Wing Commander Album's CD Run Arrives

Greetings! The WC volume 2 CD's just arrived yesterday. Looks and sounds great! I will be sending these out to CD only backers very soon.

Unfortunately, due to longer processing time and popular demand for vinyl, the LPs will not arrive until at least the first week of June. So for those who are receiving both a CD and a vinyl version I'll be shipping those together in one package.

Thank you all for your patience. I know this has been a long process, but I am thoroughly pleased with the results, and hoping you will be as well.

Yours truly,

George

Originator Updates Fixes WC2 Issues

Dickerson, Lake and Jeff

I was leafing through False Colors the other day and happened to notice an unusual reference I wanted to explore a litle further. This paragraph is from when the Landreich fleet is assembling to recover the Karga and it introduces two of the ship captains thusly:

Diaz would be working closely with the captains of the tender Sindri and the huge factory ship Andrew Carnegie, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair whose names were Dickerson and Lake—Bondarevsky still wasn't entirely sure which one was which. Their commands, though non-combatants, would have the pivotal part in the Goliath Project, the tender serving as a deep-space repair platform for the supercarrier while the mammoth Andrew Carnegie, designed for semi-automated minerals extraction and fabrication work on unsettled frontier worlds, had been pressed into service to manufacture whatever the Kilrathi derelict might be lacking right on the spot.

Mutt-and-Jeff stuck out to me as a very odd reference for the 27th century. Mutt and Jeff was one of the first daily comic strips which ran from 1907 to 1983. The reference specifically is to how the characters are a mismatched pair, one tall and one short. But as far as pop culture goes, the memory has already faded in our time!

"That's where we come in," Dickerson—or was it Lake?—put in. "The quicker your gang gets things secured and calls us in, the sooner you'll have all the comforts of home, courtesy of the good ship Sindri."

Later we learn that this was, indeed, Dickerson and that his first name is Charles. Sadly, we see him only briefly as the Sindri is destroyed by pirates. Lake is the captain of the Carnegie and he does show up again later in the book at another planning meeting. But what we never learn is which was Mutt (tall) and which was Jeff (short).

Wing Commander Movie Night: King Kong

The Wing Commander movie club has put their seats up and their tray tables in the upright position following the conclusion of Die Hard 2. Next week, we're going a little further back in the past… to 1933 for the original King Kong! King Kong is a massively important film for how it defined the kind of blockbuster movies whose evolution continues to this day… and it's always fun to watch a giant ape wreck things. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The direct connection to Wing Commander this time around is a fun one: the island that Blair, Grunt and Kulrag crash land on in Wing Commander Academy's Word of Honor is based on the island where Kong is discovered in the original movie (later named Skull Island). USA originally aired a 'Kids Club' bumper with the series' background artists explaining this; unfortunately, it has been lost to time!

There's also a big connection to Chris Roberts' history. His very first game, programmed in BASIC and printed in a magazine in 1983, was… King Kong! It's a simple arcade game that pits you against the fearsome ape in a take on the film's final climactic battle atop the Empire State building. You can read all about the game's history at Pix's Origin Adventures and even play it in your browser here. Let's compare high scores this week! We've mirrored a copy of the King Kong tape here for anyone wanting to use an emulator.

Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?

King Kong is available to download free from the Internet Archive and to stream via YouTube. It is also available for rent or purchase on all the standard services. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on BluRay in 2010 and remains in print around the world. If you are not able to locate a copy please stop by the Discord and ping a CIC staff member before Friday's showing.

How do we watch the movie together?

It's pretty low tech! Simply join the Wing Commander CIC Discord on Friday and we will be chatting (in text) along with the film in the main channel. Everyone who wants to join in should bring their own copy and we will count down to play them together at 10 PM EST. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!

Wing Commander Cartoon Party II: The Wrath of Doug

Last month, we held a special Saturday morning cartoon watch party in #WingNut where we watched the entire 'Warrior King' crossover saga that included Wing Commander Academy. Well, we had so much fun that we've decided to do it again! It's not possible to find anything quite as epic as the Warrior King saga so instead we've pulled together a collection of other Saturday morning shows that reference Wing Commander in some way! Here's the lineup:

Doug - Doug's Lost Weekend (1992, s2e25): This early episode of Doug (pre-Disney's Doug) will be extremely relatable to any Wing Commander fan: Doug becomes addicted to a space sim that is full of nods to the original Wing Commander!

Gridman the Hyper Agent - A Lonely Hacker (1993, s1e17): Gridman is a Japanese "tokusatsu" superhero show similar to the ones used as the basis for shows like Power Rangers in the United States. Watch carefully for the slightest of cameos from an unusual port of the original Wing Commander!

Viper - Ghosts (1994, s1e04): Viper was part of the mid-1990s 'magic vehicle' craze kicked off by earlier programs like Airwolf and Knight Rider. The producers contacted origin asking for a free copy of Privateer when it came out… and then everyone was surprised by just how much the game featured in the final show!

ReBoot - The Tearing (1994, s1e01): The very first episode of Canada's famous ReBoot, the show that introduced full CG to television, pays a pretty big tribute to Wing Commander by having a parody of the series be one of the very first 'games' Bob and company have to enter!

So JOIN US on Saturday, May 10th at noon Eastern when we'll enjoy them all together! Last time we had big fun wearing pajamas and eating cereal… so we recommend you plan to do the same again! You will need to download the episodes from the CIC before we start. Like last time, we're going to start things off with a classic Looney Tunes short… the sequel to the original Duck Dodgers, Duck Dodgers in the Return of the 24½th Century from 1980! Here are the links:

• Duck Dodgers in the Return of the 24½th Century
• Doug - Doug's Lost Weekend
• Gridman the Hyper Agent - A Lonely Hacker
• Viper - Ghosts
• ReBoot - The Tearing

We've also uploaded a zip of all five shows together for ease of downloading. You can get that here.

How do we watch the shows together?

It's pretty low tech! Simply join the Wing Commander CIC Discord on Saturday and we will be chatting (in text) along with the shows in the main channel. Everyone who wants to join in should download their own copies from the CIC and we will count down to play them one at a time together starting with the short at noon EST on Saturday. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!

Will there be custom certificates made for the attendees this time?

Yes.

Why are you still calling it a 'cartoon party' when two of the shows are live action?

Shut up.

To Lev is to Fly

Warning: This update contains spoilers for the ending of Privateer 2: The Darkening.

As is often the case, the topic several nights ago on Discord turned to Privateer 2. While talking about the game's conclusion, Chris Reid thought to ask: is there any significance to the 'Arris' in his fake name?

To back up: the reveal close to the end of Privateer 2 is that you are not, in fact, Lev Arris but Vell Ricaud II, the long lost first son of the founder of Ricaud Interplanetary. The head of the Kindred, "Kronos", is really your twin brother Sar Ricaud. The booth system will eventually tell you that Ricaud Interplanetary is "the largest industrial concern in the Tri-System" and there are various small hints that Sar has turned it into the Kindred. When you decode the memory solid later in the game the report says that "also the names Larn Regis and Vell Ricaud occur over 150 times, as well as the name Ricaud Interplanetary."

So, the "Lev" in Lev Arris (which is the name that had been printed on his cryo pod) is (almost) "Vell" reversed. But is there a meaning to "Arris"? We speculated for a while but couldn't come up with one that felt satisfying (the closest guess was 'heir is'). Luckily, The Darkening's screenwriter Diane Duane seems to have a memory like a steel trap! We asked her on BlueSky and she was kind enough to reply:

Nope. In the early stages of writing I was just feeling around for a name that seemed easily memorable. For some reason "Harris" suggested itself, and I just dropped the initial H off it so it wouldn't sound so ordinary.. :)

(Want to read more from Diane Duane? Check out her bookstore, Ebooks Direct!)

So there you have it! I did find an interesting joke while I was looking through the ingame text to see where 'Ricaud' was actually mentioned. Check out this characteristically goofy CCN booth update about the Yummiechow's slogan contest:

But then that story continues in another update! You can also get this story which talks about how the Munchems line has failed because, in part, of a pirate attack! The implication seems to be that the Kindred is targeting the Yummiechow corporation because Kronos didn't win the snack contest!

Wing Commander Albums in Production, More Sample Materials Released

Greetings all, and thank you for your amazing patience. Both the CD and vinyl products are (finally) in production as we speak. In the meantime I want to share all the cover art as well as the vinyl audio files for you to check out. The vinyl audio is obviously divided into two long audio files which will give you the opportunity to listen to the tracks in sequence without having to click on individual files. One note about the side A file; it starts with a 60 second tone necessary for production, but after that it is smooth sailing!

Rest assured that as soon as the products arrive here I will be sending them out.

You are all the best!

George

Reminder: #Wingnut Movie Night Tonight!

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Die Hard 2 (1990) which informed a very minor character in Privateer. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

After Action Report: Aliens

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club is pretty universal in this one: Aliens is as close to a perfect movie as you can make! We greatly enjoyed revisiting it last week and it's such a good film that we could probably do it again soon.

In the treatment for the Wing Commander movie, Chris Roberts described it as being like Alien in that the character drama emerges from the fact that everyone is totally cut off from reasonable rescue or help. And he was right, both movies certainly do chase that goal… although the isolation you feel in Aliens is much more effectively delivered. Of course, Aliens' greater legacy to Wing Commander and across most science fiction was the colonial marines. James Cameron's mixing of future space warfare with Vietnam-styled American soldiers feels like a lightning bolt… they would be aped endlessly including in Wing Commander III, IV and Prophecy.

Here are the two quotes we talked about being used as nods in Wing Commander games in the intro. I was shocked to learn that the actual line is 'Drake, we are leaving' and not 'marines, we are leaving'.

Aliens and Wing Commander Prophecy share a visual futurist: artist Syd Mead worked on both, designing the aliens in Wing Commander Prophecy. His design of the Sulaco troopship is also referenced in the Wing Commander movie; the prows of the Sivar and the Snakeir are extremely similar!

Aliens' APC design also looks pretty familiar: it was clearly the inspiration for the Hercules LC seen in Wing Commander Prophecy. Once again, this is Wing Commander borrowing directly from Ron Cobb.

Before we started watching AD said we should pay special attention to the 'scanners' at the start of the film. Sure enough, they're an extremely similar effect to the one used on the ConCom in Wing Commander.

Along those same lines, we noticed that the soundless shot of Ripley and Newt futilely trying to alert the marines from inside a sealed room was pretty similar to the shot of Admiral Wilson trying (?) to destroy the NAVCOM AI.

Chris noticed that the 'above' shot of the elevator in the third act was very similar to the one used in Wing Commander III (and then referenced again in the third episode of Academy). I'm not sure if this shot originates with Aliens or not but it's possible particularly given Chris Roberts' enjoyment of the film!

And surely the armored pleasure planet police mech from the Righteous Fire introduction owes more than a little to Ripley's exoskeleton loader! (Interesting fact, the Righteous Fire cutscene was originally rendered as the 'out of money' losing endgame for the original game. It was cut for space and was given entirely new dialogue to introduce the mission disk!)

I also thought the shot of the red lit alien crawling through the ducts looked a lot like one of the shots from the Super Wing Commander takeoff cutscenes… but that one may be a coincidence!

When I Was Seventeen…

Here's a first: a bit of Wing Commander-adjacent history reported by my wife! She came across a cover story about Freddie Prinze Jr. from the February 2000 issue of Seventeen on an Instagram account called imstuckin.1999 which provides a bit of a look at how he was marketed to teenage girls around the time of the Wing Commander movie! It even quotes Matthew Lillard and notes that they became friends on set in Luxembourg. And great news for collectors: the magazine had two different Freddie Prinze Jr. covers!

During the release of Wing Commander I remember working closely with the "fan girls" running news sites like ours but for Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard… and frankly, it was a lot more interesting way to interact with people than bickering with other gamers! And while we're at it, here's something else to preserve for posterity that doesn't really fit anywhere: a Freddie Prinze Jr. gag list from film critic's Richard Roeper's book "10 Sure Signs a Movie Character is Doomed, and Other Surprising Movie Lists" (the joke being that it's just his filmography).

3DO Commercials Collected

I'm always fascinated to find brief glimpses of Wing Commander that aired on TV and I thought of another vector for them: 3DO advertisements! So I spent some time digging through material archived by 3DO fans to find a few glimpses of Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander III that aired on national TV.

First is a 1994 advertisement called "Stop Playing with Toys" which includes a brief clip of Super Wing Commander! Watch carefully to see part of the Scimitar takeoff sequence. Fun fact: both of the 'toys' thrown away at the start, an SNES and a Genesis with Sega CD attached, also have excellent Wing Commander ports.

Then we have a 1995 advertisement called "Welcome to the REAL World" which incudes a brief clip of gameplay from Wing Commander III. The available copy is pretty low resolution but it's clearly the player flying a Hellcat and destroying a Dralthi.

Super Wing Commander also appears in this 1994 Japanese 3DO commercial. This one is crazy fun, claiming that the system is a "Big Hit in the USA" and identifying company founder rip Hawkins as a "computer genius". Watch for a brief clip from the Super Wing Commander intro showing Rapiers firing on a Snakeir (... or was it a Fralthi?). It even has an Origin bug superimposed!