California...

The Wizard
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
Tonight was video game night at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater with a 35mm screening of the 100 minute long Nintendo commercial that blew my generation's mind, The Wizard.

Show banner designed by Andrew Kern

Show poster designed by Tom Bifulco

The night was co-hosted by Justin Silverman of Retroware, who not only vended at the event, but also was the MC of the Mahoning version of Video Armageddon on the big screen after the credits rolled on the movie.

 

The Mahoning holds a raffle for just about every show that takes place on the lot.  I don't usually write about them unless it's to mention that our friends Tom, Jen, and Jackson managed to win again.  I swear, they must have a trunk full of four leaf clovers with how many times they had the winning number... but not tonight.  After four years of coming to the drive-in, I finally won a raffle!  The prize pack included four Blu-rays: The Wizard, Double Dragon, Double Dragon: The Animated Series, and The Video Game Years: 1988-1989 documentary, as well as whole bunch of arcade marquee stickers.

The trailer reel prior to the start of the film included some of my favorite movies of my childhood, including Short Circuit and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the highlight for me was their screening of a 35mm print of a commercial from 1982 promoting the release of Dig Dug in arcades.  They showed this once before this season prior to a screening of Joysticks, and I was very happy to see it again.

At the start of this post, I referred to The Wizard as a 100 minute long commercial for Nintendo and its products, but that's a pretty accurate reflection of what most critics think of this film.  It has a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and reviews of the film are among the snarkiest critiques that I've ever read.

What these critics fail to recognize is that this movie wasn't for them.  This is a kids movie centered around one of the most impactful pop culture phenomena of the 20th century, the Nintendo Entertainment System.  It's a product that is almost solely responsible for the rebirth of a video game industry that now generates more global revenue than the music and movie industries combined.  Video games have become so engrained in our culture that it's easy to forget that they were once written off as a fad.  By the middle of the 80's, Atari was all but dead as a home entertainment company and arcades had fallen pretty far from their level of popularity in the late 70's and early 80's.  Nintendo had to practically trick retailers into carrying the NES when it was first introduced to the United States because stores had gotten burned from 1983-1985 that they wanted nothing to do with selling video games.  By the end of the 80's, Nintendo was absolutely everywhere, and Mario became a more recognizable character to American children than Mickey Mouse.

The Wizard may have a simplistic plot that plays out more like a made-for-tv movie than it does a theatrical film, but it was cool to us.  It made over $14 million dollars on a budget of $6 million, and has gone on to become a cult classic with middle-aged Gen X'ers like myself, but the movie is special to me for more personal reasons.  Buckle up, because this is going to get a little bit deeper than my average Mahoning write-up.

From the time that I first held an NES controller, I was a Nintendo kid.  I was one of those kids who would rather sit in my room listening to records and playing Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, and The Legend Of Zelda than going outside to play with other kids.  It drove my mother and stepfather crazy and became a frequent point of contention between us.

One of the reasons that I preferred video games to playing outside is that I had a hard time relating to other kids, or anybody else for that matter.  I have been diagnosed in my adult life as being on the autistic spectrum, but that wasn't as widely recognized when I was growing up in the 80's and early 90's.  Unless you presented to others as Rain Man, autism was pretty much not even discussed, and the term "neurodivergent" didn't even exist.  I hit that sweet spot where I was good enough at school and at getting through the day to "pass" as a regular kid for short bursts (something that is now widely recognized as masking), but different enough from most of the other kids to get into a lot of trouble in just about every setting that involved socializing.  Simply put, I didn't know how to do it, and I'd upset people without ever really understanding how or why.  It has taken me decades of trial and error, and earning a bachelors degree in psychology, to figure enough of it out to form healthy relationships and to get along with other people.  When I was in elementary and middle school, the only healthy relationships I had were with people who have the patience of a saint, and I can't say that I've found too many of those.  Playing Nintendo in my room was an escape.  There were no expectations, no yelling, no shaming, and no trouble to get into.  It was just me and the game, and that was how I liked it.

I was nine years old when The Wizard premiered on December 15th, 1989, and smack in the middle of what would be the four most difficult years of my life.  I lived with my mother, whose primary method of communicating with me was either through mean-spirited sarcasm or screaming at the top of her lungs, and my stepfather, who took every opportunity he could to explain to me that I wasn't normal.  My grandparents house was my "safe space", but after my parents divorced, my mother decided to wage a war against my paternal grandparents that doesn't make any more sense to me now than it did when I was a kid.  Getting to see them was always a struggle, to the point where I once walked over twelve miles on the shoulder of country roads to visit them.  My mother and stepfather finally reached their breaking point with the trouble that I was getting into at home and at school, and just as The Wizard was beginning to roll out to theaters, they checked me into a child psychiatric facility in Kingston, PA.  It was called First Hospital Wyoming Valley.  I was admitted as an inpatient on January 23rd, 1990 and I lived there for the next 34 days.

Times Leader - Wilkes Barre, PA  (April 22, 1989)
I remember those Peanuts characters on the walls of that place

It's probably important to note here that I had no idea what the hell was going on at the time, and I was pretty scared.  I'm not even sure I understood that they were supposably sending me there to help me.  It felt like getting detention, but instead of an hour after school, it was five weeks living with a bunch of other kids who ranged in age from around 8 to 12, some of whom were prone to violent outbursts.  I was never really the fighting type prior to being admitted there.  I was more the type to say something that would make other people want to fight me, usually without ever understanding what I did that made them so angry.  I went into the facility as mixed up kid who didn't know how to get along with people, and I left the facility as the same mixed up kid who was now doped up on Thorazine and who learned how to throw a punch.  Life got much harder after I was discharged, and the issues I had at school prior to my stay at First Hospital Wyoming Valley look almost quaint in comparison to the trouble that I got into afterward.

The Citizens Voice - Wilkes Barre, PA  (January 27, 1990)

Living at the hospital wasn't all bad.  It was co-ed and I got along well with all of the girls, one of whom I ended up dating years later in high school.  They let me bring some of my Nintendo Power magazines with me, and I remember reading the same articles over and over again to the point that I had some of them memorized.  They also took us on outings on the weekends.  Those trips included the first times that I had ever been roller skating or ice skating.  In the last weekend of January, they took us out to a movie theater in Edwardsville where we got to see The Wizard, and it was that moment when I learned how powerful a movie can be... how it can allow you to escape the world that you're living in for just a little while and lose yourself in the story.  I've had that feeling in indoor and drive-in theaters many times in my life, but it was never as strong of a feeling as it was that day.

You couldn't have come up with a more perfect movie for me at that exact moment in my life than The Wizard.  I was nine years old the first time that I saw this film; the same age as the Jimmy Woods character in the movie.  Jimmy was going through psychological trauma that made him nearly non-verbal (I didn't have that particular problem, but it probably would have benefitted everyone if I did), and his mother and stepfather decided that they were going to admit him into a psychiatric care facility.  He's also happens to be really good at Nintendo, and he has an older brother who broke him out of the "home" so they could run off to California where Jimmy could enter a video game competition and prove to everyone that he's not so screwed up after all.

I didn't have an older brother, but damn it, for the 100 minutes that this film was on screen, Fred Savage was my older brother and we were busting out of First Hospital Wyoming Valley and hopping on the first Twinkies truck we could find to go meet a cool redhead girl and win Video Armageddon in California.  I'm probably the only kid the country who teared up when Super Mario Bros 3 was revealed at the end of the movie, and for as much as I wanted to try the game, my focus in that moment was on the fact that I didn't want the movie to end.

Seeing it at the Mahoning tonight brought all of those feelings back, only this time after the credits rolled, there was no one to shuffle me into a van to bring me back to the mental home.  Instead, I got to participate in a fun video game contest on the big screen before listening to some good music as I drove home thinking about the three and a half decades in between the first and second time I saw this movie on 35mm.  Life is such a trip... you blink your eyes and the story's half over.  My story had some rough scenes in the beginning, but it's gotten good in the middle.