You know what the Academy Award-winning film Rain Man was missing? A sneak peek at the upcoming Super Mario Bros. 3 video game!
Thankfully, this was generously rectified in The Wizard, the 1989 cult film starring then teen dream Fred Savage and current indie queen Jenny Lewis as two kids taking possibly autistic little brother Jimmy (Luke Edwards) to the Nintendo-sponsored gaming competition Video Armageddon at Universal Studios.
While many proto-nerds were pumped for Batman that summer, most of the kids I knew were eager to see this quasi-promotional flick because it featured not only a glimpse of the then-unreleased new Super Mario game, but what was possibly the coolest gaming device ever … until you actually used it: the Power Glove.
I wasn’t that excited for it, though, mostly because my brother and I lost out on getting a Nintendo the previous year; while my parents were out shopping one Saturday afternoon, we decided to coat the entire side of our farmhouse in thick, red-staining mud. (Honestly, I think they just didn’t want to spend the hundred bucks on the now-ancient console and used the wet dirt as an excuse. Bastards!)
Still, The Wizard mostly holds up if you lived in that era. It’s pretty amazing, cinematically, to remember there was an internet-free period when trios of youths traveled across the country, got viciously beaten up, chased by skunky private investigators, entered national 8-bit gaming competitions and, in the case of Lewis, falsely accused men of touching her prepubescent breasts. What a time to have been alive! —Louis Fowler