I first saw The Wizard somewhere over Greenland in July 1990. After a long US holiday it was nice seeing a road movie to pass the long hours stuck on the plane. The movie is an utterly shameless 100-minute commercial for Nintendo products, the then imminent release of Super Mario Bros. 3 (even though 2 was never released in the US) and Universal's own Los Angeles theme park, but at the time I was just interested because of all the video games on show, though it does not speak well of youth that even in 1989 video games were still the number 1 sport.
The actual plot woven into the commercial is truly heartbreaking though. Young, possibly autistic, catatonic Jimmy Woods (James Woods?) keeps wandering away from home, desperate to get to California. Half-brother Cory (Fred Savage) goes after him, attempting to pacify his desire to get to the west coast state. Cory thinks that Jimmy wants to enter a video game competition at Universal Studios but really he just wants to visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs - the last place of happy memories before the death of his twin sister, and he just wants to let her go.
Really heavy-going stuff, and not a film I can enjoy watching as an adult in that regard. The film is poorly directed and features innumerable errors regarding the Nintendo products that they are promoting. How can the kids shout out the secrets of a video game that they have never played and that has only just been announced? For a commercial they sure didn't research their material very well. But it does win back some points for effective use of the original "Send me an Angel" by Real Life.
Christian Slater and Beau Bridges pursue the boys as the older brother and dad, while a feisty teenage girl called Hayley helps them get to their destination on time. The travel montages and locations are all memorable and turn the journey into a nice rites-of-passage.
It's become a cult classic in recent years, and will provoke even more nostalgia another 24 years down the line, but the heavy subject matter beneath the Nintendo-plugging means I can't go back again.
The actual plot woven into the commercial is truly heartbreaking though. Young, possibly autistic, catatonic Jimmy Woods (James Woods?) keeps wandering away from home, desperate to get to California. Half-brother Cory (Fred Savage) goes after him, attempting to pacify his desire to get to the west coast state. Cory thinks that Jimmy wants to enter a video game competition at Universal Studios but really he just wants to visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs - the last place of happy memories before the death of his twin sister, and he just wants to let her go.
Really heavy-going stuff, and not a film I can enjoy watching as an adult in that regard. The film is poorly directed and features innumerable errors regarding the Nintendo products that they are promoting. How can the kids shout out the secrets of a video game that they have never played and that has only just been announced? For a commercial they sure didn't research their material very well. But it does win back some points for effective use of the original "Send me an Angel" by Real Life.
Christian Slater and Beau Bridges pursue the boys as the older brother and dad, while a feisty teenage girl called Hayley helps them get to their destination on time. The travel montages and locations are all memorable and turn the journey into a nice rites-of-passage.
It's become a cult classic in recent years, and will provoke even more nostalgia another 24 years down the line, but the heavy subject matter beneath the Nintendo-plugging means I can't go back again.