Read About Ginger Lynn's Other Profession (December 4, 2022)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
You’ve probably heard whispers that Ginger Lynn is famous for something other than Wing Commander, so here’s a wonderful interview about her paintings!





The initial interview linked to from that one has a great Wing Commander reminiscence, though!

Johnny: Speaking of sci-fi, you played Rachel Coriolis in several of the mid-90s "Wing Commander" games. What was your
favorite part of those games?

Ginger: I loved playing Rachel Coriolis in the "Wing Commander" series. I got to be the weapons load-out officer, so when you're playing the game, any time that you go into battle, you have to come to me. We shot a lot of it, not everything, but most of it was on green screen. My favorite memory was my grandmother came down to the set one day, and we were shooting something with green screen. My grandmother walked in front of the camera not knowing, and the entire cast and crew was laughing at my grandmother because all you could see was the top half of her body walking around on set.

Malcolm McDowell was wonderful to work with, but very grabby with his hands. Mark Hamill... Not my favorite actor to work with. Tom Wilson was fabulous. The director, Chris Roberts, fantastic. I would work with him again in a heartbeat. The disappointment that I had working on "Wing Commander" was when they finally decided to make it into a Hollywood movie, they made the mistake of not hiring the original cast and crew. People who get attached and addicted to a game, they want to see the characters they're familiar with. They want to see Rachel Coriolis. They want to see Mark Hamill. They want to see John Rhys-Davies. They want to see all of the original
characters, and instead they hired "Hollywood actors", which I think destroyed the popularity of the film.

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Original update published on December 4, 2022
 
People who get attached and addicted to a game, they want to see the characters they're familiar with. They want to see Rachel Coriolis. They want to see Mark Hamill. They want to see John Rhys-Davies. They want to see all of the original characters, and instead they hired "Hollywood actors", which I think destroyed the popularity of the film.
Interesting perspective. I completely understand the targeting of 'mass-market' for financial reasons, but I'm sure a lot of the players felt this way too.

Malcolm McDowell was wonderful to work with, but very grabby with his hands.
Wonder what that was about, to have sparked such a specific memory of him...
 
I think it just comes from listening to too many game players; the math just doesn't work out... if a million people bought your game at launch in 1999 you'd have a nearly unparallelled success of a game... but if a million people go to see your movie in theaters, you have an enormous failure of a movie.
 
All I can think of re: grabby with hands is... I'm glad it's not something else... this could have been worse. "Grabby with forklift" or "Grabby with badgers". Not cool, just oddly phrased.
 
I think it just comes from listening to too many game players; the math just doesn't work out... if a million people bought your game at launch in 1999 you'd have a nearly unparallelled success of a game... but if a million people go to see your movie in theaters, you have an enormous failure of a movie.

Maybe, but with Luke Skywalker you atleast have some Star Wars crossover.
And a million people going to see a movie may not save it, but a million (or whatever fraction put their voice out there) championing it could certainly set the tone.
Still, I think Prinze is a better Blair than Holland is a Drake, but 90% of RT users disagree so what do I know?
 
Maybe, but with Luke Skywalker you atleast have some Star Wars crossover.
And a million people going to see a movie may not save it, but a million (or whatever fraction put their voice out there) championing it could certainly set the tone.
Still, I think Prinze is a better Blair than Holland is a Drake, but 90% of RT users disagree so what do I know?

It's just pure fantasy, though, Mark Hamill was a C-list TV actor in 1999, he was never going to go from guest appearances on seaQuest to selling a theatrical movie (especially at that specific time where movies were very strongly financed, promoted and ultimately sold based on their leads). There's just a giant gulf between being the best actor you could have in a CD-ROM game and the worst actor you could have opening a movie.
 
It's just pure fantasy, though, Mark Hamill was a C-list TV actor in 1999, he was never going to go from guest appearances on seaQuest to selling a theatrical movie (especially at that specific time where movies were very strongly financed, promoted and ultimately sold based on their leads). There's just a giant gulf between being the best actor you could have in a CD-ROM game and the worst actor you could have opening a movie.

I mean I think you can have Hamill open a movie, more so than I would ever believe you could have Shatner lead a movie. Keeping a (truly truly awful) actor to please the fan base wasn’t unprecedented. The size of said base is the main factor there.

Wing Commander was never going to attact the normies, Chris Pratt might bring them to a sci-fi outing you can pitch as a romance in the trailers, but I’m not sure even he could bring them to a franchise with a premise like Wing Commander.

It was highly unlikely that Wing Commander was going to have mass appeal, it’s best hope was appealing to sci-fi fans. If the movie had the money to get a lead in a related genre, sci-fi, military etc, if it was Tom Cruise as Maverick that would have been a direction.

But assuming your only two options were Prinze Jr and the original cast I’d take the latter.
Even ignoring good will from the admittedly small fan base, if I knew nothing about Wing Commander but saw a sci-fi movie with Luke Skywalker, Biff, the bad guy from Star Trek, the Professor from Sliders and so on I would have taken more notice than one with the the lead from “She’s all that”.
 
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Well, there's an easy test the audience's secret hunger for a Mark Hamill-led midbudget sci-fi adaptation: when you're listing out the great box office successes of the 1990s, where does The Guyver fall?

Wing Commander was never going to attact the normies, Chris Pratt might bring them to a sci-fi outing you can pitch as a romance in the trailers, but I’m not sure even he could bring them to a franchise with a premise like Wing Commander.

But you're describing a thing that happened, they brought in Chris Pratt to anchor an adaptation of a nearly unintelligable comic book (... talking racoon? Tree man?) that no one had ever heard of and turned it into a billion dollar franchise.
 
I’m not sure you can call any Marvel property an unknown at that time in history.

The tomorrow war might have been a fair comparison if it had gotten a theatrical release. It’s getting a sequel (but then so did Guyver).

In any case I’m not saying Hamill would be a box office draw - I just don’t think Prinze was either. It’s not unreasonable to upset the fans in order to increase appeal, but they are capable of being your biggest champions you probably want to have someone lined up who will gain you more than you lose.
 
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Freddie Prinze was having a serious moment in the late '90s: the I Know What You Did Last Summer series and She's All That were huge. I spend a lot of time doing searches for these guys and Wing Commander, and Matthew Lillard still has a cult fan base from the group of girls who were super duper into Scream, She's All That - and Wing Commander - back in high school.
 
I think we can all agree, Lillard did a great job. He had huge shoes to fill, and made me believe he's Maniac. An epilogue with the original cast would have been a lovely way to bridge it, and yes I am overthinking it.
 
I think we can all agree, Lillard did a great job. He had huge shoes to fill, and made me believe he's Maniac. An epilogue with the original cast would have been a lovely way to bridge it, and yes I am overthinking it.

At the time I didn't like his Maniac that much, but I was more familiar with WC3 onwards at the time.
He feels more like the WC1 take on the character - so given the setting that’s no bad thing. The main thing that still sticks out is his openly being buddies with Blair rather than rivals with sometimes glimmers of respect breaking through. The novels do strain their relationship in a way where you could see that change occurring though.
 
Maybe, but with Luke Skywalker you atleast have some Star Wars crossover.
It was never going to happen anyway given Chris Roberts' comments about how hard he was trying to avoid that comparison.
 
It was never going to happen anyway given Chris Roberts' comments about how hard he was trying to avoid that comparison.

Yeah, bad timing there. I think if it had come after episode 1 the worry about comparisons with the original trilogy might have been viewed as opportunities.
 
I've never been a fan of freddy's Live acting stuff, his voice work has been okay. He just released a new movie on Netflix, a christmas romcom and he is still dull as cardboard to me in the movie.
 
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