Pap
the Disney Gamer's
Highlights: Wreck-It-Ralph
Trailer Analysis

A few weeks
ago, after being in the
works for years, Disney
released the first trailer
for their 52nd
animated classic:
Wreck-It-Ralph! Directed
by Rich Moore (best know for
his work on The Simpsons
and Futurama),
the trailer caused an
imaginative spark in people
due to its potential. In
case you missed it, here is
the full trailer courtesy of
Disney:
The basic
premise behind
Wreck-It-Ralph is that
Ralph (voiced by John C.
Reily) is the villain in a
video game called
Fix-it-Felix Jr., and after
doing the same thing for
over 30 years without
getting any recognition for
it he decides to leave his
game and visit other video
game worlds in hopes of
finding his destiny and true
calling. What seems so
wonderful about this movie
is that even though it deals
with a very modern topic
(video games), the story is
classic Disney. Yet, what
has really captured people's
attention is how the film
looks to be one filled to
the brim with references to
classic video games as well
as characters. Since the
trailer was loaded with so
much cameos, references, and
jokes about video games,
today's Gamer Tuesday will
present to you the meaning
behind those jokes and why
they left such a deep impact
in people, even if the film
has yet to premiere.

Let's start
with the game that lies at
the center of the plot:
Fix-It-Felix Jr. The
hero/villain dynamic between
Ralph and Felix is a loving
homage to Nintendo's Mario
and Donkey Kong. Ralph's
design resembles that of a
human Donkey Kong, while
Felix has a very bright and
cheery disposition, just
like Mario. The game can be
best described as backwards
Rampage (by Midway games).
The original Rampage was
about destroying buildings
while obtaining the highest
score possible. Fix-It-Felix
Jr. does it differently in
that instead of destroying
buildings you fix it. You
keep climbing up until you
reach the top, where you are
greeted by the grateful
tenants of the building, and
Ralph is tossed to the side.
The absolute best thing
about this game... you can
play it! The official site
for Wreck-It-Ralph
has the whole game, you can
play it here!

After the scene at the arcade
ends, the trailer cuts to Ralph offering his
testimony at a Bad Guy Support Group scene. This
scene was one of the first one teased at last
year's D23 event, and it is clear to see why it
has created a reaction. Rather than just using
generic villain characters, Disney was able to
obtain the rights to several popular video game
characters! While this isn't the first time
Disney has used characters from other companies
(Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Toy
Story franchise have that honor), this is
the first time they gathered such an eclectic
group of video game villains. Best of all, their
designs greatly resemble that of their original
games, meaning that their design has not been
compromised in order for their cameos to happen.
The first character to have a
speaking role in this scene is Clyde, the orange
ghost from Namco's Pac-Man. He introduces what
this group is about: feeling supportive of
yourself when you are in a role everyone is
supposed to despise. It is a very clever twist
as we have always seen these video game villains
as being despicable. Yet, the movie reminds us
that they are just doing their job. On this
scene with Clyde, we also see Dr. Eggman,
Sonic's nemesis from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog
series.

Just because you
are 'bad guy,' it doesn't mean you are a bad
guy. Pay attention to this line, it may reveal a
plot point later on
After Clyde's speech ends, we
cut to Zangief from Capcom's Street Fighter
franchise, who is sitting right next to
Nintendo's Bowser (from the Super Mario series)
and Bison, also from Street Fighter. This scene
has caused a tiny bit of controversy among
gamers due to the fact that the film depicts
Zangief as a 'bad guy.' In the Street Fighter
series, Zangief is mainly an overly patriotic
fighter driven by the love of his country. The
manual for Street Fighter II even described him
as being 'good natured.' The only instances of
Zangief being a 'bad guy' was in the 1994 live
action Street Fighter movie and the American
animated cartoon inspired by the movie.
Ironically, Street Fighter's
real villain, M. Bison, is sitting with the
group. In the Street Fighter games, he is the
leader of a terrorist group named Shadaloo,
whose intentions are to rule over the world.
Bison's powers are very vast and infinite, and
he is quite egotistical in his pursuits. He was
also responsible for the death of Chun-Li's
father and taking control of Cammy's mind. So
why is Zangief offering the testimony instead of
Bison, no one knows. It seems, however, that he
will have some sort of speaking role in the
final film.

After Zangief's testimony we now
focus on the zombie. At first, people thought
that he was just a generic zombie character
representing what is a very common villain in
video games today; the zombie. Yet, very clever
gamers took a closer look at his design and it
turns out that he isn't just a generic zombie
character. He happens to be a Sega character
that hails from their zombie shooter game, House
of the Dead! The game is an on-rails shooter (a
genre of games in which the characters move
automatically) where you investigate a mansion
that has been infiltrated with zombies and other
mutant creatures. This type of zombie wields two
axes that he throws to the screen. He has been
named Cyril by Sega.
Right next to him is Kano from
Warner Interactive's Mortal Kombat series. It
isn't known if he will have any lines during
this scene, but his inclusion in the movie is
surprising as the Mortal Kombat games are some
of the most violent ever conceived. When this
scene was shown in storyboard form at D23 last
year, Kano rips the zombie's heart out,
referencing that Kano's most popular fatality is
a heart rip. Whether the scene remains in the
final film we don't know.
When Cyril is finished with his
testimony, Ralph declares that he doesn't want
to be a bad guy, which inspires a shocking
reaction in the group. Turns out that this scene
also features some character related jokes
people might miss. Bowser begins to spit fire at
the thought of Ralph leaving his game, which
happens to be his signature move. Clyde, the
orange Pac-Man ghost, turns blue. In Pac-Man,
whenever the player obtained a power pellet, the
ghosts would turn blue, meaning that they were
vulnerable to being eaten.

Afterwards, we cut to scenes
involving Game Central Station, the video game
world's equivalent of New York's Grand Central
Station. In the film, the role of the station is
to transport video game characters to their
respective video games. In our world, it is
actually a connector that powers the arcade
cabinets. This scene is poised to have countless
of character cameos. In the trailer, when Ralph
is eating cherries (which happen to come from
Pac-Man), the main character from the arcade
game Paperboy makes a very quick 'blink and
you'll miss him' cameo. Prior to the release of
the trailer, Disney released some promotional
artwork depicting this scene. One of them has
Ralph sharing his fruit with characters from an
arcade game called Q*Bert.
In Q*Bert, you play as a little
orange creature with a big nose whose objective
is to hit the tiles on the pyramid, avoiding
enemies in the process. As the difficulty scales
more and more enemies invade the pyramid, making
it harder for Q*Bert to navigate through. In the
trailer, when Fix-It-Felix realizes that Ralph
is gone from the game he goes looking for him.
He encounters Q*Bert and asks him where Ralph
may be. This scene proves to be brief but very
amusing as both characters behind to speak 'in
Q*Bert-nese.' The joke here is that whenever
Q*Bert was defeated, a speech balloon with
random symbols on it would appear. It looked
like he was cursing, yet Wreck-It-Ralph
explains that it is his native language.
In that promotional image with
Q*Bert, one of the characters is holding a sign
that says 'Will NPC in FPS for food!' NPC stands
for Non Playable Character. In gaming, that's
when a character only exists to provide the
character with a task or piece of information,
but is never playable. FPS stands for First
Person Shooter, a game genre in which players in
a first person perspective. And speaking of
FPSs:

The trailer then focuses away
from the game cameos and into its own original
video games. When Ralph begins to game jump, he
first lands on a game called Hero's Duty. This
represents Ralph's first exposure to modern
gaming, the kind we are going through right now.
Hero's Duty seems to be heavily inspired by
Microsoft's two most popular characters: Halo
and Gears of War. It is where Ralph meets
Sergeant Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch), a tough
as nails soldier that fights against an alien
invasion. Ralph yields one of the funniest lines
in the trailer, simply because it is a truth for
many gamers: when did video games become so
violent and scary?

Finally, we get a glimpse of a
game called Sugar Rush. The best way to describe
this game is that Nintendo's Mario Kart meets
Candyland. The whole world has been created
using sugary confections, and even the character
have a 'sweet' disposition to them. Here, Ralph
meets Vanellope (voiced by Sarah Silverman).
Based on the trailer, their first meeting will
not be a pleasant one.
Even with the trailer giving us
ALL of this in just a few minutes, there are
still many things we don't know about. Who is
going to be the film's main antagonist, if
there's going to be any? How will Ralph get back
home? What other video game characters will make
it in? Will Ralph learn to appreciate himself
for who he really is? The only way to find out
is when Wreck-it-Ralph is released in theaters
on November 2, 2012.
