The early '80s were tough on video-game-obsessed movie characters. They could get sucked inside the game itself, à la Tron. Or whisked away by Robert Preston to fight aliens, as in The Last Starfighter. Or, most frightening of all, they could attract the ire of corrupt city councilman and one-time Walking Tall star Joe Don Baker. That's the problem plaguing the video-game-loving gang of Joysticks. A model of social diversity run by stud Scott McGinnis, nerd Leif Green, and funny fat guy Jim Greenleaf, a video arcade cleverly named "Video Arcade" serves as a gathering place for punks and valley girls alike. Disputes are solved with sodas and a round of Satan's Hollow played on giant screens, and displays of T&A stay confined to back rooms and custom vans. That is, until the day Baker tracks down his rebellious daughter Corinne Bohrer, just in time to catch two topless women fleeing a prank involving a round of strip gaming and a false fire alarm. Mistaking Video Arcade for a den of ill repute, Baker immediately employs two bumbling nephews to shut it down by any means necessary, including stealing all the arcade machines in the middle of the night. Overhearing their scheme, Green and Greenleaf launch a counterattack that somehow lands the former in the same bed as Baker's oversexed wife (Morgan Lofting), and later gets him sandwiched between Lofting and an unwitting Baker. As the situation once again reaches a stalemate, McGinnis decides to leak some incriminating photos of Baker to the local media. "Who do you think you are, Mike Wallace or... Howard Cosell?" Baker stammers. But soon, he settles on another scheme, hiring game-crazy punk King Vidiot (Jon Gries) and his gang of punkettes to terrorize the arcade, which leads to a courtroom showdown. "We are here to extinguish the filth and the decadence that is commonly referred to as video-game entertainment," Baker proclaims. But eventually, everyone recognizes that the problem can only be solved one way: by playing the little-loved Pac-Man spin-off Super Pac-Man. Though traumatized by a video-game-related incident in his past, McGinnis comes out of retirement for the occasion, defeating Gries, reuniting with a love from his past, and ensuring that Video Arcade would last at least until the great arcade drought of the mid-'80s. Later that same night, Green loses his virginity.
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