104: The Wizard (1989)

We'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).