I Love The Power Glove. It's So Bad.

About

"I Love The Power Glove. It's So Bad" refers to a line from the 1989 Nintendo-produced movie, "The Wizard" in which one of the characters, the antagonist Lucas (Jackey Vinson), shows off his skills with the Nintendo peripheral controller, the Power Glove. After winning, he uttered the immortal line "I Love The Power Glove. It's So Bad". The hammy, too serious delivery of the line combined with the unintentional irony of the statement led to it becoming by far the most popular scene in the movie, and a subject of much parody.

Origin

In 1989 Nintendo and Mattel released the Power Glove, a hand worn glove controller that was in some ways a precursor to the modern day Wii-mote, reacting to movement of the hand and fingers to control the onscreen action. Despite the amount of time put into the production of the controller and the demonstration of it in the movie, the controller was infamous for it's imprecise and difficult to use controls, and with only two games specifically released for use with it, it grossed sales of around $88 million and was both a critical and commercial failure.

1989 also saw the release of the movie The Wizard. Essentially a feature-length advertisement for Nintendo products, the movie starred Luke Edwards as an apparently autistic boy obsessed with going to California so he can put a memorial to his dead sister inside a tourist attraction there. On the way, his brother Fred Savage discovers he is a genius at playing video games, and enters him in a competition. Also on the way, they encounter Justin, and the aforementioned scene takes place.

A related meme is the phrase "Everything else is child's play", in reference to the poster advertising it. The pure melodramatic 80's/early 90's cheese of it has gave it a similarly popular place in the pop-cultural history.

Spread

Power Glove

The power glove has kept a fairly good popularity over the years, as shown by the chart above. The large spike in popularity towards the end of 2006 is definitely due to the review by popular gaming critic, The Angry Video Game Nerd.

(NSFW due to heavy swearing)

I Love The Power Glove

Search queries for the phrase "I love the power glove" have been quite rare with strange spikes in March 2008, and June of 2010.

A YTMND page for the Power Glove created on November 17th, 2004, "I love the power glove. it's so bad" has amassed over 17,000 views.^[1]

Derivatives

h2. External References

^[1] YTMND – I love the power glove. it's so bad / 11/17/2004