Interesting!
The RPGers are the most popular in crowd on campus? In what universe? We were the geeks, nerds, etc.
I use magic missle to attack the darkness"??:smack:
This must be a parody not straight out.
Not to mention RPGing is not a spectator sport.
I wasn’t a role-playing gamer, but am certain that having a majority of people laugh at the ridiculous earnestness in this video is sweet vindication for many OG Reagan-era RPGers.
Was it really demonized that much?
I mean, I consider fear of RPGs to be pretty fringe.
A TV-movie about D&D players murdering each other was Tom Hanks first serious role.
Wow.
Looks like a great bad movie. An imdb score of 4.2 always looks promising, and hey, at least it has Tom Hanks!
oh no as recently as 2010 religious types were putting out books on why ad&d was satan worship…even warning about the “Japanese variants” on the playstation
It’s definitely been added to the watch list for our gaming group.
Yes, it’s parody. Or rather (if I may go back for a moment to the incorrect but useful notion that it is precisely identical to the Chick Tract it is based on), it doesn’t need to be parody, because filming a Chick Tract “straight” (in this case with artistic license vis-a-vis the plot, but nothing that changes the tone or the message) is already parody.
Are there really people who can watch that video and not realize that the film-makers thought it was hilarious too? It’s hard for me to believe anyone could watch it and think the film-makers were serious believers in the Chick universe.
A fine example of Poe’s Law.
Wait, did they actually include the “I cast Magic Missile at the darkness” bit? Classic.
Yep- but this time… it worked!:eek:
Found a précis here. Hard to believe it happened, but it happened, and Jack T. Chick was hardly alone in his fabulations.
I started playing D&D in 1978 and I can attest that all too many clergymen were all bent out of shape about the game, with its demons and spells and scary stuff. I worked in a hobby store over christmas that year and spoke to several who came in to rant at store workers about it.
I think I’ll have some fun watching these tomorrow.
“We interrupt this alcohol, drug and sex fueled rave for. . . RPG!” I nearly chocked on my iced tea.
I was taught my entire life that D&D was from the occult and evil. The idea of playing a game where you can cast magic spells is considered evil enough. But throw in all those other gods, and all the creepy monsters from Lovecraft and so on–it was more evil than anything on TV!
And I wasn’t like the people I know who were forbidden to watch things on TV. And they didn’t buy the “rock music is of the devil” stuff. But D&D was basically devil worship, as far as anyone I knew was concerned.
Given your upbringing, I’m surprised you hadn’t heard about it, Spice Weasel. Or do I misremember that your mom was one of those who restricted what you could watch due to her religion?
Edited to add: Though I will say that Chick’s version of the paranoia is weird. Yes, you have the real devil worship, but it also has someone who dies in the game choosing to kill themselves. What was supposed to be bad was more that you’d join the occult and maybe get hurt in some sort of sacrifice. But Marcie died because she was kicked out of the game. Weird.
Oh, and yeah. The movie captures every scene in the tract except changing to her teacher instead of her father. It frames many scenes exactly as they were in the tract. And the suicide letter is even written in the exact same font.
It’s not word for word, but it is a very faithful adaptation. It throws in a few more knowing winks (like the lesbian jokes, making the RPGers the cool kids, referencing an vampire movie Internet reviewer, or throwing LARPing into the mix) and adds some things that come from other Chick Tracts, but it gets everything right.
Even the stuff about C.S. Lewis and Tolkien is there–it’s just in a footnote rather than the actual sermon, a lot of which is actually quoted from the tract otherwise. In fact, a lot of key lines are quoted, like “the real power.”
There’s a reason Chick signed off on it. It just reads like an expanded version of the original with some updates–unless you notice the jokes or the Airplane style comedic earnestness (which can be mistaken just for bad acting by those who don’t know otherwise).
IIRC correctly Dark Dungeons was made via a Kickstarter.
You can buy the complete film + extras about the making of here www.darkdungeonsthemovie.com/
$5 for the movie and $2.50 for the extras (84 mins of film and 5 commentary tracks)
I was going to post that the Youtube episodes were pirated from this, but the text at the beginning says “previewed with permission” and refers to the website for the uncut version so not sure.
Bought the movie couple of years ago, think I’ll shell out for the extras.
I was highly religious and knew a lot of fundamentalists, but it wasn’t imposed upon me by my parents. For lack of a better explanation, it was self-imposed. I was a member of a Pentecostal church for a while and those people were bugfuck insane. I was aware that some people believed gaming to be evil, but I thought they were fringe. I remember reading a Christian… er, thriller? horror? novel series for teens about a girl fighting the occult in her hometown. It was like reading about a ghost story. Inventive entertainment, nothing you would take seriously… but I guess some people think the occult is a serious concern? I was not a gamer at the time I heard the claims, so I didn’t examine them too deeply.
As I mentioned upthread, our DM is a minister, and he brings his fourteen year old son to play with us. He has confirmed that the Satanic Panic was a thing but he wasn’t restricted by his own parents. Two of our other players, kids in their twenties, are cousins raised in fundamentalist households. Apparently boy cousin had to have a long talk with girl cousin’s Mom when she ‘‘caught’’ them playing D&D. He had to explain why it’s not evil. Another guy had a cousin who wasn’t allowed to watch He-Man, Smurfs, Thundercats or any cartoon because it involved magic.
So… I’m convinced. Just bewildered.