8-Bit Christmas Is Right About The Nintendo Power Glove

As a nostalgic throwback to the late ’80s, 8-Bit Christmas gets the Nintendo Power Glove right. 8-Bit Christmas is a HBO Max holiday movie competing with the many Netflix original Christmas movies of the season. The movie follows the character Jake Doyle (Neil Patrick Harris) narrating a tale from his childhood (where he is played by Winslow Fegley) trying to get his hands on a Nintendo Entertainment System, the dream of just about every ’80s kid. In the film, young Jake visits the house of the local rich kid who shows off the new and, at the time, much-coveted Nintendo specialty controller, the Power Glove.

The Power Glove was an officially licensed controller released for the Nintendo Entertainment System from Mattel (of Barbie, He-Man, and Hot Wheels fame). Marketing for the Power Glove was huge in the 1980s. It was featured prominently in Nintendo Power magazine, and in the 1989 movie The Wizard, starring Fred Savage, child star turned director of the The Wonder Years fame, whose career resembled that of Neil Patrick Harris at the time. The glove fit around (some) kid’s right hands, with a controller on its wrist, and it was largely touted as the coolest Nintendo accessory.

8-Bit Christmas plays fast and loose with the timeline of the ’80s, but one thing it remembers well are the two sides of the Power Glove. Firstly, that the marketing for the Power Glove captured tremendous excitement among kids of the late ’80s, and, secondly, that the gamer glove never really worked. The ads claimed that “Everything Else is Child’s Play,” but the Power Glove, still beloved in pop culture by young Nintendo gamers, was functionally useless. By highlighting this contradiction, 8-Bit Christmas pokes fun at the failed Power Glove much in the way The Goldbergs does. Where The Goldbergs revisit “Yippie Ki Yay Melon Farmer” as a poorly dubbed Die Hard line, a mistake from the ’80s made glorious through nostalgia, 8-Bit Christmas remembers Nintendo’s admittedly cool, yet overhyped accessory.

The Power Glove was designed for use with only two games, although it could work as an alternate controller. 8-Bit Christmas seems to be aware of this limited catalogue, even making up its own game to play during the Power Glove scene, loosely based on one of the two games that it could work with, Bad Street Brawler – although with curiously upscaled graphics than the NES system can handle. Watching the Power Glove in action, Neil Patrick Harris narrates that that’s when he learned the Power Glove “sucked.” This is not the high tech outing he is expected to have when Neil Patrick Harris enters The Matrix, but 8-Bit Christmas’ assessment is correct: unreliable recognition of the controls, delayed response when it was recognized, and generally cumbersome and finicky nature, relegated the Power Glove to the garage sales of the early ’90s. Still, the advertisements in Nintendo Power magazine, replete with blue lightning effects and a kid in sunglasses, were the height of the ’80s cool kid.

The ’80s were long enough ago that whole stretches of media properties can poke fun at its ups and downs, and the Power Glove certainly had both. 8-Bit Christmas, if it does nothing else, communicates the feeling of excitement – as well as the subsequent feeling of disappointment – shared by many kids at the time. From Michael Jackson’s signature white glove to the Marvel’s Thanos’ power glove, the ’80s had its share of powerful magic gloves, but the NES Power Glove, as 8-Bit Christmas reminds its viewers, was never as magical as it promised to be.

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