You don’t get much more pop culture than video games. And every generation has seen different brands of games, with the evolution of quality and content moving at a rapid pace. Wreck-It Ralph takes the nostalgia of the old and mixes in the higher-quality, more action-filled versions of today within the context of an animated comedy. The result is a family film that tosses something familiar at many age groups. Star John C. Reilly fondly remembers the day video games were introduced when he was young, and takes full blame for his generation buying into what all parents call “a waste of time” when their kids get addicted to one game or another.
“I was the test generation for all this stuff,” says Reilly. “I mean, you can blame me and my generation, I think, for the popularity of video games, because I mean, it was just undeniable. I went from pinball machines to Space Invaders. I remember the day that that machine suddenly appeared in the bowling alley where I used to hang out in Chicago, and it was like, “Oh my god!” It was such a quantum leap from what we’d had for, you know, entertainment up to then. I mean, there weren’t even computers then. People forget, like, no cell phones, no computers, like, it was just this crazy thing that suddenly you could manipulate what was on the TV. Like, you couldn’t even do that, there weren’t even really VCRs yet, at least I didn’t have one. So just the idea that you could move a button that would move something on the screen was radical, you know? And it cost me a lot of money. A lot of quarters.”
Nowadays, those quarters spent on arcade style games has turned into big dollars spent on at home consoles, and Disney is hoping audiences will drop a few bucks on seeing their movie featuring the gamut of games and characters. Such a fun film certainly calls for us to have a little fun of our own here at The Seven Sees, so Tory Shulman has given Wreck-It Ralph the “Trailer Breakdown” treatment.
