The extended Nintendo commercial known as The Wizard has no business working at all, on any level, much less surviving for 30+ years with a modest audience of fans willing to revisit it from time to time. Unlike other notable cult films (such as the 1993 Super Mario Bros., which this pairs well with), I can’t even say that The Wizard is particularly interesting in artistic or creative terms. At best, it’s a bland TV movie that somehow wound up playing in theaters. For all that, I can’t bring myself to dislike it. As much as I know I shouldn’t, I still have an almost inexplicable fondness for the movie. Watching it again brings me back to a specific moment in my youth when the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System video gaming console was just about the only thing I cared about.
I never saw The Wizard in a theater. I don’t think any of my friends did either. This wasn’t a theatrical event movie that needed to be watched on the big screen (like Batman or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that year). While it may have, technically, been a very minor box office success – relative to its small budget, at least – the film found its real niche on VHS home video, where Nintendo addicts could pause and replay the most important scenes, if not fast-forward through everything else to go directly to them.
| Title: | The Wizard |
| Year of Release: | 1989 |
| Director: | Todd Holland |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | DVD Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
In a weird way, The Wizard could almost be a sequel to 1987’s The Princess Bride, in the “Fred Savage Plays Nintendo” Cinematic Universe. The film probably wouldn’t exist at all if not for locking in the young actor, then still at the height of his fame as the lead of the hugely popular TV series The Wonder Years.
In addition to being a shameless marketing tool for the Nintendo of America corporation, the movie is also a blatant mash-up of Rain Man, The Karate Kid, and The Who’s rock opera Tommy, and hardly tries to disguise any of those influences. The Rain Man connection is most immediately obvious. Savage stars as Corey Woods, a smart-aleck ‘tween who, upon learning that his developmentally-challenged half-brother will be institutionalized by the boy’s heartless stepfather, takes it upon himself to bust the kid out and run away with him on a cross-country odyssey to California.
Along the way, Corey discovers that young Jimmy (Luke Edwards) is a video game savant capable of racking up amazing high scores on pretty much any game he encounters – which Corey uses to their advantage by hustling travel money out of strangers. The two eventually meet and join forces with another runaway named Haley (Jenny Lewis), who tips them off to a major video game tournament in Los Angeles. After a pit-stop in Reno, the three friends head to L.A. hoping to win big and split the proceeds. Meanwhile, the boys are chased by their father (Beau Bridges) and older brother (Christian Slater), as well as a sleazebag P.I. hired by the stepfather.
The movie never explicitly states that Jimmy is autistic, but the boy presents enough obvious symptoms that everyone in the audience will draw that conclusion and ignore a suggestion that his condition could be the result of trauma suffered in his past.
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the entire film is one long product placement ad for Nintendo. Amusingly, the story takes place in a world where every video arcade exclusively features games available for the NES home console, even though some of them (notably Double Dragon) actually originated with more graphically-advanced arcade versions not seen here. Among the iconic NES hits given prominent screen time are Super Mario Bros. 2, Ninja Gaiden, Rad Racer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Metroid, and Contra. A key antagonist is a wealthy douchebag who shocks and awes our heroes by introducing them to an expensive peripheral that had conveniently just hit store shelves as the movie was released – leading to the immortal (and hilariously ironic in retrospect) line, “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.”
In its coup de grâce, the film climaxes at the big tournament with a first-look reveal of Super Mario Bros. 3, a game that wouldn’t even be available in the American market until the following year. I can tell you from experience how much that scene blew the minds of the target audience and built up a feverish anticipation that helped propel SMB3 to become a blockbuster smash. In that regard, for what was its true intended purpose, The Wizard was a huge success.
As a movie in other respects, I won’t pretend that The Wizard is any great piece of art. It definitely isn’t. Even aside from the crass commercialism of the whole endeavor, the drama is simplistic and the directing pedestrian. Nothing much about it stands out as worthy of paying a theater ticket price to see in a cinema. I really ought to hold the thing in utter disdain.
Yet, somehow, I don’t. The main characters are just likeable enough and the story otherwise harmless enough to counteract some of the cynicism of its creation and existence. Watching the movie gives me a lot of wistful nostalgia for a time when video games were much simpler and more purely fun, not to mention less brutally violent than most today.
If certainly no classic, I have to be honest that I still find The Wizard a little endearing, despite my better judgment. Unlike the Power Glove, it’s not so bad after all.
The Blu-ray
The Wizard has been released on Blu-ray twice so far, first in 2018 by Universal and later in a more elaborate Collector’s Edition from Shout! Factory in 2020. The latter is a two-disc set with more bonus features and reversible cover art – the original 1989 theatrical poster on one side (the same design Universal used) and a fun 8-bit gaming homage on the other. (Initial copies also came with a slipcover, but mine doesn’t have that.)
I’ve never seen the Universal disc, but reviews at the time were poor. The Shout Select Collector’s Edition claims to be sourced from a new 4K remaster. I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised to hear that. From the looks of it, I would’ve assumed this comes from an older video master. The mildly letterboxed 1.85:1 image is rather soft, with very flat contrast and drab colors. Any dynamic visual pop you might expect from all the neon lights in Reno simply isn’t here. While it may be possible (even probable) that The Wizard always had dull, TV movie-like photography, I’d expect a new 4K scan at the very least to resolve film grain better. Grain texture is hardly visible at all in most of the movie, and when it does show up, it’s usually quite noisy.
The DTS-Master Audio 2.0 soundtrack is also incredibly weak and required a significant volume boost above my normal default. Dialogue is very low and soft. The musical score is slightly better and has some moderate bass on occasion, but is still nothing special. Even with Dolby Surround Upmixer engaged in my receiver, about the first two-thirds of the movie have almost no noticeable surround action at all. (An airplane flyover in the opening scene stays entirely in the front channels.) However, the rear speakers come to slightly more life with crowd noises and music bleed when the story gets to the video game tournament in Los Angeles.
For bonus features, Disc 1 includes a director’s commentary, more than a half-hour of deleted scenes (mostly dull), and a vintage trailer. Disc 2 offers a 41-minute retrospective featurette, a pretty interesting interview with a former Nintendo Game Play Counselor (6 min.), an analysis of the film by a clinical psychologist who discusses its depiction of PTSD and autism (13 min.), footage from a 2019 video gaming convention panel (57 min.), a 30th anniversary Alamo Drafthouse post-screening Q&A (24 min.), and a photo gallery.
Related
- Super Mario Bros.
- Video Game Movies & TV
- Other Awesome Movies of 1989
The Video File Blog 
Love the ‘The Who’ shoutout in the title.
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