We're off to See The Wizard
Like Saturday morning television, video games teach young players not that movies are obsolete, but that they have a new (though perhaps subordinate) role to play in the ever-expanding system of entertainment. A film like Universal's The Wizard (1989, the directorial feature debut of UCLA film school graduate Todd Holland) provides one concrete model of what that new role might be. Far from figuring video as a dangerous medium (like the films about television that Beverle Houston considered), The Wizard fetishizes video games—both their hard- and software. In fact, the film could be read as a ninety-minute commercial for the Nintendo system—especially for products like the Power Glove (which was a hot seller in the 1989 Christmas season) and "Super Mario Brothers 3" (the third game in the series). Although this game was not yet available in the stores when the film opened in December, by the end of 1990 it had sold seven million copies, which made it the top-selling video game in the U.S. market. Of course, this use of movies as a site of product placement and as an alternative advertising medium is not unique to The Wizard but is a common phenomenon of the 1980s—as has been persuasively argued by Mark Crispin Miller.[14] What is unique here is the centrality of the product promotion, as if designed to teach young spectators that such commercial intertextuality is the cultural norm.
A thirty-eight-page, full-color magazine Pocket Power (published by Nintendo and distributed free at the theater ticket counter) featured a cover story on The Wizard which makes it clear that these products are the real "stars" of the movie. In this advertising brochure thinly disguised as a magazine, one anonymous article tells us that writer-producer David Chisholm "compared the game to the sequel of a big movie
hit. Fans are anxious for it ["Super Mario Brothers 3"] because it is even bigger and better than the original." The magazine also uses the young human stars to endorse the game products, telling us that "the cast were ecstatic knowing they were the first to get a glimpse of Super Mario Bros. 3." The strongest endorsement comes from the best-known child actor in the movie, Fred Savage (star of ABC's hit series "The Wonder Years," which The Wizard 's co-producer Ken Topolsky also produces): "'I never played anything like it before,' said Fred. "I can't wait until it comes out and I can buy it!'"[15]
Other video game magazines, such as the bimonthly Game Player's Buyer's Guide to Nintendo Games , make us see that cinema can play a vital role by preselling young players on stories that are being adapted by Nintendo—that is, by suturing them into identification with its superheroes. Currently, Nintendo has game versions of Predator, Total Recall, Dick Tracy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Top Gun, Platoon, Rambo, Robocop, The Karate Kid, Jaws, Goonies, Friday the 13th, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . When video game magazines describe these adaptations, they frequently warn players not to be disappointed by the differences (that is, by the loss of the unified imaginary). For example: "Like most Nintendo versions of hit movies, Back to the Future doesn't exactly duplicate the film, but rather strings together a series of arcade-type situations suggested by aspects of the story. You assume the role of Marty McFly, who is thrown back in time 30 years." Or: "Step into Arnold Schwarzenegger's shoes by assuming the role he played in the movie. . . . Predator manages to preserve something of the excitement of the movie, but the connection mainly serves as a pretext for a long series of challenges and difficulties in keeping with the Nintendo tradition."[16] Perhaps this structural difference is one reason why NES came out
with an expensive suturing apparatus like the Power Glove and why Saturday morning TV shows like "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends" and movies like The Wizard so pointedly combine spectator and interactive modes of positioning: this combination is a powerful draw, particularly with young spectators who still must rely on equilibration to master more advanced stages of operational thought.
The Wizard also promotes Universal Studio's theme parks—both the one in Los Angeles, where a key sequence of the movie is set (and whose pitch is "Live the movies!"), and the one in Orlando, Florida, where (according to a commercial that accompanied the feature) you can "ride a movie." Movie tie-in rides are also in operation at Disney theme parks; one of the best is "Star Tours," designed by George Lucas, in which a small movie theater is transformed into a spaceship that simulates an interactive spectator position for 3-D action sequences from Star Wars .[17] Even the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, will apparently be undergoing an expensive refurbishing over the next ten years, involving the addition of "a slew of rides based on hit movies—including The Little Mermaid , the Indiana Jones series and the upcoming Dick Tracy , giving Disneyland a more glitzy, Hollywood flavor." The plans include in addition a Muppets stage show and a 3-D Muppets movie, another 3-D movie developed by George Lucas, and a new theme area called Hollywoodland, which will feature simulacra of Hollywood Boulevard and the Hollywood sign, two new rides that "have patrons careening through scenes from the hit movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit ," and rides that have already proved successful in Florida—"the Great Movie Ride, which lets customers travel through recreations of movie classics, and Superstar TV, in which selected patrons will be able to appear in classic episodes of I Love Lucy or the Johnny Carson Show ."[18]
The Wizard helps us to see that most theme parks are structured like video games—with their time warps, their multiple worlds of adventure, and their conversion of passive cinematic spectatorship into interactive play.[19] For example, when the young stars go behind the scenes of one of Universal's biggest attractions, "King Kong" (whose namesake not only is a veteran of two hit movies but also is featured in the current hit video game "Rampage"), they discover a secret passage that lets them warp ahead to the video game playoffs.
Like Star Wars and the "creative play" on "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends," The Wizard recycles past successes from various film genres. Against a backstory from a family melodrama like Ordinary People , it presents a road movie that works like a kiddie version of Rain Man and The Color of Money , but with a hero who is like the pinball wizard in Tommy and with a climax that comes out of classic gunfighter movies like Shane and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. (In fact, the little wizard looks amazingly like a young Clint Eastwood, and at one point we even hear the Ennio Morricone musical theme from that Italian trilogy.) Yet these veteran structures are updated—with topical problems like runaways and broken families, current fads like "Super Mario Brothers" and the Power Glove, and postmodernist urban structures like video arcades, theme parks, and the decentered city of Los Angeles. Even though this marketing combination seems to have been made in a computerized heaven, the movie was a box office flop (for reasons we will consider in chapter 4).
Set in Nevada, The Wizard tells the story of a white middle-class ten-year-old boy named Jimmy (Luke Edwards), who was traumatized by the accidental drowning of his twin sister, an event that broke up his family. When his mother and stepfather institutionalize him (because he keeps trying to
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Jimmy, Corey, and Haley are set against the warp zones of
"Super Mario Brothers."
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Jimmy, Corey, and Haley on the road, in a kiddie version of
Rain Man and The Color of Money . © 1989 Universal.
run away to California), Jimmy is sprung by his thirteen-year-old half-brother, Corey (Fred Savage), who lives with his older brother (played by Christian Slater, who at the time was not yet known as the James Dean of the 1990s) and their father (played by Beau Bridges, fresh from his success in The Fabulous Baker Boys , which, incidentally, also draws on his real-life membership in a famous family starring father and brothers). On the road, Corey discovers that silent Jimmy is a wizard at video games; he also meets a thirteen-year-old Reno girl named Haley (Jenny Lewis), who advises him to take the kid to Universal Studio's theme park in L.A., where he can win $50,000 in the National Video Game Championships. Meanwhile, father and older brother go after the kids, improving their skill at video games along the way and playing demolition derby with a hateful bounty hunter, hired by the mother and stepfather to track Jimmy. They all
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Jimmy at the video game championship playoff with previews of
"Super Mario Brothers 3." © 1989 Nintendo and Universal.
come together in L.A. for the championships, where the finalists are confronted with "Super Mario Brothers 3" (a game no one's yet seen) and where Jimmy beats an older arch rival, a video fanatic named Lucas (an homage to George). Lucas is the proud owner of a Power Glove, which enhances not only his eye-hand coordination, but also his stature as an antagonist, by linking him both with Jack Palance's evil black-gloved gunfighter in Shane (whom little Alan Ladd defeats under a young boy's admiring gaze) and with the equally villainous animated Glove in Yellow Submarine (who terrorizes the Beatles on behalf of the Blue Meanies).
Jimmy's victory makes everyone see that he's not a crazy who belongs in an institution. Rather, by mastering new products and the alternative spaces and warp zones of video games, he proves that he (like Marty McFly in the successful Back to the Future series—which is also structured like a video
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The video game championships help to bring daddy home
and to reunite the dysfunctional family. © 1989 Universal.
game) is the consumerist hero of the future. Yet Jimmy is determined to settle with the past (for the filmmakers are determined to go for a tearful melodramatic ending and leave no popular genre untapped): he insists on burying a little box he's been carrying (which contains fetishized photos of his dead twin sister and of his unified family) in that famous desert dinosaur park somewhere between L.A. and Vegas. This site not only enables the filmmakers to cash in on the dinosaur craze, but also implies that the unified nuclear family is an extinct species—though, like the dinosaur, one that can be exploited commercially as an emotionally charged imaginary.