Blair & Maniac's First Meeting

[AD]

Apparently, I can't edit my posts- so I apologize for double posting.

You can only edit posts for the first two hours after you make them, so as long as you're not repeating yourself and have something worthwhile to add it's ok.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I apologize for the delayed response, these posts take some thought (not like my other 20,000 - zing!).

1.) So, Paladin actually speaks with a French accent then switches to Scottish for a covert operation and then finally settles on English when the whole thing is over? That's not a bad explanation. I orginally took the affectation thing to mean he was a bit of a joker- using different accents at different times. Your interpretation, while sort of the same as mine, gives more of a reason- which I appreciate. What was the nature of the operation?

Oh, I’ve got stories, all right. But the only place you’ll learn anything is out there, in the cockpit. When I was a younger man I loved coming up with (non-canonical) 'explanations' for this stuff. How Bossman could have survived, why the function of torpedoes changes, what every class of ship mentioned in passing is... but I don't do that anymore. All I can tell you is what we know: Paladin's parents were Scottish but his thick brogue was an affectation which he perpetuated as part of his role as a spy.

Why did he have a French accent in the Wing Commander movie and an English accent in Wing Commander III? There's the old joke - because he was played by a Frenchman and a Brit, respectively. Will some future game or manual or somesuch explain? Hey, you never know - Star*Soldier explained the Tiger Claw/Tiger's Claw thing pretty cleanly. Heck, the Wing Commander IV novelization addressed this exact complaint (about Rhys-Davies) by claiming the brogue was a put-on. It just doesn't seem like it's a necessary thing for us to 'work out' - it wouldn't go anywhere.

Is there an explanation beyond casting for those who really need it? Sure, probably - I myself have split my formative years between the US East Coast, central Texas and the south of France... and my casual speech reflects all of those things, from the occasional French word to the more-then-occasional 'yall'. Paladin's parents were killed when he was young and he was raised on Mimas by an uncle - maybe Mikal Taggart spoke French... he went to school in Cairo, maybe he learned there. There's a million possile explanations... but at this point I can't hand you an 'official' one.

2.) Every person in the game has two ranks? Is this a fan thing or does it come from the franchise?

Neither... or both? Much like 'real world' the Terran Confederation has multiple military services - the Terran Confederation Navy (TCN), the Terran Confederation Space Force (TCSF), the Terran Confederation Marine Corps (TCMC), the Terran Confederation Army, etc. Just like the real service branches they each have a different ranking system - you can find a chart that compares the TCN, TCSF and Kilrathi rank systems in Victory Streak (the WC3 manual).

The original game gave the pilots 'Air Force' ranks - 2nd Lt, 1st Lt, Captain, Major, Lt. Colonel, Colonel, General. The prolem with this is that in reality the pilots who fly off of aircraft carriers are naval officers, not Air Force pilots. What's more, early Wing Commander stories make clear that Blair et. al. go to a pastiche of the *Naval* Academy rather than some Air Force training school.

The continuity retconn'd this 'mistake' in post-SM1 games in several ways - first by introducing 'Navy' ranks for the crews of starships (Ensign 1st Class, Ensign 2nd Class, Lt. JG, 1st Lt., Lt. Commander, Commander, Captain, Commodore, Admiral) and then by suggesting that the two are frequently interchanged (Blair, for instance, is promoted from TCSF Colonel to TCN Commodore - this wouldn't *ever* happen in real life). The movie avoids the whole thing and refers to pilots with Navy ranks - which is something ordinary viewers would complain (somewhat stringently) about.

As I said before I like that you folks try to connect all the products in the franchise but especially with the Paladin accent issue it just seems futile. It would have been very easy for Roberts to hire an actor who could have spoken with a Scottish or English accent. The fact that he didn't points to him rebooting or retconning the series. Yes, we can rationalize it all we want and maybe we should. I know issues like this bug the hell out of me.

The problem here is that you're researching to a hypothesis rather than deriving a hypothesis from research. Any discontinuity in the movie is going to have you saying that it's proof they wanted to 'reboot' the franchise... and every one you find in Wing Commander III (which had exactly the *same* type of casting changes) is going to be written off because you believe that game must fit. I can tell you, from my personal experience, that Chris Roberts didn't want to 'reoot' the franchise (in either case)... but in both the casting of qualified actors took precedence over maintaining a strict continuity.

I guess the only real answer we're ever likely to get is that Paladin is a chameleon with the accents.

Well, as I said above - you never know. Who would have expected the Wing Commander Arena manual to integrate so many other things from the movie?

Lastly, I'd like to thank Bandit for taking the time to answer my and others questions. Hopefully, the questions I posed in my last post will find reasonable answers in his next post.

I hope this helps. I understand that you aren't complaining - discussions like this are how we learn new things about the continuity... and they only come about in the first place because everyone involved loves Wing Commander.