WtPB 33 - Fred Savage

This week Sarah, Derek and Dylan talked about a couple Fred Savage movies. The Wizard and Little Monsters. Two kids movies that we later found out were released in 1989. As always, there will be spoilers, so be warned.


First up we discussed The Wizard. Which, while basically just a Nintendo ad disguised as a movie, is actually a pretty fun ride with a surprising amount of depth and darkness. In the movie, Fred's character, Corey, runs away with his younger, emotionally withdrawn brother, Jimmy, to California. Along the way they hustle people at arcade machines to help them pay for the trip.Which is where this movie becomes an obvious Nintendo advertisement.

But the real story revolves around the reasons for Jimmy's emotional detachment. As it's explained in the movie, Jimmy had a twin sister when he was younger, whom he witnessed drown. As a result of his sisters death, his parents split up. His brothers (Fred Savage and Christian Slater) go and live with their father(Beau Bridges). So essentially, this young boy sees his sister die in front of his eyes, then his entire family falls apart. It's not much wonder he became the way he is in the movie.

Overall it's a very lite movie, but as mentioned above, it does have a really dark undercurrent to it.

Second we talked about Little Monsters, which is another very lite movie with some dark undertones. The basic story revolves around Brian(Savage), who meets a monster named Maurice(Howie Mandel) and the two become close friends very quickly.

The darkness partially comes from Brian's parents. Who have recently moved into a new house. The father(Stern) now has a 2 hour commute everyday. The house requires more work than they expected, and Maurice has been pranking the household. All of which puts a major strain on the parents relationship and about halfway through the movie they announce to Brian and his little brother, Eric(Fred's real life brother Ben), that they're getting a divorce.

Another dark aspect of the film is the villain, Boy(character actor Frank Whaley). Who kidnaps Eric in order to blackmail Brian into being Boys friend.

Well that should set you up nicely for our discussion this week, so without further ado, here's episode 33.
-Dylan


As always we encourage you to buy these movies if you don't own them already.