After Action Report: Monte Carlo or Bust!

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club made it to Monte Carlo! And what a strange movie we saw. Monte Carlo or Bust! (aka Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies) is lush and elaborate, carefully plotted and edited… but to our modern audience, the humor was completely inscrutable. It was clear many things were supposed to be jokes (like how action scenes might speed up suddenly) but it all came off as alien. Such is likely the fate of all comedy, which adheres closely to its times… but it was a little funny (pun not intended) to see how absolutely that was the case here.

And this is an extremely short report because there's not much to say about the Wing Commander connection! Chris Roberts said in his original pitch that the Wing Commander movie's climax was "literally Monte Carlo or Bust!" and it seems that all that really means is that there's an elaborate, multi-tiered race moving the film to its conclusion. Here it's literal with cars flying off cliffs and jockeying for first place and in Wing Commander it describes the Tiger's Claw's battle with the Kilrathi as Blair and Angel face the Skipper and then the quasar jump to reach Earth before the Snakeir. We did note that in the original draft being described, Blair and Angel were the decoys to save the Tiger Claw… but that doesn't seem to impact the metaphor here!