PC Gamer Visits the Wing Commander Academy (April 17, 2011)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator


Several people wrote to let us know that PC Gamer has posted a weekend article about Wing Commander Academy. This is pretty good exposure for an underappreciated part of the series. The piece is peppered with some common gaming journalism conceits - back-handed compliments and dramatized complaints - but hopefully it introduces new fans to Wing Commander. The author has typed up a play-by-play of the pilot episode here.

Perhaps most notably, the usual cartoon rule that everything has to be wrapped up nicely by the end of every episode… is not in force. Academy isn’t afraid to end stories on a downer, or present war as something other a cheery, glorious adventure. In one early episode for instance, one of the main cast has to blow up a comrade who recently declared his love for her. In another, a legendary hero turns out to have taken a turn towards Nietzsche. In others, the show plays with the fact that the cast – as fighter and bomber pilots – aren’t privvy to the high-level tactical decisions being made elsewhere on the ship, and often have very distorted ideas of what they’re risking their lives for. None of this is desperately earthshaking for fiction as a whole, but for this timeslot, it’s good stuff. It’s also a rare case where this kind of spin-off has both slipped into canon, and generally been embraced by the fans.
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Original update published on April 17, 2011
 
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That was an interesting article.

In the same vein I just watched the entirety of the Battletech Animated Series. To bad both suffered the same fate of being cut after 13 episodes.
 
I suppose when you fail out of community college and can't find work writing for High Times and you're too low-brow for Entertainment Weekly, you go to PC Gamer.

Crap article written by a third tier hack.
 
I'm not even sure this is introducing Wing Commander Academy to a new generation, anyway--this is, after all, *PC Gamer*. It's neat that the guy wasn't able to really make fun of the show's (comparatively weak!) pilot when he actually had to watch it... but the generic cynical commentary was just lame.

Wouldn't it be great to apply some real journalism to Wing Commander Academy instead of this cheap, snarky crap, though? There have to be a million interesting stories about why and how the show was made... and another million ways you can tie that story into talking about gaming in the mid-1990s. It's not even a hard thing to do--watch the show's credits, plug some names into LinkedIn and you're on your way.

It's this really interesting transitional time where gaming is straddling the mainstream but isn't quite there yet... and so much of Academy's production speaks to that story (and Wing Commander in general, the series that invented the blockbuster game production).

The writer seems nice enough but the audience is just lame (WE WANT TO HATE SOMETHING, TELL US WHAT TO HATE!).

As promised on IRC, various incredibly geeky comments:

- The Wing Commander film wasn't "cut due to lack of budget"; the whole script was shot and shown to test audiences... who were confused by the story (which revealed that Admiral Wilson, the base commander at the start of the movie, was a traitor later in the film when no one could remember who he was.)

- "Back in 1996, shortly after the third game took the world by storm"; Wing Commander III came out in 1994. That seems like splitting hairs, but two years is a massive amount of time when compared to the whole of Wing Commander's development history. By 1996, *Wing Commander IV* was out... and that game with its massive budget and need to reach a greater audience than just ordinary gamers was the impetus for the show.

- The Prophecy-never-existed thing bugs me because this is where idiots buy their opinions. We're going to hear from a dozen suboids who have never played the game but are now going to repeat that rote. It's probably too late to save Arena, which I proudly maintain is totally cool, but *no one thought this way about Prophecy*. (What did it score in PC Gamer? 88 or 90?)

- I don't think the complaint about the movie is phrased correctly. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard were/are far bigger *stars* than Mark Hamill or Tom Wilson... they just weren't Mark Hamill or Tom Wilson. (The movie's supporting cast was far, far better than the games in any measurable way, too-- Tcheky Karyo, David Suchet, David Warner, etc.)

- The 'shoot down Maniac' runner isn't because it's some funny thing players all decided to do... it's because the game *has a joke about doing that* in it.

- "You cannot defeat the Drakhai!" is Wing Commander II and thus not a line that comes from Dralthi.

- "Ah... go fly your own ship" - I think he missed the joke here. Archer is starting to say "go fuck yourself" but then thinks better of it.

- Joke about Rapiers and porn stars--the Rapier was Wing Commander I and II, the porn star was Wing Commander III.

- The rat man's name is Burroughs. It's spoken after the simulator fails ("Get on it, Burroughs.")

- Blair's callsign is an interesting history and by interesting I mean meandering. Academy was actually the thing that "popularized" Maverick as the name. It had been used twice earlier, once in passing in the Wing Commander III novelization and then as the callsign for 'Armstrong' in Super Wing Commander... and it came from the callsign used by CHris Roberts and the production group in charge of Wing Commander (and, lets not delude ourselves, Top Gun). But it was just a passing thing before Academy--a nod to Chris Roberts every hear and then... Academy was the first time we got the explanation of the callsign and it was the first time we had it used essentially as Blair's name. (The movie, you'll note, specifically avoids using Maverick because of the Top Gun connection... Mr. Telep even removed it from later movie books for that reason.)

- The bit about Academy (the game) and X-Wing is a bit strange since there wasn't really a rivalry at that point. Both games came out in 1993--and at the time Academy was a much demanded (and low priced) Wing Commander mission builder rather than whatever we're mythologizing ALL WING COMMANDER GAMES MUST BE as now.
 
This actually isn't the first time that PC Gamer has talked about Academy - they did a small write-up about it in a side column to their Richard Garriott coverpiece, way back in October 1996.

"ON SCREEN!" Wing Commander goes Hollywood as its very own animated TV series debuts this month...​

Wing Commander III and IV actors Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson and Malcolm McDowell are reprising their roles as Colonel Blair, Maniac, and Admiral Tolwyn by lending their voices to “Wing Commander Academy,” a new 13-part animated series to debut on the USA network this month. It's kind of a “Wing Commander: The Early Years,” set in 2655 — 20 years before the first Wing Commander game, and tracing the exploits of Blair and his fighter pilot buddies as they're thrown into the forward battle lines against the Kilrathi in their last year of training. While still learning their craft, Blair, Maniac, and Bowman (voiced by Dana Delaney of “China Beach” fame) fly missions against the Kilrathi from aboard the TCS Tiger's Claw commanded by Commodore Tolwyn.​

“Essential elements for the series were easily drawn from the games,” says the show's producer Larry Latham. “The show is very cinematic as opposed to cartoony, very stylized in its approached, but still grounded in the covenants of good story-telling.” The prequel format was decided upon to make the principal characters younger, and so appeal to a cartoon audience. “We didn't want caricatures of the characters,” says Latham, “but we did need everybody to be a recognizable, earlier version of themselves. And the planes look like they did in the games, only with the technology taken backwards a bit.”​

Not surprisingly, Origin already as plans for a spin-off “game of the TV show of the game” featuring the show's cartoon animation rather than live-action movie sequences, due to appear early next year. Look out for the show itself on Saturdays, during USA's “Action Extreme Team” slot.​

If it weren't for this I never would have known to watch it (or rather, "On Both Your Houses," since as eager as I was, my insomnia was still as bad as it was and that's the only episode I ever saw. I think I might have caught part of Walking Wounded or Invisible Enemy too).

It's probably too late to save Arena, which I proudly maintain is totally cool, but *no one thought this way about Prophecy*. (What did it score in PC Gamer? 88 or 90?)
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88 - enough to qualify for an Editor's Choice award, albeit barely. (The standard was later raised to 90.)

That said, PC Gamer editorial, even at the time, wasn't against backtracking on its own opinions - as soon as the review of Myst hit print they were already beating a retreat over how it wasn't a proper adventure game, or good either - over the 94% rating they had proudly bestowed on it. To their credit, they were always pretty open about that. (They were less open about Outpost - I think it scored a 94% as well, and then was quickly never mentioned again).
 
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This actually isn't the first time that PC Gamer has talked about Academy - they did a small write-up about it in a side column to their Richard Garriott coverpiece, way back in October 1996.
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I remember this like it was yesterday. The issue showed up about a month before the show started and that little blurb was the first solid information about the show--we knew it was coming but there were no images or trailers or anything like that (there was a teaser on USA, which was just a starfield with an Academy logo).

Someone on IRC got the issue in the mail and I shot out the door trying to find a copy somewhere. I remember being so incredibly excited to find it and to scan over the tiny images--it's hard to imagine that anyone could ever feel that way about PC Gamer again (and I subscribe!).

IIRC, the plans for the spinoff involved retooling the then-in-production budget space game some other EA studio was working on (I can't remember the name, but it eventually came out for the PC and... Dreamcast?).
 
Bandit LOAF said:
- The Wing Commander film wasn't "cut due to lack of budget"; the whole script was shot and shown to test audiences... who were confused by the story (which revealed that Admiral Wilson, the base commander at the start of the movie, was a traitor later in the film when no one could remember who he was.)
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I guess it should be pretty unsuprising that I'm picking this to comment on, hehe

Anyway, I have to ask again if we really know for sure why they cut Merlin from the finished film. I have my suspicions but no confirmation. It's quite possible they realized nobody liked the idea of zany holographic sidekick. Or maybe Freddy's acting with the dolls was unconvincing... or maybe it was really money after all. Possibly they didn't want to pay to finish the hologram effects.

Whatever the reason, I'm not so sure it really mattered if people remembered who Wilson was. That's a pretty easy fix really by having a brief flashback to Wilson on the Pegasus when Gerald says to Wilson on the Concom, "But the Pegasus! You were in command." People may have been confused briefly by this but I think overall they would have been more interested in the fact that there's also a Traitor on the claw (Sansky).

I don't know which version they screened for the test audiences but if the rough cut I've seen is any indication the main reason the scene is confusing is because (partly due to the bad quality of the vidoe and the fog) you at times cant tell who is who and who's supposed to be talking. Without Merlin, Blair's reasons for leaving his post on the Diligent are muddy at best. Not only that they attributed some of Merlin's dialogue to other characters in Post and it just doesn't work. (there's also evidence that they tried changing the big red self destruct button to a countdown in post as well which further confuses things when Gerald is yelling at blair to turn off the ULF/UHF transmitter on the Concom. Is he talking about the transmitter or the self Destruct (which they kind of forget about after Wilson grenades himself)?
 
Merlin was the first change, for sure. Chris Roberts has said, IIRC, that the removal was because the technology wasn't there to have him look like they wanted... but I guess it's not clear to what degree that was actually a budget decision (presumably given enough money you can make Freddie Prinze Jr. talk to a tiny wizard... but in my mind there's a pretty low cutoff for how much you should try and spend on the process).

I remember being OVERJOYED at this change at the time. I bought a copy of the script off of eBay some months before the film came out ($100--a LOT of money for a high school student) and read the Merlin character as the one thing that EVERYONE was going to hate about the film. (At the time the bad jokes overshadowed everything about him for me--and then thinking a few years later that the awful version of C3PO in Attack of the Clones was proof that George Lucas didn't have Chris Roberts' editing chops...).
 
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