As a result, I treat the ships as the stars of the show. An X-Wing is always an X-Wing whether it comes alive on the big screen or in the depths of one of many novels. It was simply difficult for me to understand why the Tiger's Claw, the iconic carrier from WC1, MY SHIP appeared to be a foreign vessel on the silver screen.
I think that's an important point to recognize -- Star Wars is a game about a pre-existing game... Wing Commander is the opposite. To sell a Wing Commander movie they needed to interest the masses, not the people who played the game.
That said, look at X-Wing -- they started off with beautiful simple 3D models... and by the time the series ended they'd slopped horrible ugly textures all over them that completely changed the feel of the thing. There's more to any work of art than how it literally looks.
I'm not quite sure what to say here, except that the misunderstanding is a result of an inability to articulate my point. The motives behind changing the ship design for the movie are quite different, I think, than those behind altering the visual character of the "stars" of WC1 for SWC. I'll have to think more about this; I see SWC and WC the movie as two very different situations. I realize as a fan that we need to be greatful anytime an additional opportunity is created to enjoy the WC universe, but I think using a different cast to tell the same story is unfortunate.
I think the two situations are very similar, actually. The idea behind *both* is to bring the original 'concept' to an audience who didn't play the original game. SWC cold redo the ship designs in a way that worked on a 3DO/Mac because it was for an audience which had always lusted after but never actually gotten to use the original game.
While I agree that the movie needed to redesign things in order to create that specific submarine feel and all, I really have to point out that this part of your argument is extremely weak. You know very well we're not talking about thirty-pixel sprites - there most certainly would have been enough good references to allow for faithful, great-looking high-quality recreations of the game ships in a movie... had this been appropriate for the movie Chris Roberts was trying to create. It obviously wasn't - but when you go on to explain how not only Chris Roberts didn't want to do it, but in fact he could not do it even had he wanted to, you weaken your overall argument.
I'm not quite sure I follow you -- that isn't really what I'm trying to say. I certainly don't believe that it would be *impossible* to build a 'high resolution' Tiger's Claw... simply that it was unnecessary and ultimately undesirable to do so.
That said, I do disagree with your "you know perfectly well" jab -- the fact of the matter is that the same people who cry bloody murder because the Tiger's Claw looks different in the movie would be doing the same thing if it were exactly like it was in the game but a different color (and we saw this, when Academy was new)..
Wing Commander's "thirty pixel sprites" are beloved because of what we turned them into in our minds eye, not because there's some secret perfect look to them that was abandoned by the evil movie. The Claw Marks lineart doesn't upconvert into a giant movie rendering in any sort of obvious way, as neat as it is -- you would have to add all kinds of details that would ultimately just make the people that you were going beyond your means to please unhappy.
That goes back, somewhat, to the point about different medias having different scales and audiences. Think of Star Trek... over the years, they added more and more details to the Enterprise. Little lines on the saucer, little spots of light on the hull, etc. The original model is a *mess*... when you go and look at it today, it's nothing like how you imagine the ship. For the first movie, they threw the whol thing out and went with something that worked with the look and feel of the film.
You're saying that the movie had to be made completety different to appeal to the mass market and not just the relatively few devout Wing Commander fans like us. I just don't follow the reasoning. The games were hugely popular for a reason, and keeping the same feel and atmosphere on the big screen could only have helped. The prop design was only one gripe of many that I have with what I feel was an overall lousy film, but it's probably the biggest.
You aren't thinking outside the end of your nose. Wing Commander was a huge success because it was Star Wars you could be part of. A linear, non-interactive movie *automatically* throws that out... and so in order to make it a success, you ned a better gimmick. Wing Commander isn't a hit because the Tiger's Claw has littl wings with turrets on them, not to anyone but a few hardcore fans.
Moreover, though, actually read this thread -- we've already discussed *exactly* why a game being a huge hit is nothing like a movie being a huge hit. In its awful box office showing, several times the number of people who ever played a WC game went to see the movie.
Since they did feel that it was best to deviate that much from other established Wing Commander products, and since as you say, they were overwhelmingly aiming at an audience that didn't have a clue about Wing Commander, then why even call it Wing Commander at all? Why not make their space submarine movie and call it something else entirely?
This isn't Star Trek, the captain is *bald*! went out with the Usenet. The movie very, very, very clearly was the Wing Commander IP, from the story on down. The fact that the Tiger's Claw looks kind of different doesn't change that at all, given any kind of objective analysis.
Regardless, Wing Commander was (and is) a valuable IP.. people *know* the name, people have had some encounter with the game or the press surrounding the FMV stuff over the years...
You go into "Wing Commander" with a slight edge over the competition... not only in terms of your opening a movie, but in securing a budget for it. "It's this sci fi idea I had!" doesn't sell a film to FOX anywhere near as quickly as "It's the best seling video game!" does