California (The Wizard)

Still not ready to talk about the Nintendo games yet. The entire point of the Nintendo Project is looking back, and I find myself looking back to December of 2013. There, I postulated that the end of the NES was a thing of beauty. To be fair, this was mostly brought on by me being mushy about my friends getting engaged, but I'm going to stick with it. 1994 and 2012 were both about Nintendo partying in the face of oblivion, and doing it with a vibrant celebration of the life that the NES and Nintendo Power had led. Today we go to 1989, where both were riding high. Millions of children were getting the Power every month, and the end of the 80's signalled Nintendo's arguably highest heights with the NES. 1989's silver anniversary is waning, set to be subsumed by a future in which we make the same tired fucking joke about hoverboards and Pepsi Perfect for 365 days. How depressing. Now playing at the Holomax of Infinity, where time is a construct and we flit through it like antsy and esoteric little hummingbirds, it's The Wizard in 5.1-D totally schway vision.

God help us, what are we doing here? A movie starring that Wonder Years kid about road trips and Nintendo games. Dear god in heaven, have we sunk to these meteoric lows? Still, there are things to be said about this movie. It's little more than a historical relic at this point, an artifact of 1989. Is it a very good film? Not really. I don't even know if one could call it a cult classic. It is riddled with problems and things that people on the Internet mock it for... like its video game inaccuracies. Roger Ebert called them out on this. The mental image of Roger Ebert in 1989, playing the first Ninja Turtles game on the NES, speaks to me on so many levels. Part of it is the "secret history" Phil mentioned ages ago, but with me being used to the main reason people call the first Ninja Turtles one of the hardest NES games being the dam level... I want to know if Roger Ebert ever beat it. Short of a seance, I will never know the answer to that question and it fucking haunts me. Just like the NES and Nintendo haunt this film, the spectral force of Nintendo's influence being the fabric that binds it all. Here we sit, at the tail end of the Dance Apocalyptic, and yet in the cinemasphere we have a looming Destructor to rival Peko. It is Video Armageddon that blazes in the skies over Universal Studios in California, and the secret harbored beneath its gates will send the world into chaos and frenzy. But let it sleep for now.

Then you have the weird moments. Jenny Lewis screaming about breasts, for instance. Ah, Jenny Lewis. Looking back again, it was this time nine years ago that I first became acquainted with her voice. Imagine my surprise when I learned that she was in this. How about that. Of course, the Power Glove shows up as well, Nintendo and Mattel's joint gauntlet of doom in these dark times. The camera trickery led us to believe that this would assist our alchemy. We were wrong. Oh god, were we wrong. The muddled power of control was not in our hands. We were fooled into creating a monster... but this is only one of the monsters birthed by our Wizard. The next lies buried within Universal Studios, the harbinger that is the final test of Video Armageddon. Video Armageddon, you see, is a test of the best. The children who have mastered the video games flock, pitted against each other in glorious 8-bit alchemical combat. We come down to three in the final round. A girl that the movie does not care for. Lucas, wielder of the Glove of Deception. Jimmy, our protagonist and Wizard of California. The final test is unleashed upon these three Hard Game Beaters, and it is nothing they could comprehend. They know only the games that have existed. Now, as Video Armageddon strikes their hearts, comes the world of anti-matter, screaming at them in chiptunes. As the gate is raised, the full fury is placed upon them. In this unknown land, they must beat their rivals and become the champion of all video games, both existant and non-existant. As for us, we witness something amazing. Something that set the world on fire in 1989, when we knew naught about it.

Holy fucking shit. Super Mario Brothers Three.

To speak more is to risk being sucked into the open wound that Mario unleashed upon time in this period. Already, I fear the winds are gale force. Still, this is the monster set loose upon the world in 1989, the bringer of Video Armageddon and the vanguard who let Nintendo rule the world. Only a beast altered with superior alchemy could possibly take it on... but that story is not ours to tell. The Wizard probably made money. It probably cemented the hype for Super Mario Brothers Three in the minds of every child of the time. What I know for sure is that this film created several monsters. The Power Glove was one. Super Mario Brothers Three is another. The third came about when Nintendo sought to bring the film to life. That story comes later. God help us all.