8-Bit Christmas

A Christmas Story is a charming movie my generation — Gen X — grew up watching. We all love it. But it’s really not for us. It’s for our parents. It’s full of boomer nostalgia. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just how it’s designed. We X’ers can enjoy the story, but it’s hard to fully identify with Ralphie’s holiday story when we didn’t live in those times. 8-bit Christmas is the answer to that. It takes the idea and modernizes it for X’ers by focusing it on the object we all desired and begged for in the 80’s: a Nintendo Entertainment System. The movie does a nice job — with comedic exaggeration — capturing the mania we felt in the era when we wanted an NES and didn’t have one. And, worse, knowing someone who did and lorded it over other kids. It also captures some of the moral panic parents felt about video games, driven here by a silly accident. There’s a lot to love here. The energy and charm is there in spades, brought to life by a bright cast of kids who all lust for the NES like it was a life support system. You really feel the desperation in these kids, and if you grew up in that era, you’ll be transported right back to that time. It’s an effective use of nostalgia; it doesn’t just scream “do you remember this?” at us. The movie uses our memories to put us alongside these kids. You won’t even care about the movie’s slippery timeline. The one flaw would be how the movie feels like three distinct episodes that don’t gel together as a three-act story. The first is all about the neighborhood rich kid having one. The second is about a contest to win one, and the final part is a scheme to buy one. They’re all good, but you can almost feel a guillotine blade come down and make a cut between storylines. I still had a good time with this, and if you grew up in the dawn of video games and the rise of Nintendo, so will you. It’s a nice addition to the annual battery of holiday movies; sweet without being saccharine, and silly without being stupid. A great family holiday movie.