This was a book by Rona Jaffe that exploited the whole hystery around Dungeons & Dragons. It came out in 1981. The title was close enough so everyone knew what it was about, yet different enough to avoid a lawsuit. I found a signed first edition on the web for $39, but they would ship to the USA and Canada only…sigh.
1982, this book was turned into a movie by Steven Hilliard Stern, or rather a TV production, featuring Tom Hanks. And this movie became quite a fad of roleplayers. Read some excerpts from customer reviews on Amazon:
I would like to say that I have played RPGs for years, and took no offense at all to this movie infact I LOVE IT!
I'm a role-player and although this has anti-RPG overtones I loved it. I first saw this movie when it first aired on television waaaaaaaaaay back in the day. Although the acting was a tad cheesy I felt it was a very good movie just because of the content, RPGs. And whether you loved it, hated it, or had no opinion whatsoever about it you do have to admit one thing…this was the *original* D&D movie; the forefather to the one made in 2000. This one based in reality and the latter based in what we all love, fantasy.
And was the movie any good? Let's have a look what the critics have to say.
The film opens as cops rush to the Pequod caverns, where a reporter explains that a missing university student was the "victim of a seemingly innocent game - Mazes and Monsters. It's kind of a psychodrama you might say, where these people deal with problems in their lives by acting them out." It all sounds a little fishy to me. If most roleplayers dealt with their real life problems in-game, there would be a lot more Quests to Defeat the Crippling Fear of Women.
It is true that the dialog and acting are very weak in Mazes and Monsters, but we must remember that the emphasis of the movie is on the warning. We cannot dismiss the message just because all the students contain more distilled preppiness than an army of stockbrokers. We cannot ignore the dangers of role-playing just because their dark god is depicted as speaking through a sewer pipe with a strobe light behind him.
There are few greater thrills than watching a really famous person suck hard. I'm not talking about Pamela Lee here, I'm talking about Tom Hanks, star of such hits as Forrest Gump, Dragnet, and Joe Versus the Volcano.
I've had the pleasure of seeing this movie a couple of times over the last two weeks and I must say… it is indeed a sight to behold and not to be missed. Mazes and Monsters features a youngish Tom Hanks, goofball Chris Makepeace, romance, cheesy renaissance festival garb, a talking bird, occultish dabblings, cavern freakouts and a now-eerie climax atop shiny decade-old World Trade Center towers. Who could ask for anything more?
The BEST room paintjob by a deranged mother EVER!
The BEST use of a metal drainage pipe in a prophetic dream sequence EVER!
The BEST Tom Hanks versus a terrifying gorvil scene EVER!
It's like a little time capsule showing exactly how weak and sad and silly all those people were when they lined up to denounce our past time. Perhaps it's a bit of schadenfreude on my part, seeing how irrelevant their crusade has become. Or, perhaps it's knowing that LARPing today does safely what "Mazes & Monsters" spelled out as certain doom. And in so defying the movie's premise, shows just how idiotic the whole crusade was in the first place.
But while there's plenty of unintentional laughs coming from the crappiness of the production, it's really the movie's premise that gets the most giggles. Here's a movie that actually thinks a role-playing game will make you lose your mind. Robbie not only thinks he's a wizard named Pardue, but he begins to see dragons (a great moment for lousy special effects!) and hear voices commanding him to begin his own quest.
Bottom line? If Ed Wood had remade Reefer Madness, something very similar would have come out.
