IN WHICH a nerd-tastic documentary is discussed, and painful childhood memories are exhumed.
When I was a kid my mother used to drop me off at (if memory serves me right—I could be wrong here) the LARGEST, most GLORIOUS video arcade / adventure park in South Florida. Along with my brother, she would hand us each $10.00 and set a time to pick us back up before heading off to date night with my step-dad. Who needs a babysitter when you have a palace of video games to defeat? I spent my money wisely, however. I stuck to what I knew in an effort to extend my game allowance for as long as possible. I played Donkey Kong. I played it a lot. But I never made it to the kill screen…
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is one of the most dramatic, endearing and hilarious documentaries I have ever seen. In short, it’s about the deadly serious competition between two men for the highest score achievable on the classic video game, Donkey Kong. It’s also a Star Wars level depiction of good versus evil between the down on his luck / all around nice guy, Steve Wiebe and the former childhood video game prodigy / egomaniac business man, Billy Mitchell. You may not want drama in your life, but the showmanship on display in King of Kong will make you grip that joystick and challenge all your friends to a game, proclaiming loudly to the universe that (to quote Ice Cube) IT’S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG!!!!!!!!!!!
James' pick: "All Summer in a Day"
For a lot of people who are roughly my age – which is to say, late thirties – there is a haunting memory of a television show about children in a very bleak place, and an unbelievable act of cruelty that some of them commit. A story about a world where the sun only shines in the sky for one hour every nine years – and about a young girl who is locked in a closet by jealous peers during that precious hour. Ringing any emotional bells?
The story is “All Summer in a Day,” written by the master Ray Bradbury and published originally in 1954. (Here’s a link to the original story, if you’d like to visit/re-visit it.) It’s the story of Margot, a girl who used to live on Earth but has been moved to Venus, where life is a bleak and rainy affair. She’s the only child in her school who remembers what it was like to live with sunlight every day, and they hate her for it – so much so that they lock her up as a spiteful joke.
But as soon as they lock her up, the rain stops, and in their excitement to get outside … well, you get the idea. It’s an emotional suckerpunch of a story – still chokes me up – and I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it haunts them these many years later. Specifically, they are haunted by a television version made in 1982 for the PBS series “Wonderworks.”
I've got the show in its entirety posted over on Gooder Than Hell, thanks to the wonders of YouTube. It’s the best 30 minutes you will spend today.
[podcast]http://archive.wfpk.org/Podcasts/20090821-nerdy.mp3[/podcast]