Dungeons & Dragons Ruins Lives in Tom Hanks’ First Lead Role

The big picture

• Tom Hanks began with minor film roles before achieving legendary status, with his first leading role in the 1982 made-for-TV movie.
  Labyrinths and monsters
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• Labyrinths and monsters
  it was influenced by a moral panic surrounding Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, with Tom Hanks' character suffering from mental illness due to a role-playing fantasy game.
• Despite the film's dark ending, Hanks enjoyed a successful career, and beliefs about the dangers of D&D have been debunked.

Tom Hanks has had an unparalleled acting career and is truly a legend in the industry, beloved in households for his countless outstanding performances. The multiple Academy Award-winning actor has turned in memorable performance after memorable performance, able to captivate audiences whether he's playing a stranded castaway, a diligent FBI agent, or an endearing protagonist of the romantic comedy. As one of the quintessential movie stars, it's hard to imagine Hanks as anything other than an acclaimed and successful actor, but even Forrest Gump had to start somewhere. Although he's been lost under the mountain of critical and commercial success, Hanks' early film roles weren't exactly clear indicators of the career to come.

Hanks first appeared in a low budget slasher film released in 1980 called He knows you're lonelybut he became the protagonist for the first time in a made-for-television picture, Labyrinths and monsters. But even the most avid Tom Hanks fan might not be familiar with the film, and that's because of its niche and complicated story and subject matter. This is because Labyrinths and monsters was not just an ordinary TV fantasy movie, but a “moral panic” reaction to the popular role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, based on sensational stories about the game's demonic dangers, with the goal of dissuading viewers from ever picking up the dice and character token. The film's success in this quest, as with many other films released with the same goal, was mixed and insignificant, but although Labyrinths and monsters never stopped D&D from becoming wildly popular, it still served as the starting point for one of the most illustrious careers in all of cinema.

What is “Labyrinths and Monsters” about and who plays Tom Hanks?

Labyrinths and monsters was a direct-to-TV movie based on a book of the same name by the author Rona Jaffe, published in 1982 and inspired by tabloid stories published a couple of years earlier. Although unlike the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series launched in the same decade, Jaffe's story had a very different take on the game. The film follows Robbie (Tom Hanks), a college student entering a new school, as he befriends a trio of classmates who ask him to join their Mazes and Monsters group. Based on D&D, Mazes and Monsters is a fantasy RPG filled with, well, monsters and mazes. Robbie's new friends include Jay-Jay (Chris Makepeace), Daniel (David Wallace), and Kate (Wendy Crewson), the latter whom Robbie begins dating as they grow closer. However, despite its initial levity, the game soon bleeds to life in a darker way than Robbie's friends could have anticipated.

Robbie's story with It is revealed that Mazes and Monsters was complex and damaging to his mental health, as he was expelled from his previous school for obsessing over the game. While playing with his new friends, Robbie is flooded with nightmares about his missing older brother and eventually suffers a mental breakdown that leads him to genuinely believe that he is his character Pardieu, a magical and devout cleric. When the group makes the rash decision to play in the service tunnels below the school, Robbie hallucinates monsters he can't see, and gets so fixated on his character that he can't separate fiction from reality.

The self-destructive behavior continues as Robbie breaks up with Kate to keep Pardieu's vow of celibacy, then suddenly disappears. Still believing himself to be Pardieu, Robbie travels to New York, where his hallucinations only get worse. When approached by the robbers, Robbie mistakenly believes they are monsters and stabs one of them with a knife. His friends are able to locate him due to a map Robbie had left in his room and catch up with him thanks to a moment of clarity that Kate is able to take advantage of while they are on a phone call. His friends find Robbie on the roof of one of the Twin Towers, about to jump in order to reach the fictional “Great Hall”, but Jay-Jay is able to conjure it up by asserting his authority as the “Maze Controller”, the game's dungeon master.

Why did people think Dungeons & Dragons was evil in the 80s?

Labyrinths and monsters is a time capsule into an intriguing and impactful period in Dungeons & Dragons history, as public perception and opinion of the game in the 1980s was created by sensational stories and the panic of certain groups. D&D was accused of being dangerous to its players, harmfully indoctrinating them with “demonic” influences and witchcraft. Although there was no tangible evidence of the game's negative influence, it was falsely correlated with several real-life tragedies that occurred during the decade. Examples of suicide and violent crime were associated with gambling simply because the people involved had a history of gambling, largely ignoring the other extenuating circumstances that often affected these people's lives.

The most notable of these stories was that of James Dallas Egbert, a student at Michigan State University who had disappeared and became the subject of a nationwide fascination. A private investigator, William Dear, investigated Egbert's disappearance and came up with the idea that the student's self-destructive behavior was related to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Dear himself later stated that he did not believe that D&D had anything to do with the case, but the idea had already run rampant when news stations began reporting sensational stories about the dangers of role-playing.

Rona Jaffe, the author of Labyrinths and monstersbased much of its story on sensational media reports of Egbert's disappearance. While Robbie's obsession with mazes and monsters is the obvious parallel, Jaffe had also written Jay-Jay with several traits drawn from Egbert's story. Egbert was a prodigy studying computer science at university aged just 16 and had spent time exploring the steam tunnels beneath the school while fantasizing about D&D. Egbert did not die in the tunnels, although the university utility tunnels soon became an urban legend, but a series of complicated mental health issues sadly led to his suicide just a year after he was found. Organizations such as Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) continued their campaign against the game, even appearing in 60 minutes in conversation with the creator of D&D, Gary Gygax. But despite all the negative press, sales of the game actually took off, and over the next few decades, TTRP would evolve from a niche gaming community into an internationally popular fantasy staple. And fortunately, despite criticism of the game, ongoing studies by the American Association of Suicidology, the US Centers for Disease Control, and Health and Welfare Canada have found no identifiable link between D&D and suicide.

“Mazes and Monsters” didn't have a happy ending, but Tom Hanks' career did

Staying in line with the film's intention to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of D&D, Labyrinths and monsters does not conclude with a happy ending for Robbie. Although his friends saved him from jumping off a skyscraper, Robbie never regains his senses and continues to believe himself to be Pardieu. He lives with his mother in a more rural house, his friends visit him and are disheartened to see that their friend is gone forever and only Pardieu remains. They play out Robbie's fantasies one last time to kill monsters with him until the sun goes down, though they will forever mourn the loss of their friend. The film remains a complicated piece of fiction, both for its inspiration from a set of loose facts from a real-life missing person case and for its depiction of the dangers of D&D. Robbie and each of his friends present with serious interpersonal and emotional issues with their families that ultimately affect their actions more than the film ever admits. Although Robbie's obsession with the game is vilified, it is hard to believe that his family life with an alcoholic mother and a controlling father are not also serious causes of his poor mental health.

But while the film's ending was bleak, Tom Hanks' career was thankfully not lost before it began. Despite much of the silliness on paper, Hanks gave the film's most outstanding performance yet, from its most comedic moments to its genuinely heartbreaking ones. Tom Hanks' subsequent decades of success leave little to be desired as he starred in countless blockbuster films, received multiple awards and accolades, and became one of the most beloved actors in film history. Dungeons & Dragons, too, was not thwarted by the moral panic movies that tried to take it down in the 1980s. The game continued to grow in popularity, spawning a trilogy of cult classic movies, a variety of real game content and one of the funniest movies of 2023, with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Labyrinths and monsters is available to stream on Peacock in the US

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