If You Were 12 Years Old in 1989, the Power Glove/Fred Savage Vehicle Was the Most Important Movie in the World
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I am devoting March to Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 because I would love to work through my sizable backlog and be able to execute this column more efficiently going forward. I’m doing my damnedest to get to ALL of the movies that have been nominated for this column this month but when it comes to choosing which Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 contender to write up first I usually let my inner child decide.
And the 13 year old me was EXTREMELY in favor of me re-watching and writing up the 1989 video game exploitation movie The Wizard as soon as humanly possible.
If you were not a 13 year old boy in 1989, it’s impossible to understand what a big deal The Wizard was to people EXACTLY my age and gender. It was as close as we’d come to getting an official Nintendo movie.
If you were a 13 year old boy, The Wizard was no mere movie, it was a bona fide pop culture event that seemingly showcased ALL of the Nintendo games (or at least the super popular ones), gave a tacky contraption known as the Power Glove an iconic cinematic introduction befitting a gunslinger in a Sergio Leone Western AND introduced the world to what we could only assume would be the single greatest video game of all time in Super Mario 3, since that distinction previously belonged to Super Mario 2.
For the video game-loving 13 year old me of 1989, it was a very good thing that The Wizard was nakedly and unapologetically a 100 minute long infomercial for the life-affirming wonders of the miracle devices created by the Nintendo corporation.
I did not care that the movie was one long Nintendo commercial. I WANTED to see a movie that existed solely to extol the God-like majesty of the Power Glove. I used to read video game magazines at Walgreen’s and day-dream about how magical it would be if I had enough money to actually own and play any of those 8 bit wonders.
I would go to the corner store and watch strangers play arcade games for hours at a time. I was, if anything, way too psyched about the prospect of a movie being about as exciting as watching other people play video games. Actually, Watching Other People Play Video Games: The Movie would be another very fitting alternate title for The Wizard.
As if all that weren’t exciting enough, The Wizard starred top child star Fred Savage, who my cousin totally went to dance camp with before The Wonder Years so he was pretty much my best friend by association.
In The Wizard, my pal Savage plays Corey Woods, the product of a broken family who pulls a Gigli and pulls his deeply traumatized, semi-catatonic half brother Jimmy (Luke Edwards), who only speaks when it is absolutely essential for the plot, from a psychiatric home where he might receive the help he so clearly needs, so they can set out on a bonding trip to California.
Why California? Because it’s California, man! In movies like this, California is less a state than a state of mind. It’s an ideal, an idea, a promised land of instant fame, money and theme park rides as well as a video game Valhalla.
Early in their journey West, Corey pops a quarter into Double Dragon for Jimmy and discovers that he’s an otherworldly prodigy whose gift for playing any video game borders on preternatural.
The duo then hook up with Haley Brooks, a tough-talking early teen video game grifter played by future independent rock god Jenny Lewis , who sizes up Jimmy as her meal ticket. Haley, who spends her days cos-playing as Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, observes of the Double Dragon-playing wizard who sure plays a mean Ninja Gaiden, “If he can beat me, why can’t he beat any video head?
That’s the kind of authenticity we “video heads” in the audience craved! Finally, a movie that spoke our language, and wasn’t afraid to expose the powerful and provocative truth that Nintendo video games are awesome, and not just for kids, but rather fun for the whole family.
Maybe it’s because I’m a parent but I was horrified at how casual and chill everyone seems to be about a deeply mentally ill nine year old on the open road with zero contact with his parents or authority figures. The brothers’ family seems bizarrely unconcerned that a pre-teen who needs round-the-clock care is being used to hustle the kinds of people most likely to lash out in violence if they feel they’ve cheated: angry truckers, snotty teenagers, arrogant businessmen.
If I were the father of the boys, I would be terrified that my boys would be murdered, tortured, sex trafficked, sold into slavery or worse. Yet when Corey’s dad (Beau Bridges) and angsty teen brother Nick (Christian Slater) head out on the open road to find the runaways the vibe is less “desperate hunt to find vulnerable children before they are murdered” than “fun video game bonding road trip!”
Ah, but Corey and Nick aren’t the only ones looking for the missing boys. Jimmy’s mother and stepfather send bounty hunter Mt. Putnam (Will Seltzer), a scheming opportunist who angrily informs the boys’ father that he intends to snag Jimmy first so he can collect a big payday even though I would imagine that birth parents probably have dibs in circumstances like this.
Sam, Nick and Mr. Putnam have a Cannonball Run-style rivalry as they continually sabotage and undermine one another. Otherwise Corey and Nick’s role here is to overcome their differences through the righteous crucible of a rocking road trip and to illustrate that video games aren’t just for small children.
As a happening teen, Nick knows that video games, specifically Nintendo video games, are where it’s at but being a grumpy dad, Sam grouses that video games don’t take much in the way of brainpower.
The next time we see this heretic, however, he has been INSTANTLY and DRAMATICALLY saved by the glory of video games and his exposure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ home game. He’s thereafter a changed man, a real video head to use jargon I’m pretty sure the movie made up.
People are perpetually being amazed and entertained by Nintendo and its many wonder products. The savvy Haley makes sure to stack up on issues of Nintendo Power, gushing of the Nintendo-themed magazine, “I got these Power magazines to help Jimmy, to teach him the secret tricks of each game!”
Ah, but as miraculous and extremely useful as Nintendo Power might be it’s nothing compared to the majesty of the Power Glove, a futuristic controller that looked super cool but otherwise proved almost impressively useless.
Early in their video game journey across America, lushly mulleted video game champ Lucas (Jackie Vinson) uses a Power Glove so all-powerful that Jimmy runs off in fear rather than face him despite being the greatest video game player in the history of the world.
A look of pure ecstasy in his eye, Lucas gushes, “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad!” (meaning good) but he’s so enraptured that it’s clear that he would not mind losing his virginity to this magnificent wonder of technology.
In The Wizard, the Power Glove is magic. It was James Bond level technology children could master. It was the future today! It was as awe-inspiring as jet-packs or laser guns but better, because it was real! Well, sort of. It didn’t really work, truth be told, but it sure looked neat.
The runaways of The Wizard are in constant, seemingly mortal danger but the movie and the adult characters do not seem to notice or care. En route to the climactic video game competition in California the grifting trio are discovered counting their winnings in the back of a truck and are quickly relieved of their money by truckers.
These children are being robbed by adults yet the jaunty music on the score suggests we should be enjoying a chuckle at the rowdy shenanigans instead of being worried about their safety and lives.
The addition of a precocious, tough-talking girl 13 year old girl brings an additional element of danger the movie is utterly unwilling to deal with in anything other than a horrifyingly glib, comic fashion.
When our heroes are about to get captured by the child-hunter dispatched to bring them in, Haley resorts to the nuclear option and, in a packed arcade, yells as loud as possible while pointing at Putnam, “He touched my breast!”
Usually false accusations of child molestation are depicted in a negative light in movies. Not here. In this PG-rated feature length Nintendo commercial for small, stupid, indiscriminating children Haley pretending to have been sexually assaulted by a creepy adult is depicted as another illustration of her admirable pluck and genius for outside the box thinking.
Besides, at another point in the film the child hunter offers Jimmy a lollipop from a bag that he apparently uses to lure children into his car so there is a pretty good chance that in an earlier, PG-13 or R-rated version of the screenplay the bounty hunter with the overwhelming child molester vibe is an actual pedophile.
Putnam later complains of Haley’s false accusation, “I touched her breast. She doesn't have any breasts!”, which suggests that he thinks that the problem is that a 13 year old girl wasn’t voluptuous enough to be worth groping, not that sexually assaulting a child represents an unforgivable crime and moral transgression.
Everybody eventually ends up in Los Angeles for the big video game competition at Universal Studios, truly the happiest place on earth. Like everything else in The Wizard, this climax exists almost exclusively to promote the Nintendo corporation, specifically its hot new game Super Mario Brothers 3.
The Wizard deserves a place of shame, distinction or both in the annals of product placement, alongside such similarly questionable exercise in commerce thinly disguised as entertainment as Mac & Me, Bye, Bye Love, Houseguest and The Internship.
The Wizard is barely a movie but I enjoyed every ridiculous moment of it all the same. It was made in the two year window when I would recognize all the big video games by sight. So the cheap but powerful buzz of recognition you experience encountering something beloved from your childhood is more like a deafening roar of guilty nostalgic fun.
I’m obviously not the only person in the world with an intense emotional connection with The Wizard that has nothing to do with its questionable merits as a motion picture since Shout Factory just put out a collector’s edition Blu-Ray that includes lots of deleted scenes from The Wizard’s two and a half hour original cut.
I’m grateful I had an excuse to revisit this idiotic and deeply satisfying piece of cinematic garbage; I enjoyed the crap out of this crappy movie and my inner 13 year had an absolute blast, as I expected he might.
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