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 Back to the Future (1985) 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!
The Wing Commander movie club has watched Crash (1996) and… that's all we have to say about that! In all seriousness, it's a pretty interesting movie. For all of the extreme sex none of it is really prurient… it's all in the service of telling a decidedly unsexy story. I think what we can say about it overall is that we still had people talking about it the morning after the screening and that's a credit!
We talked about Crash's actual connection to Wing Commander in the intro post… but since this is (probably) the only erotic thriller movie club will get it seems like a good (?) idea to catalog Wing Commander's sex scenes. Which is easier done than said, as Wing Commander is largely a pretty chaste IP. In fact, Chris Roberts famously avoided anything of the sort in Wing Commander IV because of the response to the 'kiss Rachel or Flint' mechanic in its predecessor. In spite of this, we have had a few sex scenes in the canon… and some of them are quite terrible!
Most of what we're calling sex scenes are referred to as 'fade to black' scenes where we see the characters interacting and end 'knowing' what comes next. Even then, the romances in Wing Commander II and III only go as far as kissing and aren't really suggestive enough to make this list (though Sparks does later chide you for spending too much time with Angel). But we are going to count the below scene from the novelization, where Rachel and Blair make plans for what might be their only night together.
The carrier made the jump from Blackmane to the Freya System, where the High Command ordered the strike force to assemble for the attack that was supposed to cover the raid on Kilrah. Through the viewport in the rec room, Blair could see a few of the ships of the Terran fleet, some close enough to recognize shapes and configurations, others so far away that they glimmered as moving lights against the starfield.
It was a powerful force, but nowhere near the size of the fleet that had held the Kilrathi at Terra. Yet this was supposed to be Earth's decisive strike, the knockout punch that would end the war.
Blair watched the other ships, and doubted.
"You look like you could use some company," Rachel Coriolis said from behind him.
Blair turned in his chair. "Rachel . . . I thought you had the duty until seventeen hundred hours."
"This is just a break," she said. "We've still got a lot to get done before the jump to Hyperion tomorrow, so I'm grabbing a bite to eat now and then pulling a double shift." She mustered a weary smile. "So, are you going to invite a girl to sit down, or what?"
"Sure, sure," he said hurriedly. "Please. Sorry . . ."
Rachel laughed. "So, the rough, tough pilot goes to pieces under pressure." She took the seat across from him, her eyes searching his face under a worried frown. "What's the matter? Is it . . . Hobbes?"
He shook his head. "Not that . . . not really. Fact is . . . it's, well, it's us."
"Us? As in you plus me equals us?"
"Yeah. Look, Rachel, I started thinking some things over today, and I realized something. Yesterday I was all set for a nice little seduction scene. Dinner. Music. A quiet talk that could lead to . . . whatever." He looked away. "After what happened . . ."
"Hey, I understood then. I understand now. We'll still have our time together."
"Maybe it was best that we couldn't make it happen," he went on doggedly. "It might be the best thing if we don't try to push it now . . ."
"Are you backing out on me?" Her expression hovered between concern and anger. "I thought . . ."
"Look, Rachel, by this time tomorrow, God only knows where I'll be. Even if we carry out the mission, the deck's stacked against any of us coming back from Kilrah. It isn't fair to start something with you that I might not be able to finish. I wouldn't want you to have to go through what I did . . . with Angel."
"Pilots . . ." She shook her head. "They'd rather crash and burn than make a commitment. Look, Chris, I've been there, remember? I know what it's like. And I also know that if we keep putting our own lives aside because of what might happen tomorrow, eventually we'll run out of tomorrows. We'll never have anything to look back at, anything to remember except the war, just fighting and killing. I want something else to remember . . . whether it's one night, or an eternity. Don't you?"
"Do you really mean that? You want to go ahead, even knowing it might not be more than one night?"
She met his eyes and nodded. "I'd rather we had just one night together. Especially if the alternative is . . . never having any time at all."
"Your shift . . ."
"Ends at midnight. I'll skip the dinner and the music, if you'll be there for me when I come . . ."
"Midnight, then." She stood when he did, and they came together in a long, lingering kiss. "Midnight . . ."
And while Wing Commander IV avoids sex altogether, the novelization does still (somewhat bizarrely) ends by implying that Blair and Sosa are about to hook up:
Blair stepped into his newly refurbished cabin. The smells of fresh sealant and paint permeated the room. He cued the lightbar and saw a neat bed, a desk with a workstation, and a sofa and chair group.
He swung around as the inner door opened. Velina Sosa, her hair down and her uniform collar unbuttoned, stepped into the main room of the cabin. She carried a bottle and a pair of glasses. He noticed distractedly that she had captain's bars on her shoulders.
"Admiral Richards says that you'll need a Border Worlds liaison officer," she said, as she set the glasses down on the table. "He thought I might stand in."
Blair took a long look at her, and saw her smile. He felt himself smiling in return. "I'd like that," he replied. "I'd like that a lot."
She smiled, her dimples showing.
He had a feeling this tour was starting out well, very well indeed.
But things are very different in the Tri-System! Privateer 2 uses sex scenes as a reward! And you have FIVE of them with Melissa Banks. The first is the followup to rescuing her and then the others can happen randomly when you visit the Sinner's Inn any time after her second escort mission.
The ending of the Tamessa Ames cinematic mission has one more fade-to-black, this time with the Senator's daughter you rescued.
And then the Wing Commander movie gives us probably the series' most famous sex scene, where Maniac and Rosie are interrupted by a scramble:
The movie sequel novels, Pilgrim Stars in particular, go much harder on sex and the prose is often, ah, florid. We've got Blair and Angel getting together on the Tiger Claw…
By the time Blair reached Angel’s hatch, the notion of barging in and taking her into his arms felt so powerful that he lingered outside her door, trembling and listening for sounds from inside. Then he remembered her saying she had reports to make; she was probably in her squadron commander’s office. He rolled his eyes and hauled himself toward his quarters.
When the hatch opened, he found Angel stripped down to bra and panties and standing near his bunk. She wrapped an arm around his neck, dragged him inside, then kissed him hard and twirled her tongue around his. The hatch cycled shut, and her fingers fumbled for the buttons of his utilities. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Maniac’s empty bunk and figured that Angel had somehow taken care of that technicality.
“Lieutenant,” she moaned after breaking their embrace. “What we’re about to do is classified, compartmentalized, and highly erotic.”
“Ma’am, are you sure that?”
She put a finger to his lips. “Just get naked.”
For once Blair sat through a jump with no intention of reaching out to find his mother. The secrets of being a Pilgrim no longer seemed important compared to the events of the past five days. He shifted in his jump seat and fought off the shit-eating grin that threatened to burst across his face.
Making love to Lieutenant Commander Jeanette Deveraux would stand as one of the most memorable experiences of his life. They had spent that entire day together, beginning in his quarters, then moving stealthily back to hers. He had explored every curve of her lithe, well-toned frame, and their bodies felt smooth and right together. In candlelight, they had swayed as one silhouette on the bulkhead, growing more hungry for each other as the hours wore on. They had kept silent, speaking with their hands, their eyes. The fire grew, and they had quivered, grimaced in ecstasy, and had fallen back, exhausted and gratified for their efforts.
While lying there after the first time, with Angel’s head resting on his shoulder, Blair had half-expected Merlin to suddenly appear with his appraisal of their lovemaking: “Well, bravo, Christopher. No performance anxiety this time, eh? And Lieutenant Commander, you’re quite flexible, aren’t you.” He had shaken off the thought, and when Angel had asked him what was wrong, he had told her that he sometimes got the shakes afterward. That much wasn’t a lie.
They had set another rendezvous for the following day, knowing that the rumors would begin to circulate but too infected with each other to be apart. Angel had, indeed, ordered Maniac to sim practice that first day, but she could not keep up that diversion. So they would meet in her quarters. Strange, though. During that second day, Blair had asked why she had suddenly changed her mind. She had told him not to ruin what they had by talking it away. After a moment’s consideration, he had realized the truth in that, though the unanswered question still troubled him.
By the third day--and the third tryst--Blair had grown frustrated with their silence. They made love repeatedly, working into each other’s rhythms like musicians, but the connection between them seemed to weaken instead of strengthen.
On the fourth day, Blair felt as though they were just working out their anxieties on each other’s bodies. Tenderness had turned to grunting. Their relationship was all about that final, pulse-pounding moment. Afterward, they would fall back and stare at the overhead, their gazes swimming through the shadows and never once falling on each other.
Out of nowhere, Blair had said, “We’re close. But we’re not close.”
“I know,” she had admitted.
“Guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m getting what most guys want, right? Sex with no emotional baggage.”
“I can’t give you any more than that. Not yet.”
He had rolled to face her. “But there’s hope?”
“You don’t know what I’m risking here.”
“I think I do.”
Blair had closed his eyes and had taken her into arms. She had buried her head in his chest, and he had simply held her there, trying to show that he wouldn’t let go, that he would be there for her for as long as fate allowed.
On the early morning of the fifth day, Blair had tiptoed out of his quarters, had keyed himself into hers, and had spooned her for an hour or two before the jump alarm sounded. During that simple moment he had felt more bonded to her than any other time. He had listened to her breathe and had let her silky hair fall in curtains across her face. Her scent, a light blend of perfume and coconut shampoo, had lulled him to sleep.
... and then star crossed lovers/enemies Taggart and Aristee.
The slightly muffled roar of running water emanated about one hundred meters away from the clearing, and while Aristee had gone off to meet with Frotur McDaniel, Paladin had ventured down a steep, natural embankment to a spectacular waterfall that rose some ninety meters and thrust out its great chest for nearly twice that. The water fell partly in a large double drop and partly in a series of smaller cataracts that gave it a crescent shape at its apex. Clouds of mist surged up from the river below and wound their way through the verdant treetops guarding the falls. The soothing rush of water and the angelic vapor that glossed the scene had lifted Paladin out of the nightmare of Aristee’s rebellion and had lowered him into a dream where he could be consoled, comforted, and loved without complications. After a few minutes of pure rapture, he had sat on a large rock whose face had been worn smooth. He had remained there for nearly an hour until Aristee had come down to find him. She had massaged his shoulders for a few minutes, then, like a giggling schoolgirl, had stripped out of her uniform and had jumped into the river. Paladin had shaken his head at her requests for him to join her. Then she had come ashore and had dragged him fully clothed into the water.
They had spent the rest of that first day at the falls, swimming, climbing the slick rocks to find purchase beneath some of the less turbulent falls, letting the water cascade over their naked bodies. They had even discovered a cave behind one of the cataracts, had speculated on the treasure that lay within, but visions of sharp-toothed predators had cured their curiosity. They had eaten fruit and bread that Aristee had stowed in her pack and were disturbed only once by a call from the XO, who had delivered a routine progress report. Paladin had wondered when Aristee would return to the conversation they had begun on the bridge, but she had seemed at peace with the moment and had not wanted to spoil it. He had tapped into a little of her peace and had avoided the issue as well. Given his surroundings, he could easily pretend that he had but one task: to draw pleasure from the environment and the woman.
After relishing in fourteen standard hours of sunlight, twilight had washed over the sapphire sky, and Paladin had suggested that they head back to the launch. Aristee had insisted that they camp near the falls. She had taken along a small, Marine Corps-issue survival tent, so they had sent up their bivouac on the shoreline. They had made love until they were breathless, then had remained in each other’s arms, whispered to sleep by the falls.
Morning’s light cut through the flaps of their tent and drew a blinding line across Paladin’s face. He suddenly bolted awake, wondering how long they had slept. 1125 CST. Aristee lay on her stomach, head resting on an arm, hair curving across her smooth cheek. She breathed softly and looked frail, a young girl incapable of all she had wrought. Paladin shifted gingerly toward her pack and removed the palmlink. He slipped through the tent flaps and stood shivering in the cool, moist air as he opened a channel to the Olympus.
... and again at the end of the book...
James Taggart sat up in her bed and leaned back on an ornate trioak headboard. Were it not for his scowl, he would appear almost angelic, framed by the leafy designs carved into the rare wood. A lone blue candle as thick as his wrist sat on an equally ornate nightstand, and in that poor light he had been reading hard copies of ancient star charts which now littered the deck and sheets. He acknowledged her presence with a meager glance.
“James, you’ve been in this bed for two days. You have to get up. You have to eat something.”
“No.”
“You’re brooding like a child. You made your choice. You chose blood. Just like your father did. Now it’s time to move on.” She stepped toward the bed, then toed off her sandals.
“Move on? To what? We’ve lost nearly half the crew and we’re operating on one ion engine. It’s only a matter time before we make a wrong jump.”
“If you’re so certain that we’re going to get caught, then why did you change your mind?”
He just looked at her, as though he didn’t know himself.
She shook her head, undid her sash, and let her robe slink to the floor. She slid naked into bed and rested her head on his chest. “We can’t get caught,” she whispered, tracing his navel with a pearly fingernail. “And we can’t die because there’s too much war left to fight.”
The novel End Run was probably the first part of the Wing Commander canon to have any sex. We've got Jason Bondarevsky's romance with his doomed ex-love Svetlana:
“Tell me honestly. If it was a choice now. If Tolwyn came along and said, ‘All right, Jason, you can take the girl and go home, but you’ll miss all the action,’ what would you do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Liar.” She smiled again. “Once you’ve been in it, you can’t let go. I’m so scared about this next mission I can’t sleep. Hell, that’s why I’m drinking. But I wouldn’t miss a crack at their home world for anything.”
He nodded his head. He knew that he was as good as dead already, but just for once, it would be good to be able to give it to the Kilrathi, to hit them right in their own backyard, rather than this endless war on the frontiers. It was worth everything, and he knew he’d go nuts if he ever passed it up.
“So, we’re in agreement then,” Svetlana said with a sigh, and she poured another drink, and then downed it.
“Maybe when the war is over,” Jason said quietly. “Maybe then we can make another try at it.”
“Old lover, when this war’s over, you and I will be dust.”
Her voice was hard and cold.
“You sound like a damned marine.”
“I am a damned marine and don’t forget it,” and there was a slight slurring to her voice. “You lousy blue suits look down on us like we’re animals or something, but you don’t know what it’s really like. Honey, if you ever saw war the way I have, you’d puke your guts out.”
“All right, all right. You choose to be a macho grunt; you don’t have to prove it to me.”
“Prove something to you? Flyboy, I don’t need to prove anything to you. Go ahead and fly your lousy fighters, but it’ll be the marines that take the planets and win this war.”
“Without top cover, you’re nothing but target practice. I’m not the instructor who washed you out of flight school, so don’t keep trying to prove something to me now.”
Her eyes went cold and hard and she stood up.
“Go to hell,” and she stormed out of the room.
“Hey, you forgot your bottle . . .”
The door slid shut and he sat back in his chair.
“Nice going, Jason,” he sighed and was tempted to pick the bottle up and pour another drink.
The door slid back open and she stormed back into the room, came up to where he was sitting and pointed a finger in his face.
“And another thing, you egotistical bastard—”
Suddenly the whole thing seemed totally absurd and he started to laugh.
She looked down at him, her eyes filled with rage. And then it all started to melt away.
“You were about to say,” Jason whispered, looking up and smiling.
She hesitated and then her words came out as a whisper.
“Can I spend the night with you?”
And then a second time before she dies destroying a Kilrathi shipyard!
Jason switched off the lights, lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes, not even bothering to get out of his flight suit.
He wouldn’t have noticed someone else in the room if it hadn’t been for the faint scent of honeysuckle, a smell which took him back so many years to when he was in flight school.
“Svetlana.”
“Captain Grierson dropped by my landing craft on his way out and said you wanted to see me.”
Jason smiled. Grierson was all right; if only he was the one running this mission, there’d be no worries, other than what he knew they were finally going to face when part of the home fleet closed in.
“The perfume?”
“Our good friend Janice loaned it to me.”
“Perfume on a marine? Come on.”
“Just shut up and follow my orders,” she said as she started to unzip his flight suit.
Jason has a will-they-won't-they relationship with a Landreich pilot in False Colors. We don't know if they ever get together, but they do share a non-sex scene that IS straight out of Crash!
It was touchy work, and he was afraid his artificial hand might go back into spasms again if he tried to do anything too delicate.
He was so wrapped up in the job that he didn't notice where his other hand rested as he tried to steady himself. Travis flashed a painful grin. "Most guys at least give me dinner and a holo-vid before they try something like that," she said.
Bondarevsky pulled his good hand away from her bare breast, flushing, "Sorry," he muttered.
"Don't worry about it," she told him. "All in a good cause. Just remember about the dinner if we get back to Landreich, okay?"
"It's a date," he said, adjusting the healstrip one last time. "Can you handle the armor again?"
She nodded. "Yeah. But I won't be doing any dancing for a while." He helped her back into the chest and back pieces of her space armor, uncomfortably aware of her bare skin now. When it was sealed up, he gathered up her helmet and pointed to the top of the ramp. "The firing's stopped. Let's see what's going on." She gave a nod, and allowed him to help her up the incline.
The greatest Maniac of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time! Director Quentin Tarantino has come for... Matthew Lillard? While promoting his new Kill Bill-based Fortnight expansion, Tarantino made several outrageous statements calling out specific actors... including, for some reason, Wing Commander's Matthew Lillard. Lillard, himself promoting the new Five Nights at Freddy's movie at a convention, reacted soulfully:
Quentin Tarantino this week said he didn't like me as an actor. Listen, listen, listen. The point is is that it hurts your feelings. It sucks. And he wouldn't say that to Tom Cruise. Quentin wouldn't say he doesn't like Tom Cruise cuz he likes Tom Cruise. He wouldn't say that to somebody who's a topline actor in Hollywood. I'm very popular in this room. I am not very popular in Hollywood. Two totally different microcosms, right? And so, you know, it's it's humbling and it hurts.
But it turns out Lillard is a little more popular than he knew; the internet has rallied strongly in his support, casting former indie darling Tarantino as a creepy and out-of-touch old man. Who knew Maniac was so popular!
The Digital Antiquarian is back with another article about the history of Chris Roberts' career, this time ostensibly covering the founding of Digital Anvil and the making of the Wing Commander movie.
We've reported on these articles in the past with little commentary. This time, though, I want to stress that these articles are incredibly misleading. They are poorly researched blog entries built around an incredibly inappropriate bias. Their entire gimmick is that they attempt to mimic the form and tone of academic writing without any of the necessary rigor. Anyone familiar with the subjects being discussed (this is not limited to the Wing Commander pieces) pretty quickly recognizes how they work: they cap a generally uninteresting personal review with a lengthy rewrite of someone else's article that takes every opportunity to intentionally twist meanings towards whatever personal narrative the author has decided to trace, seemingly from whole cloth, on top of it. In the case of Wing Commander, the Digital Antiquarian is certain that Chris Roberts is both a fool who has failed upwards his entire career and that he is a sinister shadowy figure that has been simultaneously plotting something awful that whole time. Everything that he has ever said or done somehow speaks to these two theories, no matter how innocuous those things might seem to a less conspiratorial brain.
The first pieces on Wing Commander, for example, are a rewrite of Mike Harrison's Software Meet the Movies: Making Wing Commander I and II reworked only to make it clear that the author doesn't believe any of the parts where Chris Roberts was responsible for anything. I should pause to stress that this is not an accusation of academic dishonesty; in fact, the Digital Antiquarian typically sources the material being mirrored as part of their 'research' facade. It's also entirely reasonable to question an official narrative like Harrison's which was published by Origin and intended, obviously, to tell a sanitized version of the behind the screens story. But that's not quite what the Digital Antiquarian ever actually does. Rather, they have a true devotion to officially screened sources–junket interviews, press releases, making of fluff–except where they must be ignored or reworked to square with the added narrative. I will show you shortly how this flawed approach specifically ruins this article about Digital Anvil.
The core of this article is from a chapter of the 2012 book Generation Xbox which interviews movie producer Todd Moyer. Moyer, through his sketchy production shingle No Prisoners, produced the 1999 Wing Commander movie to no one's satisfaction. In the years since, he and Chris Roberts have occasionally spoken poorly of one another, each blaming the other for the movie's failures. I can't accurately speak to who is right and who is wrong, just say that both have made reasonable claims that we've reproduced many times. I suspect it's a case of Chris Roberts being a creative without a talent for financing and Moyer being, as he acknowledges, someone focused on money without any regard for art. The irony is of course that Roberts would go on to run his own sketchy production shingle and then billion dollar computer game while Moyer would fade into obscurity. However, I can say something that the Digital Antiquarian chose not to: the Generation Xbox interview in question was considered so egregious to Chris Roberts that he personally issued a direct rebuke to it. Hmm!
Before I continue I need to stop to address my own biases. I am a Wing Commander superfan; in fact, I'm pictured as such in the Digital Antiquarian article! I have loved Wing Commander my entire life. I am not a Chris Roberts fan but I am ultimately a well-wisher. I worked for Chris Roberts at Cloud Imperium for ten years. I have seen him be utterly brilliant, I've seen him magically sell boardrooms and concert halls of people on a seemingly impossible vision and I've seen him do incredible work when pushed up against the wall again and again. I've also seen plenty of flaws. I've seen him be absolutely blind to his detractors, I've seen him make horrible mistakes that have hurt his projects and his employees. I've been treated very kindly by him and I've been deeply, deeply hurt by him. I have not spoken to him in several years. I think that he is as flawed a human being as anyone else in the world and that there are endlessly fascinating things you could write about his story, good and bad. But none of what's in this article is speaking to any of that reality; it's just SomethingAwful forum troll nonsense packaged in a thick veneer of faux-academic writing.
So why am I bothering to write any of this? I didn't really want to! For many years, I relished in furious internet arguments and I was so very good at winning them. I was the loudest and the smartest person in a given forum thread and that is a terrible combination, one that made me pretty unpleasant. I gave up that kind of thing some years ago and have tried to focus on building a welcoming and moral community that focuses on preservation and positivity. But when this article came up and was being passed around social media and the WCCIC Discord, I was asked repeatedly by that community: why not write a response? Why not let people know the perspective of the guy that actually knows the thing the article is supposed to be about? And so I suppose here it is. I believe in telling the real story behind Digital Anvil and the Wing Commander movie. I don't think Chris Roberts would even agree but I see the Wing Commander movie's story as incredibly fascinating because it is a case of some incredibly brilliant people doing amazing work that could not come together. It's something I'd like to see a real historian write about someday and filling the internet with this trolly dreck unchallenged makes that ever more difficult. I started off with an 'angry' draft of this and didn't bother publishing it because that's such a stupid perspective to take. So here's a second attempt, keeping only the original title for the update… which clearly now refers to me for doing this in the first place.
So here's how it all falls apart. From the article:
Indeed, even at this early juncture, Roberts was savvy enough to put together one eyebrow-raising arrangement of his own: he “hired” Digital Anvil, his own company, to provide the movie’s visual effects, thus funneling some substantial portion of that $30 million budget into his and his colleagues’ own coffers long before the movie ever made it into theaters.
Here we are told that Chris Roberts square quote hired Digital Anvil to do the Wing Commander movie's CG shots and that this really raised eyebrows. How this is a problem is also questionable structurally; movie VFX houses aren't applying for government contracts. Even before the massive historical misunderstanding this is a strong "I accuse the phone company of making that film on purpose!". But it's getting the story 100% backwards. We can prove it. On May 17, 1996, Chris Roberts met with Mike Medavoy's Phoenix Pictures to pitch the Wing Commander movie. His presentation included a director's reel of footage from Wing Commander III and IV and a copy of Kevin Droney's already finished first draft script for the film. Three days later, executive assistant Stuart Volkow e-mailed his thoughts on the project to the rest of his creative team.
The notes were not particularly gentle: he did not like Droney's script and found Wing Commander IV's production to be amateurish. But he also recognized a genius to the underlying creative work that he believed could be worth investing in. The pitch meeting, one of many like it that had begun with the initial treatment for the movie in 1995, didn't result in a deal between Phoenix and Electronic Arts. But in September, Volkow's notes were leaked to the Wing Commander Home Sector's Dan Hardwicke1 who published them online. This caused a firestorm in the Origin community, one so large it's hard to imagine that a remotely decent researcher didn't spot it (especially as it was the first mention anywhere in public of Digital Anvil). Fans bickered over whether or not the notes were real, what they represented, whether a Wing Commander movie was really being made and so on. In retrospect, the notes were real. They clearly reference the actual script that no one publicly knew existed at the time. They confirm a lot of things, including that Electronic Arts was bullish on Wing Commander… and they're the first ever public mention of Digital Anvil. Again, something that basic research about Digital Anvil should've revealed. And look at where it comes up:
Roberts is open to discussing the possibility of other directors. The digital fx would in any case rest with him and a new CG studio he is putting together, Digital Anvil.
Digital Anvil was INTENDED TO BE the CG studio for the movie from its inception, months and months. The idea was always that Chris Roberts could make the movie–which despite the popular narrative he was not clearly desperate to direct—with the new outfit. This was not some evil scheme that 'raised eyebrows', it was the whole point of the endeavor. (The Digital Antiquarian's understanding of the story is actually even more embarrassing: Origin began trying to make what would become the Wing Commander movie in 1991 at the very start of the development of Wing Commander II. The idea began with, surprise, exactly this idea: that Origin could use the same team currently learning 3DS to make the game to make a movie. They commissioned a treatment and a first draft script from GP Austin (you can read it here) and Warren Spector's production group put together a budget. But Origin soon found that they couldn't hire 3D artists quickly enough to satisfy the increasing needs of their game and the project went on the back burner.)
But beyond that, none of the story of Digital Anvil is here in this story about Digital Anvil. The Wing Commander movie didn't spin off from some sales failure, the entire project came to be because Chris Roberts went to Hollywood… to produce a Wing Commander television show with Universal! Chris teamed up with Universal's Jeff Segal to develop Wing Commander Academy and in the process Segal took a bet on Origin's long suffering movie project. Like many people, he immediately took to Chris Roberts and his vision (if you are trying to figure out Chris Roberts, this ability is what you should be looking at!) and arranged to pay to turn the treatment into a script. Here we are told "He gave it to Kevin Droney, a screenwriter who had earlier turned the Mortal Kombat games into a movie, to make a proper script out of it, then sent it to Hollywood on a wing and a prayer." No, a big three major motion picture studio paid for this because Electronic Arts wanted to make a Wing Commander movie after Chris successfully sold and produced a season of television.
The article goes on to imagine some moment, apparently in September or October 1996, where Origin's management called Chris Roberts to account for something implied but not specified about Wing Commander. And that's just a kid's fantasy about how any of this kind of business works. Ignoring that Chris Roberts was Origin's senior Vice President at the time (he was the management imagined here) this is a fantasy. It was clear before Wing Commander IV shipped that Chris was going to step away to build his film company. Electronic Arts wanted him to stay on and produce Wing Commander V and he countered that he wanted to do something other than Wing Commander, a game called Silverheart. Why is none of this easily documented history in the story and instead we're supposed to imagine that a company that forecasts its projects and plans years in advance simply decided one day to fire Chris Roberts? Real life isn't some sinister drama. Chris had been building Digital Anvil for months as part of the Wing Commander movie project Electronic Arts was pushing which dovetailed in his interest in movie production (and not, as is mythologized, being George Lucas). That's WHY Robert Rodriguez helped found the company in the first (something the Digital Antiquarian notes but decides is actually implying something sinister, of course).
Microsoft, which had made its “significant investment” in Digital Anvil in the expectation that the studio would exclusively make games exclusively for it, could hardly have been pleased by the pivot into conventional film-making, but it showed remarkable patience and forbearance on the whole. Knowing that his mega-corp’s reputation as a ruthless monopolist preceded it, Ed Fries was determined to present a different face to the games industry, to show that Microsoft could be a good, supportive partner to the studios it took under its wing. An ugly lawsuit against Digital Anvil — even a justified one — would not have forwarded that agenda. Once again, in other words, Chris Roberts got lucky.
And here's the core of the peach. The Digital Antiquarian has found ridiculous internet trolls and reconstituted Digital Anvil's story to reach their easily discredited (with a single Phoenix Pictures memo!) stories. So you can't be told that Digital Anvil was founded to make the Wing Commander movie or that the project the company worked on for the first year of its existence was a short film intended to show that they could do high fidelity SFX for the Wing Commander movie. (You can watch it online.) But look at the ridiculous shape of this thought on its own: the only reason no one knows this story is because one of the most famously litigious companies in the world didn't want their partner companies to… know that they would be punished for committing fraud? How does this person think business works? Gotta be nice and friendly or people might not want to work with the company with all the money that dictates how everything in the industry works! And the fact that I thought that proves it happened!
The real story is that Chris Roberts wanted to make (not specifically direct) movies and built Digital Anvil with that in mind. He loved his experience directing the games and recognized that CG VFX was about to boil over. He reached an impasse with Electronic Arts not over Wing Commander being a secret failure (who even knows) but because he didn't want to make a yearly Wing Commander game for the duration of his next contract. What he DID want to do, though, was not some money-making mega scheme… despite not being mentioned in the article, it is massively well documented: he wanted to make an RPG project he had been developing with Michael Moorcock. He speaks of it over and over during the Wing Commander IV launch, Origin did test shoots for the full motion video, he commissioned set blueprints and costumes and authored an outline that became a complete novel (which was ultimately published on its own). And in the years since he has personally bought the rights for the project back repeatedly… something that's fascinating to me and I think also greatly informs Chris Roberts' connection to his projects. And all that time he was meeting with potential production partners to put together a Wing Commander movie.
The story of Digital Anvil coming into games is pretty much the opposite of what this article about the story of Digital Anvil coming into games says. Digital Anvil's first project (which was public! It played at SXSW in 1997!) was their Wing Commander movie test. The company went from being a VFX house to being a game developed BECAUSE the Microsoft deal happened and absolutely not in spite of it. The company doubled in size because it BECAME A GAME STUDIO and not because they were stealing money in a sinister plot to produce a film for a different, smaller company. After all, the Digital Antiquarian would like to imply that Chris Roberts' devilish scheme is not that he stole money for himself but that he stole money from Microsoft to produce a movie for Electronic Arts, a much smaller and less influential company which the Digital Antiquarian also would like you to believe savagely fired him personally several months before. Makes perfect sense!
(There's actually another untold element here. One major reason Digital Anvil pivoted to (TO) games is that they could. When he started the studio, Chris did not (either out of respect or because he contractually could not) hire away his former team from Origin. But that next year, Electronic Arts changed their bonus structure and many of Origin's veteran leads quit furiously and suddenly became free agents. This dovetailed nicely with Chris Roberts' discussions with Microsoft that resulted in that first publishing contract.)
And the game part of the story is so interesting and the Digital Antiquarian just… doesn't know it, at all. For example:
Another game in the pipeline that went unmentioned was Erin Roberts’s Starlancer, which was to be a linear space sim with a set-piece story line, an even more obvious successor to Wing Commander than was Freelancer. (Students of the Robertses’ later careers will recognize a kinship between Freelancer and Starlancer on the one hand and Star Citizen and its single-player companion Squadron 42 on the other.) That’s five games in all: it was quite the agenda for such a small studio. And then the movies came calling.
We've already pointed out that the last part is an absolute lie, but this doesn't even understand StarLancer. StarLancer wasn't made by Digital Anvil, it was made by Warthog, Erin Roberts' studio in the UK. It was a completely unrelated generic space sim called Zero Tolerance which they had been pitching around the industry without any bites for several months when Chris signed a game deal with Microsoft. Microsoft, as a show of faith in Chris Roberts and in a way that this article could easily greatly misconstrue to its ends if the author actually knew any of the story they're writing about, purchased the game from Warthog. The 'connection' to Chris' dream project, Freelancer, was an incredibly slight narrative (and utterly meaningless) thread that was added after the fact. It's not some prototype for Star Citizen that speaks to the future, it's a total coincidence that also proves how interested Microsoft was in keeping Chris happy.
Why was Microsoft so interested in doing that? It doesn't show up in the article because in the Digital Antiquarian's world only Chris Roberts has agency. But the other side of this story is fascinating and leads to all sorts of interesting what-could've-beens: Microsoft was laying the foundation for XBox. They wanted to learn how to build gaming hardware and software and they placed their bet on the latter on Digital Anvil. Just like they turned hardware bets into production systems with products like their Sidewinder line to prep for their planned future, they wanted to grow studios that would be ready to go for Xbox, able to produce the first party titles that would sell the system. That's why they made the initial deal with Digital Anvil and that's why they bought the company in the first place. Microsoft was less interested in StarLancer and Conquest and the like than they were in having the talent and the cache to make… well, ultimately Brute Force. Which is fascinating! As in ANY BUSINESS ARRANGEMENT EVER both parties are using each other… and it's pretty interesting to figure out how they were doing that rather than to work out how it should all be part of a conspiracy.
Anyway, here are a couple of other notes about disqualifying errors and misleading information in the article.
The official Wing Commander world premiere took place on March 12. It was less than a gala affair, being held in Austin rather than Hollywood, with none of the cast in attendance; the actors in question were still saying polite things about the movie when forced into it, but quite obviously preferred to talk about something else. (Freddie Prinze, Jr., would grow less polite in later years, calling Wing Commander “a piece of shit” that he couldn’t stand to see or even think back on.) It appeared on 1500 screens across the country that same weekend, complete with the Star Wars trailer that Fox hoped would prove its secret weapon.
The official Wing Commander's world premiere took place on March *11* in LOS ANGELES and it was attended by the film's cast (excepting Matthew Lillard who was shooting on location). The slightest amount of earnest research would have revealed this; the event was promoted in Variety! You can still today purchase photographs of Freddie Prinze Jr., David Warner and (for some reason) Rachael Leigh Cook walking the red carpet on Shutterstock (someone please actually do this, I would love to have these photos without the watermarks). The Austin "world premiere" the next day at the Paramount was a (sold out!) charity screening that was part of the SXSW festival. Chris surely considered this to be an appropriate place to 'launch' the movie as exactly two years earlier SXSW had premiered Digital Anvil's very first production, the short film intended to prove to investors that they were capable of doing feature-level CG and matte work.
I must next call out the sheer nonsense of framing the exact same movie junketing process as every other film ever made as "forcing" the actors to say nice things about the film. Beyond simple decorum, actors universally praise bad movies because they personally stand to benefit from the success of films they make, either directly because they have points in the production or because they need to use their brief moments of visibility to secure additional roles. It is not part of a dastardly plot that Chris Roberts hatched (but also fell upwards into because he's just so stupid!). I know we don't need to harp too much on this as it's a nakedly obvious attempt to present Freddie Prinze Jr. as having only ever said nice things about Chris Roberts because he had to and then was only telling the truth when he later criticized the movie.
Now, it is true that Freddie Prinze Jr. once called the Wing Commander movie "a piece of shit." The Digital Antiquarian tells us that this is evidence that he "would grow less polite in later years", How many years do you think this vague statement is intended to cover? If you said more than one then you are incorrect because the interview in question was published on Movieline on May 1st 2000, less than 14 months after Wing Commander came out. Here is the entire interaction covering Wing Commander:
Q: Have you liked all the films you've been in?
A: No.
Q: Which ones don't you like?
A: I can't stand Wing Commander. I can't watch one scene of that movie.
Q: How did it become so awful?
A: It's the simplest story in the world. I read the script and loved it. So did my buddy Matthew Lillard. We both got the parts. We went on location and they said, "Here's the new script." It was a piece of shit.
This is interesting for a few reasons. First of all, the actual statement doesn't speak to the Digital Antiquarian's claims at all. He's simply saying that Wing Commander was a bad movie, something that I don't think anyone has ever questioned in the first place. The article would like to imply that this is proof that when allowed to 'speak freely' that Freddie Prinze Jr. would endlessly trash Wing Commander as he always wanted to. Except you can find dozens and dozens of Freddie Prinze Jr. interviews in the ensuing years where he explicitly says that Chris Roberts is one of the best directors he's ever worked with and that he wishes the circumstances were different. Just last year he told ScreenRant that Wing Commander was the one project he wishes could have had a sequel! Did Chris Roberts get to him again?!
But it's also worth noting that this isn't saying much one way or another because Freddie Prinze Jr. himself is a notoriously unreliable interview subject. He is well known for saying controversial, untrue things to make interviews more exciting; he was recently walked away from the Star Wars franchise for exactly this reason. For my part, I don't think this is sinister; he writes for professional wrestling, he is conscious of exactly the reaction he's going to get when he does this… and he does it a lot! Another issue with the Movieline quote that the Digital Antiquarian should've flagged is that it just isn't true. I mean, it is true that the Wing Commander movie wasn't good but the story he tells about it is not. Freddie Prinze Jr.'s audition footage clearly shows him reading from the third draft script which was nearly identical to the one shot in Luxembourg. I would guess that he is telling this story because the real one (the movie was heavily reworked AFTER shooting) would have required context that doesn't make sense in a casual interview. (One surprising thing you will find is that while you can find angry game developers out there that Chris Roberts is pretty universally praised by his casts and crews. Actors LOVE working with him and I think that he has a genuine way with them. This has been left out in favor of the one time Freddie Prinze Jr. said something bad about the movie itself 24 years ago. That is not to say that it's some specific talent that translates to a better movie, but actors across all his productions do specifically praise–often years later–his hands on style.)
Finally, proper research should've contextualized "complete with the Star Wars trailer that Fox hoped would prove its secret weapon". The Wing Commander movie did ship with the Star Wars trailer attached… alongside instructions from FOX telling theaters they should remove the trailer and play it with any screening they wanted. This alone is one of the most fascinating moments in the Wing Commander movie story and it's somehow totally absent here. In fact, it's almost to the level of fictional drama that our pal believes is happening constantly everywhere else. FOX wanted to attach the trailer, Lucasfilm found out and demanded they put a stop to it and so they informed theaters not to promote Wing Commander as having the trailer, they arranged to show it on television the Thursday before Wing Commander released and they put out a fair amount of press aimed specifically at the Star Wars community about how the trailer was specifically not attached to Wing Commander. Chris Roberts, for his part, engaged with the fan community and specifically told everyone to spread the word that while FOX was saying this, theaters would never actually bother to detach the trailer. To me, this is a very interesting story about his engagement with the movie, his understanding of his audience (and the rise of digital communities!) and how he reacts when he seems to be cornered; it's fascinating material that a capable writer making a case for their view of Chris Roberts could take in any direction (and so the Digital Antiquarian simply left it out).
A planned panoply of Wing Commander action figures, toy spaceships, backpacks, lunchboxes, tee-shirts, and Halloween costumes either never reached stores at all or were pulled from the shelves in short order.
Of the items mentioned here, Wing Commander action figures, backpacks, tee-shirts and Halloween costumes all made it to market and they were certainly never "pulled from the shelves". The same is true of the tie-in novels, movie book, official magazine, fine art painting and posters. This is meant to imply that there was some Star Wars level of merchandise planned for the Wing Commander movie and that simply isn't true. Two products WERE cancelled: the toy spaceships planned to go with the action figures and the Tiger Claw cutaway poster from SciPubTech. In both cases, they were doomed less by the movie's failure and more because FOX couldn't set a date in time to allow them to go into production for the film's release. X Toys could rush the figures from China, the vehicles would've taken additional months.. (A quick look at Phantom Menace's much more well documented licensing will show you hundreds of similarly cancelled products; this is another completely normal part of the merchandising process being sold to you as scary and negative.)
Not only had Chris Roberts never received any formal training as a film director, but the cast and crew had three different mother tongues, with wildly varying levels of proficiency in the other two languages.
This is actually not true on its face, Chris Roberts attended a director's boot camp training program as part of the preproduction of Wing Commander III and he dedicated much of his free time in the ensuing years to learning the job and the industry. But it's also a lie by omission. By the time he got off the plane in Luxembourg in 1998, Chris had directed half a dozen multimillion dollar game productions, three film shoots (two feature-equivalent games and a theatrical short), done and uncredited edit on another major FMV project, spent over a year in preproduction on Wing Commander, had executive produced a television show and so on. And the second part about the different languages is taking the lighthearted color from THE FILM'S OWN PRODUCTION NOTES and implying it's something sinister. This is again where the Digital Antiquarian is either failing at reading anything beyond its literal meaning or pushing the edges of about how blatantly biased they can get away with being. The production notes point out that it was tough to communicate with all the different groups as a way of selling that the movie was an international production, not because someone slipped into its actual marketing material a secret gripe that only one special guy can pick out.
Origin flew the teenage proprietors of the biggest Wing Commander fan site down to Austin for the premiere. (Aren’t they adorable, by the way?) They saw the movie four times in a single weekend — not a fate I would wish on anyone, but more power to them.
This is captioning a photo of Chris Reid and I. It is also not true: we saw Wing Commander five times that weekend!
As for the article's critique of the Wing Commander movie: I think it's entirely fair. I think it's pretty lacking in comparison to the goal in that it doesn't look at how the movie actually fell apart between the shoot and the final product, but that's probably a fair choice to make for a review. I also think that would've been much more interesting and probably damning of Chris Roberts. His months of desperately trying to get the movie to work would be an interesting story that would tell you a lot about his character that's sorely needed in all this. The resources he tried to tap and the favors he tried to call and the shape of what his vision actually was are all flawed and fascinating. And I do think it's pretty interesting that they call out the piece of the movie that Chris managed to have absolute creative control over, the stunning intro, as being notable (without knowing where it came from, of course!). I've written my own review that covers why I'm interested in the film but it doesn't at all disagree with the idea that it's not, as released, a good movie.
1 - Another thought with the benefit of years: based on Hardwicke's certainty that the Phoenix Pictures document was real surely indicates that it was leaked to him Chris Roberts or someone else on the nascent Digital Anvil team that had leaked the memo to him in the first place, presumably to help move forward whatever deal was in progress at that time. This would happen again, with us, a few years later when Lucasfilm came out against attaching the Phantom Menace trailer. Perhaps this is more interesting color for someone trying to understand how Chris Roberts responds when he's in a corner?
Perhaps the less said about last week's screening of Crash the better! No, it was a pretty fascinating movie and absolutely one that made you think. Just… not one you'd tell your parents you were watching! This week, the Wing Commander movie club is going to go with something much, much safer: all time crowd favorite Back to the Future (1985). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
The big connection between Wing Commander is, once again, the flying car! We've already talked about how The Last Starfighter's Starcar and Blade Runner's police car influenced the flying cars seen on New Detroit. But we need to give some credit to Back to the Future's evolution of the idea and specifically how (at the end of the movie) the Delorean's wheels turn in and stay that way for the flight (the Starcar also does this, but they're then sealed closed). Both "car" and "jacko" (the silver one) fly this way on New Detroit! You can download and explore the original models here.
Of course, there's another big reason for Wing Commander fans to check out Back to the Future: it's the movie that put Tom Wilson, Maniac in Wing Commander III, IV, Prophecy and Academy, on the map! He does an incredible job as Biff and we can't help but wonder if that's what Maniac was like as a teenager…
(And of course we'll talk about time travel in the Wing Commander canon in the After Action Report; it does exist!)
Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?
Back to the Future is available for rent or purchase on the standard streaming services. It is currently streaming on AMC in the United States. If you would like a physical copy, the movie was released on UHD Blu-ray in 2025 and remains in print around the world. If you would like to go retro, a VHS copy is available on the Internet Archive. You can also find a higher resolution version here, but be sure to download the MP4 which is the only version with an English soundtrack option. 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.
There's a small but satisfying discovery for fans of tragically lost games: we've found a screenshot from the cancelled Wing Commander II port for the Sega Genesis! This screenshot showing a Broadsword targetting a Sartha (or a Drakhri?) and viewing a Grikath appears in a March 1993 Electronic Gaming Monthly supplement called the "1994 Video Game Preview Guide" which collects previews of games shown at that year's Las Vegas CES. And it was sponsored by Electronic Arts' EA Sports division! If you compare this Broadsword cockpit to the game you'll see it isn't a stock PC shot, it has been modified for the console version.
WING COMMANDER II
The popular PC classic is now on the Genesis. Using the revolutionary ASICS chip, the action is smooth and incredibly fast. Battle against the Kilrathi Empire for control over space.
BY ELECTRONIC ARTS
Wing Commander II for the Genesis was being developed for Electronic Arts by Looking Glass but the project fell into technical difficulties and was abandoned after missing a milestone. The work was then used by a team at Origin to develop and finish... but never release!... a port of Wing Commander II for the SNES.
The booklet also includes a listing for Super Wing Commander for the 3DO which we include here specifically because of its excellent use of the word "furbag". If you look closely you can see that the screenshot shown is also an early build: that's an original Wing Commander Hornet schematic on the right VDU!
SUPER WING COMMANDER
From the original computer versions comes the classic confrontation of man and furbag. As a member of the academy you fly several missions to earn higher ranks and better challenges.
BY ELECTRONIC ARTS
You can read the entire magazine at the Video Game Hhistory Foundation's wonderful Digital Archive.
"Sorry boys, I'm just a tourist with a fried nav console."The legendary TARSUS from Wing Commander Privateer is the latest addition to my shipyard workshop. I hope you'll enjoy flying this beast!
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 Crash (1996) 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!
The Wing Commander movie club is back from our vacation to Westworld and, well, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. The movie holds up very well, it's still tremendously fun. Objectively, you recognize that it isn't much of a story as over half the run time is devoted to setting up the world and explaining how the theme park works… but subjectively, that's the fun part and Michael Crichton made exactly the right choice focusing on what's actually most interesting here. And after so many somber British war movies, its breezy sub-90-minute run time was certainly a nice feature!
We already talked about Michael Crichton's star system in the intro post so there's not a lot more to say about Westworld's connection to Wing Commander! We did manage to find one almost-reference: hidden in Privateer 2's data is a list of ships for an earlier version of the booth database which is totally different from anything in the game... and it includes one seemingly named after Westworld's Gunslinger. Here's the complete list, which deserves further study; very few of these made it into the final game!
Adrilak
Airhead
Alpha
Aswan
Aurora
Baldesh
Bigfoot
Bikila
Blackdog
Blackfire
Blask
Borrealis
Brave
Canberra
Chaos
Cloc
Cygnus
Danrik
Defector
Dionysus
Dogstar
Doppelganger
Drakkar
Dreamstate
Duress
Eclipse
Eradicator
Excalibur
Eye Of The Storm
Faldari
Famagusta
Flipside
Freij
Funkbuster
Garios
Gazar
Geek
Geo
Glutino
Gunslinger
Headfirst
Helter Skelter
Heretic
Herima
Hyppolita
Icarus
Ilia
Iron horse
Isaoko
Jendevi
Jinter
Judar
Kabaka
Kalrechi
Kalthike
Karnene
Kassar
Ketra
Kitrum
Lady Of The Lake
Lazarus
Liberty
Lima
Lionheart
Lucitania
Masrada
Miguez
Ogan
Olura
Olympus
Omega
Papagos
Patriot
Police Ship Sweeney
Presto
Red Dragon
S.S. Amelia
S.S. Ballistic
S.S. Caroline
S.S. Manchester
S.S. Manhattan
Salvia
Scarecrow
Shadowcaster
Shaman
Skeces
Sledgehammer
Sundog
Tempest
Titania
Trigo
Trojan Horse
Vacuum Oasis
Varjner
Veldor
Velecia
Vetrece
Victor
Vindicator
Violator
White Lightning
Yabar
Yackard
Zeus
Zion
And you can come up with your own Wing Commander I joke for this one! (We just call him Maniac?)
Last month, we published an article cataloging the wings worn by Wing Commander's various fighter pilots. We failed to include one pretty important reference: Jazz's wings from Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi! You may remember that these wings played an important role in Wing Commander II's treason mystery and as a result got their own closeup shot! When Jazz shoots Specialist McGuffin for discovering his communications with the Kilrathi, McGuffin grabs his wings as he dies. Jazz then steals Stingray's wings and he is blamed for the murder (until Sparks provides an alibi). Of course, as we pointed out in the initial article there's not a clear place on the Wing Commander II duty uniforms where wings are worn! But the scene provides a great look at them:
In case you aren't familiar with the joke about this scene, Specialist McGuffin is named after the idea of a "MacGuffin" which is a word used by writers for something that motivates a story but isn't necessarily important to it in any other way. The joke being that he appears only for this scene, which moves Wing Commander II's story forward. The term was first used by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and was popularized by famed director Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Wikipedia quotes his explanation from a 1939 lecture:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin." The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.
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