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The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 104: The Wizard (1989)
🕑 Added 2024-09-02 21:34:42 +0000 UTCWe're kicking off a full month of video game related movies with what is far and away the most important video game commercial of our collective childhoods, The Wizard! Join us as we torment our younger selves by forcing them to confront the cold, hard reality of a movie from our youth not quite standing up to the test of time...or the test of anything, really.
CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 104: The Wizard (1989)
(00:00:27) - Intro.
(00:04:27) - We finally get around to saying the name of our movie this week: The Wizard!
(00:10:15) - Picking apart a bunch of the family scenes that were cut.
(00:18:32) - Getting into the background of the folks who made this thing.
(00:34:18) - Why did Nintendo get involved in this nonsense?
(00:47:31) - Break!
(00:48:06) - We're back, and let's kick off this video game movie with a wildly neglected child.
(00:58:59) - Just two young kids skateboarding from Utah to California. An extremely normal thing to do.
(01:06:26) - Haley has an idea to exploit this traumatized child's adeptness at video games.
(01:11:09) - Is that how a Power Glove™ works?
(01:14:13) - Father and son bonding over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
(01:22:04) - Reno! It's a town! And some musings on the Nintendo Help Line.
(01:30:25) - Haley gets her monologue.
(01:36:04) - FINALLY, we are in California.
(01:41:55) - A Universal backlot chase climax? In this economy?!?
(01:49:01) - The real star of the movie: Super Mario Bros. 3!
(01:56:00) - Sure, Jimmy just won $50k, but what is that worth if we don't solve his trauma before the credits?
(02:02:42) - Final thoughts.
(02:05:55) - Talking about the rest of our films for this month.
(02:12:14) - Outro (and Vinny's ranking).
Comments
Regular Viewer Bunty Hoven
Class of 1999 is genius cheese. Brits of a particular age should recognise the opening as sampled in “There is No Law” by Messiah.
Brian Streleckis
I caught onto Rilo Kiley in the early 00s, not just because I thought Jenny Lewis sounded good, but one of the other band members was in the cast of Salute Your Shorts.
Michael Jacobson
I meant to mention it when it was more timely, but just last week I was taking a road trip to visit Disneyland and I happened to be passing the Cabazon Dinosaurs as you got to that part of the discussion. I forgot the characters originated from Utah & Reno, NV. There is ZERO reason for them to be going by those dinosaurs because that's along I-10 to Phoenix and completely off the route you would be taking to go to even Las Vegas.
csl316
I'm a wizard and that looks like a mediocre movie.
Yorick
Now I’m afraid to read “The Name of the Rose” and confirm that I’m an idiot. Sounds interesting though.
Anthony Hafner
yeah, after mentioning keach and mcdowell, i really thought brad would also see that Pam Grier is one of the robot teachers
Brad Arnold
I have no idea about the Fred Savage accusations directly and I don’t say this to cast aspersions on the people who made them or call their stories into doubt. But I used to do a lot of extra work and I worked on several shows he directed around 2008-2010 and he seemed pretty nice back then. It was really strange to hear bad stuff about him.
Alex S
I’m just going into this one raw. Didn’t make time to rewatch it and haven’t seen it since it was on cable in the 90s 😂
swiftdraw
I remember seeing this after SMB3 came out as a kid. Pretty sure I badgered my parents to rent it because I saw it was about video games. I only remembered being amazed that there were video game competitions. Having watched it yesterday, I can understand why I remember absolutely nothing else about it.
Michael
I have no idea if this movie is any good, but after hearing the synopsis of Class of 1999, I feel like we have to watch that now.
Matt Hannum
“You got 50,000 on Double Dragon?!?!?!?!?!?!”
