Video: Today is the 25th anniversary of The Wizard, the movie that was essentially a big commercial for Nintendo where Super Mario Bros. 3 was revealed to the world.
25 Years Ago, Hollywood Tried To Make The Nintendo Power Glove Look Cool
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15 responses to “25 Years Ago, Hollywood Tried To Make The Nintendo Power Glove Look Cool”
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jasoncrenshawDoesn’t matter how much of a commercial the movie was, it is still amazing to watch.
Kotaku should take a hard stance on removing any members who say otherwise.
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poitaI’m amazed that people forget just how heartbreaking this movie is.
Seriously, it is a real tearjerker and has pretty heavy themes. It gets forgotten in the whole powerglove thing. It’s pretty dark.
In 1988 Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) is a young boy who has suffered from an unnamed, but serious mental disorder ever since his twin sister Jennifer drowned in the Green River two years earlier. He does not interact with anyone, spending most of his time building things out of blocks or boxes, and he always carries his lunch box with him. He is determined to go to “California”, at first nearly the only word he can say since the tragedy. The trauma of the drowning and Jimmy’s condition have broken up his family; he lives with his mother Christine Bateman and stepfather, while his brothers Corey (Fred Savage) and Nick (Christian Slater) live with their father Sam (Beau Bridges). When Jimmy is put into an institution, Corey breaks him out and runs away with him to California. Christine and her husband hire Putnam (Will Seltzer), a greedy and sleazy runaway-child bounty hunter, to bring back only Jimmy; he competes with Sam and Nick to find the boys, and both groups sabotage each other’s efforts.
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mrtacoI remember Mum hiring this out for us from the video shop. VHS in one of those big clunky bubbly plastic cases…
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charlie_s123I hired this pretty much every time we went to the video store (except for when I was in a Wrestlemania mood instead).
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ninjakickthedamnrabitI saw the movie in the theater as a kid, and yeah, I wanted a power glove. That reminds me, I need to watch the AVGN power glove video again :p
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germinalconsequenceAs a kid who owned an NES, this was like a message from the Video Game Gods themselves. I was so hyped for SMB 3 after that movie and when I hired the game (I couldn’t afford video games at that age) I woke up that night and found my parents playing it. We then had a family gaming session for a while and it is one of the things from my childhood I’ll never forget. Funnily enough, that was also the way I ended up seeing The Princess Bride as a kid too (I was a Fred Savage fan as a kid).
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bigcheez77“25 Years Ago, Hollywood Tried To Make The Nintendo Power Glove Look Cool”
25 years ago Nintendo did make it look cool, I guess you were not a child of the 80s?
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tobiasampersandWe had free tickets to see this in the cinema, but by the time we found one playing it (we lived in a country town) it was all over.
So it became the first movie we rented for our VCR… we were late adopters.
One of the things I never could understand was, the reveal of Mario 3 at the end is a big twist, because no one has played it so they don’t know anything about it, but Fred Savage spends that scene narrating the action like he’d seen it before – “All he has to do is the thing and when he gets the thing he’ll win the thing!”. What was Fred Savage not telling us?!
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