Wing Commander Academy Tv show Chris Roberts?

Mindcrime

Commodore
Hey all, another question here. All research I have done is leading me to believe Chris Roberts wasn't involved in the TV show. I know a bunch of you have the answer lol. Thanks in advanced.
 
Yeah, don't get me wrong - Chris Roberts is a genius who's responsible for so much of what we remember as great from our collective childhoods - but there's also lots and lots of Wing Commander that he had little or nothing to do with. I get the impression that some people think he's deity that had oversight over each and every WC product, and that's not the case. Even in projects where he's listed as something like an "Executive Producer" on some of the side games, he may not have been involved in day to day operations. I think the key link to Academy was Adam Foshko, who was one of numerous key personnel that also played a critical role in the development of Wing Commander throughout the mid '90s.
 
Chris Roberts had some direct involvement with the writing and character portrayals but Adam Foshko, who produced Academy with cartoon veteran Larry Latham, was also Associate Producer for WC3, Producer for WC4 & WCP:SO, and a Writer for WCP. Worked as a director for IV and Prophecy as well.

Academy really never got the chance it deserved.
 
Awesome. Well i know two of my favorite games ever Erin did all the heavy lifting. Starlancer and WC2 so I wasn't trying to bad talk it cuz chris wasn't involved in the show. Just curious and i seem to be on quest to know all WC facts as of late. Lol
 
I don’t believe that anyone at Origin had much to do with the show. Chris’ only credit is ‘created by,’ so he likely wasn’t involved in any way beyond oversight on the original pitch. Basically: at the time, Origin wanted to go wider with their intellectual properties and so put together series bibles’ and other pitch material for potential Wing Commander and Ultima shows… and then they went to Los Angeles to try and sell the idea to studios. I’m sure Chris (and Richard) were involved in selling the idea, but likely not beyond that. (By the by, Wing Commander was something of an afterthought; they REALLY wanted to launch an Ultima series… but no one bit.)

And that’s not unusual: it would have been much stranger for a bunch of game developers to pretend to run the very ordered world of an animated cartoon. Just a totally different world from even the film stuff Chris was spending most of his time working on at the time! Adam Foshko at Origin and Richard Hilleman (an EA executive) are credited as ‘Executive Story Consultants,’ which really just means that scripts were sent to them for approval. To the best of my knowledge, Origin never exercised any of their creative options for the show… rather, the series was developed and produced by a team at Universal Studios made up largely of the creatives behind the television show ‘Exo Squad.’ (You may have noticed over the years that creative teams tend to move together from show to show.)
 
Gotta admit. I never knew there was a show until about a year ago. I thought "how the hell did i not know about this!?!" So I proceeded to watch the show asap and I was blown away when I heard the voices. Mark, tom, and malcolm doing the voices was such a bonus for a cartoon like this. It could have been better but I'm so glad I watched it. I think it would have continued to improve if they got a few kore seasons also. I just recently bought the dvd package for it all just cuz I enjoyed it so much. Really cool my favorite game ever got a movie and a cartoon series. Now I just wish I had some friends outside of here that what Wing Commander is lol. Everyone thinks I'm crazy with my hotas system and playing all these old 90s games they never heard of. Blows my mind something so successful could slip through so many gamers without them even hearing the name Wing Commander. Amyways, glad to be here so I can chat about this kinda stuff with good folk like all you guys and gals.
 
Also The TV had plans to introduce the other characters of the Claw back then, Paladin and hobbes being 2 of them
 
For some reason Paladin would be hilarious animates if John Davis did the voice. : ) hilarious good that is.
 
Interestingly, the trend was actually to move away from established canon. When the series was first pitched (by Origin) it was proposed as a sort of 'Wing Commander III Babies' that would literally move WC3's dramatis personae into the storyline of Secret Missions 2. So you would literally have young Blair, Maniac, Cobra, Vaquero, Rachel, etc. (it's not a coincidence that so many of the character ages in Victory Streak are the same or close; this started early!) Universal moved away from that (which was probably where you heard about Paladin!), and instead used it as the framework to create new characters and situations. Thus, Cobra became Payback, Vaquero became Grunt, Rachel became Maya, the Firekkans became the Dolosians and so on. Hobbes is the most interesting one, because he is rewritten as Gharal.. which is actually an anagram for Ralgha. Gharal would have become a traitor in season 2... but it's unclear whether or not he would have 'become' Ralgha. (The earlier character designs actually used the straight WC3 outfits; there's even a big animation bug in Walking Wounded where they use the earlier footage.) I think the end product is a better idea, but it sure would've been fun having Ginger Lynn voice a children's cartoon character...

As for Season 2, the biggest difference would have been that it 'went wide' and showed us more of the war. We'd meet Blair's father, an anti-war senator, we'd see the Confederation government... and we'd have more interludes on the Kilrathi side, see Thrakhath's war council. If you're familiar with Exo-Squad, it'd have been the same sort of jump in scope between the two seasons. (With far more episodes produced in the second... possibly loosely patterned after the events of Wing Commander 2 moved forward.)
 
Awesome insight Ben. And yes it would have been awesome to have Ginger Lynn voice Rachel for a kids show lol. Dirty. Heehee.
 
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