"Not my personal favorite, but prisoners seem to like it."
REVIEWERS: David Rudden, Brian Baker, Andrew Votta, and Kevin Mitchell
It was an event years in the making. To not celebrate it would have been a sin. The Wizard--the first gaming-centric major motion picture I had ever seen--had just been released on DVD. After years of patiently waiting, it had received the home video release it had so richly deserved. Actually, that's a lie. It deserved more. It was a barebones disc with nary a special feature to be found--the type of DVD that lists "interactive menus" as an extra, It also deserved a far better frope to eat alongside it.
Truth be told, when I found out about the release of this DVD, and actually managed to score a copy, my first inclination was to assemble a proper movie-watching posse, and I got a great group with these three. All are great friends that I had worked with at a videogame store during my long tenure there. Brian, who I started hanging out with nary a month after I started six years ago was the type who could quote the movie back and forth, as evidenced by the many times we quoted the movie back and forth. Andrew and Kevin, on the other hand, had never seen the flick, which was surprising, considering they could both be classified as hardcore Nintendo fans. The Wizard, as anyone who's seen it can attest to, is essentially a 90-minute commercial for the NES.
From left: Me, Brian, Andrew, Kevin, and my progressively deteriorating photography skills.
Once I rounded up my three former co-workers, I swung by my local grocer and picked up the first brand that came to mind--Tombstone. If ever a company could be synonymous with frozen pizza, that would be the one. I can still remember seeing the commercials for the pizza way back when, wherein an executioner about to put a poor man to his death would ask him what he wanted on his tombstone. The snarky death row inmate would reply "Sausage and Pepperoni", or some equally glib set of toppings. Snarky inmate would then get a Tombstone pizza with said toppings. See, if I was an executioner, I'd have the guy killed, and have "Sausage and Pepperoni" literally written on his headstone. That'd show him.
Excecutioner fantasies aside, I pulled a pair of fropes, both identical size and flavor out of their shared bag. The pizza, like the movie we were to watch, had extra cheese. I started the flick and attended to the pizzas like any good host should. Plus, the less you directly concentrate on a movie like The Wizard, the better. Roughly twenty minutes into the movie--roundabout the time when Fred Savage incredulously exclaims "You got fifty thousand points in Double Dragon?!"-- I headed upstairs and plucked the fropes from their heated home and brought them to my friends, drawn in by my HDTV's warm, glowing, warming glow.
I wish I could recall the input my friends had given me about our extra cheese Tombstone pizza. I remember Andrew emailing me to say his had tasted like meat. I couldn't tell whether that comment was a bizarre entendre, a poke at my aversion to eating beef and pork, or an actual judgement on the pizza. Honestly, watching a bad movie with friends is worth remembering on its own. What I did know, and have since I started eating Tombstone fropes are that they're nothing if not dependable. You won't be disgusted after eating a Tombstone, because you know what's coming. A decent sauce, passable cheese, and a communion wafer-thin crust. Not my personal favorite, but prisoners seem to like it.
We love your pizza but this is the third time we went to cook our pizza and it had no crust.
Posted by: MARY COLLINS | August 19, 2008 at 09:56 AM