The legend had languished for the last 150 years, since the incumbent rode off into the proverbial sunset with a contract, cheating the Devil out of a potent spell for harnessing the power of the evil spirits roaming the Earth.
You could be forgiven if you thought that this plot prologue, or the springboard into the modern storyline, might seem corny. The modern storyline starts harmlessly enough, with a young Johnny Blaze in a twosome bike daredevil act with his father. He almost fouls up their act because he is too busy smiling and gesturing to his girlfriend, Roxanne Simpson, in the audience. He is tempted to leave town, with Roxanne on his pillion, to escape the censoriousness and disapproval of her parents and the repressive authority of his own father. The plan is stillborn, however, when he finds a crumpled note in the waste-paper basket (where else?) which conveys the news that his father has cancer.
A pact with the Devil is the upshot of this news, which upsets Johnny so much that he scoots past the trysting place with Roxanne with barely a sideways glance. She is standing there with her suitcase ready for the elopement.  The moral – to the effect that the Devil is essentially untrustworthy – becomes apparent when Johnny’s father recovers from cancer, only to die unexpectedly in a biking spectacular through a flaming hoop, which goes wrong.
The face of young Johnny, looking upset, then morphs into an older, though not wiser, Johnny in the form of Nicolas Cage. Humour is a characteristic of the scenes which ensue, establishing Blaze’s character and success, as with his Blaze team he travels round the American continent, trotting out his road show with far more success than his father ever achieved: now Blaze jumps 20 trucks or sails shamelessly over a covey of helicopters, with propellers ominously spinning. He seems somewhat of a sad case, however: he is socially inept and culturally impoverished. While his team swigs beer and plays cards, or watches some wholesome action TV, Blaze sucks meditatively on sugar bean sweets from a martini glass, plugs his ears into mindless bubble-gum music, or takes a childish delight in farcical sitcoms to relieve stress.