Tom Hanks Starred In A TV Movie Inspired By Dungeons & Dragons' 'Satanic Panic'

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a strange time for the roleplaying game, "Dungeons & Dragons." The game was exploding in popularity, while also being at the center of a moral panic, while also giving Tom Hanks his first lead role in a feature film.

"Mazes and Monsters" was a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS in December 1982, based on Rona Jaffe's novel of the same name. The movie, like the novel, was a misguided cautionary tale, inspired by urban myths and ill-founded reports linking D&D to psychoses, Satanic practices, and the deaths of players. These emerging social paranoias were explored in the film through a group of misfit students who played the fictional RPG "Mazes and Monsters" together. Chief among them was Robbie Wheeling, played by Tom Hanks.

Up until the release of "Mazes and Monsters," Hanks had never led a feature film. Hanks' previous credits included a spate of single-episode TV roles, as well as a minor role in the movie "He Knows You're Alone." His only lead role prior to "Mazes and Monsters" was in the series, "Bosom Buddies," a cross-dressing sitcom that has aged about as well as its title suggests.

Robbie, Hanks' "Mazes and Monsters" character, is a college student who suffers a psychotic break while venturing into an abandoned cavern where one of his friends had suggested hosting a roleplaying game. Robbie becomes convinced the game is real, a psychosis in which he remains trapped as the movie ends.

"Mazes and Monsters" debuted just a few years after reports broke of the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, erroneously linking his disappearance to him playing "Dungeons & Dragons." The reports elevated the moral panic surrounding the game, inspiring works like Rona Jaffe's novel on which the movie was based. At the time, The New York Times praised the movie for achieving "a broader 'rites-of-passage' experience than most viewers might be expecting."

To modern audiences, the misguided preaching on the perils of roleplaying games comes off as farcical, rendering "Mazes and Monsters" a strange glimpse into a bygone era of misunderstanding and baseless paranoia. Neither the movie nor the novel that inspired it seemed to have a particularly detrimental impact on "Dungeons & Dragons." In fact, 1981, the year Jaffe's novel debuted, also saw a boom in "D&D" sales. In 1983, the year after the movie adaptation aired, "Dungeons & Dragons" was itself adapted for television in the form of an animated series that ran for three seasons.

More recently, "Dungeons & Dragons" and the so-called "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s featured heavily in the hit Netflix series, "Stranger Things." The RPG was also adapted in the Chris Pine-led blockbuster, "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves." Hanks went from strength to strength after "Mazes and Monsters." Two years later, he starred in "Splash," before going on to lead movies like "Big," "Forrest Gump," "Apollo 13," and "Toy Story."