For the Gen Z’ers out there, the Nintendo craze was real. I myself and had begged my mom & dad for 2 years to get a Nintendo for the present based celebrations, with them finally caving in by my 8th birthday. I’ll never forget those damn underwater bombs on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1, or beating that first Super Mario Brothers game for the first time. 8-Bit Christmas taps into that relentless kid toy zeitgeist machine A Christmas Story built itself upon, but with the PG Approved NES Zapper replacing an actual gun.
Jake Doyle (Neil Patrick Harris) arrives early at his mom’s house with his daughter Annie (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) in modern times. Waiting for her to return, Jake fires up a game on his old Nintendo, and tells Annie the story of his younger self (played by Winslow Fegley) during the Winter of , um the late 1980s. Back then, only the jerkwad rich kid in the neighborhood had a Nintendo, and Jake and his friends rallied together to try to buy an NES in time for Christmas.
Hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. A Christmas Story has been at the top of the Christmas movie list forever and a day at this point, succeeding because of its episodic rewatchability and understanding of a kid’s relationship to the Christmas Season. 8-Bit Christmas CTRL+H’s on an old PC “BB Gun” with “Nintendo” and the story basically writes itself: toy parents don’t want, kid tries all sorts of tricks to get toy, Christmas day surprise. But the magic of A Christmas Story is those little mini tales and holiday mechanisms, and for the most part, those are the high points of 8-Bit Christmas. I actively noticed several similar childhood moments: losing horribly at King of the Mountain, the mad dash to play with the hottest toy at the richer kid’s house, collecting baseball cards, Christmas cookies everywhere but only for other people, etc. The strongest episodes are Jake’s Boy Scout quest to get the 1st Prize Nintendo by selling the most wreaths (a dreaded annual tradition), a trip to the mall (A Christmas Story is better, but this one was loony fun), and a mini heist on Toronto’s version of Michigan Avenue (the biggest Chicago flaw, but maybe the best part of the movie). And I will say the Christmas day surprise completely caught me off guard with how emotional I got, a testament to the modern Christmas Story Remix 8-Bit Christmas managed to pull off.
If I were Nintendo, I would try to be turning the Michigan Avenue heist into a mini game ASAP. But even if they don’t, 8-Bit Christmas is total family fun, reminding everyone the roller coaster ride kids go on during the holidays, that almost always ends on a high note. Plus, the movie “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and Start”ed a cheat code I wish more Christmas movies would adopt: A Christmas Story’s vision of a holiday movie. And Chicago. Always Chicago!