 Jack Black is all set to play Steve in the Minecraft movie. Answering the question of why Jack Black is nominally fairly straightforward, he's an accomplished and experienced voice actor, and in playing Bowser, he provided the most memorable vocal performance in the Super Mario Bros. Movie, the most profitable animated film of 2023. But beyond this, we also need to ask, why Jack Black? Just why? Where did this actor come from, and how did he become a modern movie star? Because the Super Mario Bros. Movie wasn't even Black's first role in video game-related media. That came when he was 13 years old. Brace yourself, because the story of Jack Black's life involves the doomed Apollo 13 lunar mission, the Hubble telescope, a volcano in Scotland, a friendship with one of the surviving members of Nirvana, and one of my personal favourite video games, Wonder Boy the Dragon's Trap. Okay, that last one is a bit tenuous, but the rest of the story is fascinating. Here is why Jack Black is in the Minecraft movie. I think you ought to go to a nice finishing school and learn to be a lady. These are the words of teenage Judith Love Cohen's school guidance counsellor, and they were the opposite of what she wanted to hear. Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, and the women in her family all worked in a dress factory. Cohen, though, was far more interested in geometry. Despite a lack of roles for women in STEM subjects at the time, she received a scholarship to study maths at Brooklyn College, before pursuing a career in engineering. While studying at college, she was also a dancer in the Corpse de Ballet of the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, because why shouldn't she be both a maths genius and an accomplished performer? Cohen eventually moved to California, where she raised four children while working full-time as an aerospace engineer. Her most famous of many contributions to the American space program was the abort guidance system in the lunar excursion module. This proved crucial when lunar mission Apollo 13 famously told Houston, we have a problem. According to Cohen's oldest son, Professor Neil Siegel, when disasters struck the Apollo 13 mission, it was the abort guidance system that brought the astronauts home safely. Judy was there when the Apollo 13 astronauts paid a thank you to the TRW facility at Redondo Beach. She finished her engineering career running the systems engineering for the science ground facility of the Hubble Space Telescope. I could easily dedicate an entire video to this woman, perhaps I should, but this quote from Siegel gets us back on track. She actually went to the office on the day that Jack was born. When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And oh yes, the baby was born too. Young Thomas Jacob Black, yes that's his real name, later made an attempt in following other members of his family into academia. But after two years at the University of California, he dropped out to pursue an acting career instead. Black had already had some success in this career. At age 13 he made his acting debut in, of all things, a TV commercial for the video game pitfall. Clearly, some things are just meant to be. Black joined the Actors Gang Theatre Company, where he had an initial rivalry with fellow member Kyle Gass. This rivalry turned into a friendship when the pair, along with the rest of the Actors Gang, visited the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, climbing Arthur's seat a famous Scottish hiking destination the pair bonded. Upon their return to California, Gass taught Black to play the guitar, in exchange for Black buying him tacos, which is a pretty good deal. One day Black told Gass that his favourite song was won by Metallica. He considered it the greatest song in the world. The pair agreed that they could never write the best song in the world. The best they could manage was a tribute. With that, the pair wrote arguably their most famous song about a musical battle with a shiny demon on a long and winding road. It was around this time that the pair, known to the world as Tenacious D, were introduced to Dave Grohl, who had been the drummer in Nirvana, and who was now the lead singer and guitarist for a little known band called Foo Fighters. I'm having fun with this video, can you tell? Grohl and the duo hit it off, and Grohl went on to play drums and guitar for Tenacious D's studio recordings. Another of Tenacious D's songs is titled Wonder Boy. Is this a reference to the popular game series Wonder Boy? No, no it is not, but it gives me an excuse to talk about the Dragon's Trap again and I'm taking it. The Dragon's Trap is really good. It was his performances with Tenacious D that landed Black what he considers his breakout role in the John Cusack film High Fidelity. Cusack said of this casting, I had seen Tenacious D play because I knew Tim Robbins and the actors gang and Jack was around there, so I already knew that he was a great musician and singer and a great comic actor who was about to explode. But I felt like I had this secret weapon because no one really knew that he could rock that much. So the book was perfect and I thought, this is the perfect role for him. This led to many other film roles, Orange County, Shallow Howl, Shark Tale, School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda. Throughout all of this, Black was a passionate fan of gaming. He was a fan of LucasArts Adventure games, for example, a fact that inspired Tim Schaefer to cast him as the voice of Eddie Riggs in the double fine adventure game, Brutal Legend. Nintendo, meanwhile, was a sphere of gaming that Black didn't truly embrace until he was a parent. He later said, Donky Kong was such a huge part of my childhood, but my boys first introduced me to Bowser because I didn't even play that until they were playing their Nintendo Switches. That's when I really got into Super Mario Bros with them. When the author of Playing Bowser came along, Black says that it was a no-brainer, and following his tremendously well-received performance in the Mario movie, it seems he's been cast in the Minecraft film as well. The moral of the story, if you work hard, and if you're also the tremendously charismatic son of a genius, you too can be the voice of a major video game character in an upcoming film adaptation. Or, since that's not a very widely applicable moral, let's try this one. Be yourself. I don't think anyone can ever accuse Jack Black of being anyone but Jack Black, unless they accuse him of being Thomas Jake of Black, but that doesn't count.