my cohort. The awesomeness, by the way, is sufficiently awesome as to not be overshadowed by the bummer plotline even upon recent repeat viewings. It includes children exercising their autonomy in ways that children always wish they could, like making a cross-country hitchhiking journey and hustling adults, in addition to generalized awesomeness like long discussions of videogame strategies, the aforementioned Power Glove, the biggest little city (Reno, NV), and giant dinosaur statues in California. And of course, there is the moment we’d all been waiting for: the Unveiling of Super Mario 3. Which turned out to be so freaking awesome that last Saturday night I returned home at 2:30 a.m. from the bar and found my boyfriend and friend playing it, 20 years later, with as much focus and enthusiasm as we all greeted this life-changing game at the climax of this classic film.