This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Arcadia of My Youth (1982) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
It's hard not to love It's a Wonderful Life, even if its specific vision of hope is increasingly specific to a 1940s America that we don't necessarily support today. As we noted, it's almost like a long Twilight Zone episode, complete with that same sense of our grandparents' nostalgia that that show is sometimes steeped in. It also flies by very quickly even though the 'point' of the movie isn't reached until very close to the end.
The major connection to Wing Commander is that Pilgrim Stars has a flagship named the TCS Bedford Falls after It's a Wonderful Life's setting. The two 'versions' of Bedford Falls are the crux of the story, with Jimmy Stewart's character seeing what an impact his seemingly small life had on his town (which becomes a dystopian nightmare in the timeline where he never existed). Wing Commander could take place in either world!
With that in mind, I thought I'd make a quick list of the other capital ships named by Pilgrim Stars... and it's pretty interesting! Where Dr. Forstchen and Andrew Keith use familiar 'military' terms (familiar things like Defiant or Gettysburg), Peter Telep chooses much more unusual names for capital ships. Many of them seem related to his own life in Florida... or they're outright unknown! Here's our quick attempt at identifying them all, we encourage you to try and figure them out on the forums.
We would like to wish a merry Christmas to all wingnuts that celebrate (and a happy holidays to all that don't). The Wing Commander community remains a constant source of happiness in dark times for us and I can't rightly express how much your friendship, your contributions and your general existence makes our lives better. The WC:CIC staff sends you all love and hope.
Now: need some balls to decorate your tree? Here's a quick visual timeline of Wing Commander's most Christmas-y ship, the Super Wing Commander Dorkir. It was built from the Wing Commander II depot model and remains a very bizarre sight when you encounter them in the game.
Like everyone, we're absolutely exhausted this year so we'll leave it at that. But if you're in need of a big dose of Christmas cheer, we highly reccomend checking out last year's omnibus post which collects two decades of wingnut holiday celebrations!
Happy holidays, friends; better days are surely ahead.
Xeen Music, the mind behind the wonderful Wing Commander II and Academy soundtracks released earlier this year is back with two more exhaustive Origin Systems soundtracks! No Wing Commander this time around but they have put together the definitive scores for two classic Ultimas (Ultimae?): the first Ultima Underworld and Runes of Virtue, the GameBoy spinoff!
Both of these soundtracks are currently available only through Xeen Music's Patreon, though composer George "The Fatman" Sanger will make them available on other streaming services at some point in the future. They can be purchased on their own for $10 or accessed as part of their subscription option (which is a great deal!).
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
Ultima: Runes of Virtue
It's a Wonderful Life remains a classic, though I'm not sure many members of the Wing Commander movie club are feeling all too festive this year. So, ultimately a good reminder that better days are ahead. Now we've decided to end the year with an animated film that a lot of our audience has never seen: Arcadia of My Youth, the 1982 origin story of the fearsome space pirate Captain Harlock. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Wing Commander Academy character-and-storyboard artist Tim Eldred was (and remains!) an enormous anime fan and his work on the show was greatly influenced by classic shows like Captain Harlock. Mr. Eldred even slipped a Harlock skull tattoo onto one of the background techs he concepted for the Tiger's Claw… and if you look carefully you can actually see it appear in the final show! This capture is from The Most Delicate Instrument, which makes heavy use of the 'Claw's ground crews.
Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?
Unfortunately, Arcadia of my Youth is not currently available for rent or purchase on the standard streaming services. A high quality subbed version is available on the Internet Archive as is a dubbed version preserved from a VHS tape. Feel free to pick whichever you prefer, but make sure you go with one that has a 2h10m run time. 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!
How can I help pick future movie club movies?
The movie club movies are voted on each week by the Wing Commander Discord. The poll is typically posted 24 hours before each week's screening and the next movie is announced at the end. The choices for the poll come from a master pool of Wing Commander-related movies. If you would like to suggest a film for inclusion in that pool you can post it to this thread.
Here's a fascinating preservation project: MemCards.art aims to archive all of the tiny game-specific icons that would be saved on original PlayStation memory cards. Every original PlayStation game had a 16x16 pixel icon to represent what game a particular save came from… and of course that included Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV on the platform. And their icons were animated! MemCards has preserved each in both the original format and as an enlarged version that's easier to study. What a cool amount of work for such a small piece of gaming logistics! If you're interested in learning more about the history and function of these icons, they have an excellent introduction.
Original Size
Enlarged
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut event happening on Discord this morning! Join us at noon EST/9 AM PST for a fun filled morning of television... that all connect to Wing Commander somehow! This time around we've got two not-so-classic Disney live action films from the mid 1990s… that both feature Wing Commander appearances! You can find details on the shows included as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. Be sure to download the episodes so they're ready to play with the group!
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
And don't forget our fifth Wing Commander Cartoon party is early tomorrow!
Everyone loves Back to the Future! And the Wing Commander movie club is largely a subset of everyone. I was personally not sure how I would feel after it was so over-exposed in mid-2010s geek culture... but you can't help but smile when you're actually watching it. It's so beautifully structured and ceaselessly entertaining, the run time feels like nothing at all. I'd go so far as to say it's a better movie on its own than with the rest of the trilogy that was added later.
Now let's talk Wing Commander! Here's the very last shot of the movie where the Delorean switches to flight mode and shoots off into the future... and the Privateer animation that it inspired. Note that this was originally not a come on for Back to the Future but a final joke to end the movie. Crazy what it has since become!
We also have a full resolution clip available here for future car wheel historians.
And here's the great Biff comparison. Tom Wilson may be the best actor in the movie and he's the only one close to believable as both a high school student and a middle aged man. To say Wing Commander was lucky to get him for Maniac would be an understatement!
In fact, young Biff even looks a bit like Matthew Lillard's Maniac!
We should also note that Back to the Future shows up in tenth place on Chris Roberts' 1991 list of favored action/adventure films! By the time movie club is over we will likely have seen most of these.
As promised, we are going to do a brief survey of time travel in the Wing Commander universe! The most significant mention of time travel is from Privateer 2 and it relates to the game's spectacular Nuke 'em bomb.
Nuke'em
This is a smart bomb. If you use this beast, all small ships in a specific local vecinity will be destroyed, as well as causing a lot of damage to larger ships.
The Nuke 'em causes 14,000 points of damage to every ship within 500 kilometers of your ship, effectively destroying anything near you including both friends or foes.
Nuke 'em Bomb
Ah, the Nuke 'em bomb — the greatest toy in the Tri-System. Sure, they're expensive, but the amount of indiscriminate damage they do would make the sourest Original Humanist giggle (inwardly, of course).
These bombs have a blast radius extending out to about the first ring from the center of your radar in long-range Celestial TSM mode (about 500 klicks). When you drop a Nuke 'em, all ships within the ring will be affected — except your own — and most (if not all) will be wiped out. The closer a ship is to the center of the blast, the more likely it is to be completely destroyed.
Once released, the bomb takes 5 seconds to prime before it detonates.
Purchase Price: 4,000
Max. Damage (points): 14,000
Blast Radius (klicks): 500
Nuke 'em bombs blow up everything within their blast radius. This include friendlies, wingman and fair maidens in distress. This is not a good option for escort or rescue missions, unless you can get your pals out of range before you drop.
... and it turns out it keeps YOUR ship safe by shooting it several seconds forward in time! The information about the time travel aspect comes from the original UK version of the manual.
This horrible device emits a blastwave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate everything in close proximity but the most resilient dreadnoughts. The damage is worse near the epicentre, dissipating outward. The device carries a small synchronic temporal warp generator which at the point of detonation throws you marginally forward in time after the blast, giving you escape from the carnage. However, it does not extend this benefit to any cargo ships or wingmen you may have in tow, who will encounter a particularly terminal, and bad, day. The Campaign for Real Time considered this weapon to be a breach of most time laws and lobbied against its legality, until one day, quite by accident, a rogue Nuke 'em landed on their offices during an annual general meeting.
The manual was famously reworked by Origin's creative services department for the US release and they stripped the time travel mention right out!
Emits a blast wave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate all but the largest ships within close proximity. Damage is worst near the epicenter, dissipating outward. Includes a small Synchronic Temporal Warp generator which protects your ship from the blast.
... but it did make it into the players' guide (the little CD-sized booklet everyone forgets about). They drop the joke but actually add a little more lore about how the STWs work... while also clarifying that they aren't currently powerful enough to do more than this. Party poopers!
Nuke 'em
This horrible device emits a blast wave from the vicinity of your ship powerful enough to annihilate almost everything within close proximity. Damage is worst near the epicenter, dissipating outward.
A Nuke 'em device carries a small Synchronic Temporal Warp (STW) generator, which throws you marginally forward in time at the moment of detonation. You reappear in the same place after the blast, protected from the carnage of the explosion in the immediate past. STW generators are currently neither powerful nor sophisticated enough to protect any cargo ships or wingmen, however. Point your Nuke 'em away from your travelling companions, and make sure they are far enough away to survive.
Privateer 2 also has a second brief mention of time travel. The company database entry for Crius Net has a Douglas Adams-inspired story about how the company's 420 year old founder has recently purchased a "DEDFLASH space/time cruiser" which can look into the future and refuse to fly you somewhere you might be endangered or bored.
NAME: Crius Net
OWNER: Vrootle Pigfididrin
EMPLOYEES: 4712
LOCATION: Anticinedes Heights, Neo-Cabillus
BUSINESS: TeleCommunications
BACKGROUND: Starting out as a sandwich ordering service in the adolescent dawn of Crius' astonishing economic evolution, the Crius Net now connects all aspects of commerce, communication and entertainment across the planet. Its founder, Vrootle Pigfididrin recently made history after his fifth brain relocation transplant operation brought him up to the grand old age of 420 years. Speaking from his private penthouse complex at the Avalon Convalescence Dimension of Zib, Pigfididrin was quoted as saying "I feel like a new man, and a new woman too for that matter". Solicitors acting for his 212th wife Serefina Mucholusholise say that they intend to include Pigfididrin's new DEDFLASH space/time cruiser in their claim for alimony settlement. The revolutionary new craft has computational power so powerful that it sees into your planned journey's future and decides whether you are likely to enjoy it or not. If danger, trouble or boredom are detected, it simply refuses to take you. Pigfididrin is rumoured to have blown a small star system on acquiring the ship. <255>
Finally, we came close to having one more major appearance of time travel in the Wing Commander universe: the plot for Loose Cannon's Privateer 3: Retribution used a Steltek time machine as the story's McGuffin. General Drakas, a renegade Kilrathi, searches the galaxy for the machine so he can resurrect Kilrah… and of course it's up to your privateer to stop him. You can read the script for the sadly cancelled project here.
Here's a neat piece of ephemera: it's a gaudy advertisement that ran in the October 2008 issue of play3, a German PlayStation magazine promoting phone downloads. This was back when you could add things like ringtones, themes, backgrounds, games and other content to your pre-smart phones by sending a text message to purchase or rent it. And in this case, if you look past all the pornography, you'll find that the people at HandySMS were offering Wing Commander ringtones, both the overture from the movie and the Cobalt 60 Prophecy song! Did anyone ever use this service? It would be great to find these files today!
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