Defecting to the Kilrathi

I

I'm not prepared to make this call *anywhere*, as the WC1 ships change appearance half a dozen times. The Tiger's Claw has three distinct versions in WC1 alone (line art, in-flight and cutscene all have different numbers of engines)...it changes completely in SWC, in the Academy TV show and in the movie. Style is not substance.

How many models of Dralthi that look different have we seen?

(Well, I can call the Rapier -- since it's a different fighter...)


While I can understand the existance of minor differences in the appearance of the Tiger's Claw in the various venues, the treatment of ship design in the movie has always aroused my interest.

Firstly, the name of the carrier in the movie isn't even Tiger's Claw; it's Tiger Claw.

Secondly, the movie carrier doesn't even closely resemble its namesake in appearence from any of its other iterations (SWC notwithstanding). The Tiger's Claw in Academy might have an altered appearence, but there's no mistaking it with the Tiger's Claw from WC1.

I love the Wing Commander universe. However, I have just never understood what value there could be in abandoning all of the designs from the games for the movie. I can't see the disparity reducing costs, appealing to any broader an audience, or increasing the visual appeal of the movie. How exciting would it have been to see the TCS Tiger's Claw as we all remembered it from WC1 on the big screen?

The first time I saw the movie, I just couldn't prevent this feeling of perplexity that seemed to surround every detail in the film. My first thought was that it was all a distancing tactic to satisfy some detailed legal agreement somewhere, but when I saw that Chris Roberts was involved, my curiosity increased ten fold.

I'm sure that many of you will disagree with me, and that's fine. I still love the movie and respect the effort that must have went in to making it a reality. I just wish the ships felt, fought, and appeared as they did in the games.

As for SWC, I'm not sure how to treat that intelectually. While its nice to create reasoning to support the different ship designs, the fact that it depicts the same events as WC1 is difficult for me to allow.

At some point you have to ask yourself what a Bengal really looks like, and the answer as I see it right now is "we don't know."
 
Secondly, the movie carrier doesn't even closely resemble its namesake in appearence from any of its other iterations (SWC notwithstanding).

I always found it strange in that people throw an example of what they're arguing against at the end of a sentence, as if "nonwithstanding" somehow allows them to push that example aside. (I'm not harping on you, just a personal observation).

If anything, the very existence of the SWC version of the Tiger's Claw should show you that there are many versions of the same ship, all of them equally valid.

I love the Wing Commander universe. However, I have just never understood what value there could be in abandoning all of the designs from the games for the movie. I can't see the disparity reducing costs, appealing to any broader an audience, or increasing the visual appeal of the movie.

I think there are various reasons. Peter Lamont has been a long, long established production designer - I think he's been involved in every James Bond movie since Goldfinger - and has considerable talent. Roberts probably gave him a specific pitch (submarine in space?) and Lamont did something Roberts approved of.

Roberts said (in the linar notes for the WCM soundtrack) that he wanted parts of the movie to harken back to WWII movies like The Dam Busters or Mosquito Squadron, and the production design (amongst other aspects) reflects that.

The first time I saw the movie, I just couldn't prevent this feeling of perplexity that seemed to surround every detail in the film.

This could also be due to the fact that the movie prints made didn't adapt to American projectors very well and ended up being obviously darker than intended. ;) (This was fixed for the DVD.)

At some point you have to ask yourself what a Bengal really looks like, and the answer as I see it right now is "we don't know."

Well, it is hard to say - but at the beginning of Pilgrim Stars, I believe they mention that the Tiger's Claw undergoes a large scale refit before Gerald takes command of the ship. (I forget how long the time period is between the movie and the follow-up novel)
 
I always found it strange in that people throw an example of what they're arguing against at the end of a sentence, as if "nonwithstanding" somehow allows them to push that example aside. (I'm not harping on you, just a personal observation).
l)

The reason for exempting SWC is because I offered my own reasoning at the end of the argument for why it was not valid; it attempts to re-tell the same story with completely different spacecraft.

The look and feel of the movie could easily have been maintained without deviating from the designs used in WC1. The interior sets could have remained identical.

Creating the WWII feel of a submarine drama relies more upon the action on-screen, the ability of the actors, the tension written into the script, etc. than on what the starships look like from the exterior. The same feel could have been achieved without changing the Tiger's Claw to Tiger Claw and making it look like a giant submarine :D

I did not know any of the information about Peter Lamont though. I love finding out the details! Thank you!!
 
The look and feel of the movie could easily have been maintained without deviating from the designs used in WC1. The interior sets could have remained identical.

Well, the first thing is that the color scheme of the game would probably look somewhat garish on the big screen. That aside though, the reasons for the change were purely asthetic. All the renditions of the Tiger's Claw are valid.

Creating the WWII feel of a submarine drama relies more upon the action on-screen, the ability of the actors, the tension written into the script, etc. than on what the starships look like from the exterior.

Well, how are you going to know its a "submarine drama" if you don't see the "submarine" in the first place? ;)
 
While I can understand the existance of minor differences in the appearance of the Tiger's Claw in the various venues, the treatment of ship design in the movie has always aroused my interest.

If you're truly interested in the how and the why of the movie, you need to think about it more objectively. The fact of the matter is that, at the end of the day, a movie is an entirely different beast than even a game release. A big budget movie needs to sell tickets to between fifteen and twenty million people. When Wing Commander III was the best selling game of its time, it had shipped one million units. That's a million people who *know* the game, not who are obsessive fans -- the hardcore groupies who visit the CIC each day number roughly three thousand individuals. This means that perhaps 5% of the intended audience knows Blair's name... and that under .0002% cares what the Tiger's Claw looks like -- and those few people are the ones who will see the movie *regardless*.

With all this in mind, the movie was created for the masses and not for the fans. It's very, very cool that it's full of little references for us -- the line about the Hornets, the mention of Lt. Dibbles, etc... but it's both unnecessary and impossible to lock your massive production design team and budget into exactly copying the thirty pixel-wide space ships from the decade old game.

Think of how much of the movie was built around selling Chris Roberts' 'submarine' idea: from the story (sonar scene!), to set designs to all the CGI plans to the casting of Commander Gerald (to all the many, many interviews Chris gave about this). That was the result of thinking up an idea that he believed would help make the movie appeal to everyone -- it wasn't trying to offend longtime fans, they simply didn't figure in. We should, in all this, be very happy that the guys at Digital Anvil were willing to go back and add the little things for us after the film was constructed for the masses -- they didn't have to do any of that.

Firstly, the name of the carrier in the movie isn't even Tiger's Claw; it's Tiger Claw.

Examining this, again, depends on whether or not you're actually interested in the subject or if you're just looking for an excuse to attack the movie. It's basically a mistake -- and you can track it through the various development scripts in the archive. In the first version you can find where there was one "Tiger Claw" among many "Tiger's Claw"s. Then in the second rewrite, someone found the error... and corrected it backwards. As the drafts go by, the 's is removed until, in the shooting version, only one remains. Never the less, there's a "Tiger's Claw" in the shooting script, and we can probably find half a dozen plus uses of the possessive version in various support materials (novel, handbook, etc.).

Secondly, the movie carrier doesn't even closely resemble its namesake in appearence from any of its other iterations (SWC notwithstanding). The Tiger's Claw in Academy might have an altered appearence, but there's no mistaking it with the Tiger's Claw from WC1.

Lets be fair -- this isn't a point at all. "It always does, except when it doesn't" simply isn't an argument.

I love the Wing Commander universe. However, I have just never understood what value there could be in abandoning all of the designs from the games for the movie. I can't see the disparity reducing costs, appealing to any broader an audience, or increasing the visual appeal of the movie. How exciting would it have been to see the TCS Tiger's Claw as we all remembered it from WC1 on the big screen?

I addressed most of this above, but let me just touch on the 'cost saving' point. Basically, it doesn't exist. It's something people came up with to, essentially, demean a movie they didn't like. The Rapier looks different? Must be to keep it cheap! In fact, the design decisions in the movie were artistic in nature. The Rapiers, for instance, are a result of wanting to be able to have a "real" fighter set -- allowing Roberts to have realistic physical sets (built from real aircraft) rather than rely on CGI/matte composition.

As for SWC, I'm not sure how to treat that intelectually. While its nice to create reasoning to support the different ship designs, the fact that it depicts the same events as WC1 is difficult for me to allow.

I hate to harp on spelling, but the when the word in question is "intellectually"... :)

But seriously, you need to stand back -- Wing Commander has gone through several complete changes in design. Wing Commander II's characters look nothing like those in Wing Commander III. An 'academic' analysis of Wing Commander simply doesn't take into account the look of the thing. Ships simply do not *need* an 'explanation' as to why they look different between two stories that take place at the same time (or that are the same game).

Note that we have an explanation as to why the Rapier is a different fighter because it has a different *backstory*, not because it looks different. This confuses a lot of people, I think, into thinking that there is some elaborate fan explanation for why *every* Wing Commander movie ship has a different appearance -- there is not.

Woe, for instance, to the person who comes up with an excuse for why Paladin puts on a hundred pounds and dyes his newly regrown hair in the course of a year.
 
If you're truly interested in the how and the why of the movie, you need to think about it more objectively. The fact of the matter is that, at the end of the day, a movie is an entirely different beast than even a game release. A big budget movie needs to sell tickets to between fifteen and twenty million people. When Wing Commander III was the best selling game of its time, it had shipped one million units. That's a million people who *know* the game, not who are obsessive fans -- the hardcore groupies who visit the CIC each day number roughly three thousand individuals. This means that perhaps 5% of the intended audience knows Blair's name... and that under .0002% cares what the Tiger's Claw looks like -- and those few people are the ones who will see the movie *regardless*.

I am certainly not attacking the movie for the fun of it; on the contrary, I respect the games and the production so highly that I enjoy discovering the hidden truths surrounding them (not to mention the fact that I own the movie.) I think, perhaps, what I am failing to properly consider is the order in which the Wing Commander universe was created. Inevitably, (and perhaps wrongly so) I tend to compare WC to Star Wars. This tendency I am sure has a lot to do with the fact that I played Wing Commander and X-Wing continuously when they originally came out. Both computer games served as my initital exposure to their respective universes and the genre in general. I highly enjoyed the world of starfigher combat and at the time, had no particular allegiance to which war or universe I was fighting in.

As a result, I treat the ships as the stars of the show. An X-Wing is always an X-Wing whether it comes alive on the big screen or in the depths of one of many novels. It was simply difficult for me to understand why the Tiger's Claw, the iconic carrier from WC1, MY SHIP :D appeared to be a foreign vessel on the silver screen.

As time passed and found myself growing more excited with each installment in the Wing Commander series, the details became more important to me.
LOAF, you have certainly given me alot to think about. I especially appreciate your insight into the issue of the Tiger vs Tiger's Claw discrepancy. I feel better! :) What I am beginning to see is that the movie was just another way for Roberts to experiment and try to bring his universe to life. Maybe it was still expanding, still taking on different forms. Not that it matters to anyone else, but this is something I can accept as a fan. The spirit of the characters, the setting, and the conflict was identical.


Lets be fair -- this isn't a point at all. "It always does, except when it doesn't" simply isn't an argument.

I'm not quite sure what to say here, except that the misunderstanding is a result of an inability to articulate my point. The motives behind changing the ship design for the movie are quite different, I think, than those behind altering the visual character of the "stars" of WC1 for SWC. I'll have to think more about this; I see SWC and WC the movie as two very different situations. I realize as a fan that we need to be greatful anytime an additional opportunity is created to enjoy the WC universe, but I think using a different cast to tell the same story is unfortunate.

Then again, maybe that's the magic here. Maybe I shoudn't view SWC and the movie as different...

LeHah, I got a good laugh over your last post! :p

Thanks to all for your responses. I was afraid of sparking an uproar!








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I'm not quite sure what to say here, except that the misunderstanding is a result of an inability to articulate my point. The motives behind changing the ship design for the movie are quite different, I think, than those behind altering the visual character of the "stars" of WC1 for SWC. I'll have to think more about this; I see SWC and WC the movie as two very different situations. I realize as a fan that we need to be greatful anytime an additional opportunity is created to enjoy the WC universe, but I think using a different cast to tell the same story is unfortunate.

Then again, maybe that's the magic here. Maybe I shoudn't view SWC and the movie as different...

No, you shouldn't, not any different from WC1 or Academy or anything else. The great thing here is that this whole business is actually very simple. Official products like the ones mentioned above are all the same. The only problem arises when people try to selectively pick and choose which parts they like to form the universe. In that case, there's no continuity whatsoever, because each person has their own arbitrary definition of what really exists. It's fine to like some things more or less than others, but that's completely separate from any kind of continuity issue.
 
With all this in mind, the movie was created for the masses and not for the fans. It's very, very cool that it's full of little references for us -- the line about the Hornets, the mention of Lt. Dibbles, etc... but it's both unnecessary and impossible to lock your massive production design team and budget into exactly copying the thirty pixel-wide space ships from the decade old game.
While I agree that the movie needed to redesign things in order to create that specific submarine feel and all, I really have to point out that this part of your argument is extremely weak. You know very well we're not talking about thirty-pixel sprites - there most certainly would have been enough good references to allow for faithful, great-looking high-quality recreations of the game ships in a movie... had this been appropriate for the movie Chris Roberts was trying to create. It obviously wasn't - but when you go on to explain how not only Chris Roberts didn't want to do it, but in fact he could not do it even had he wanted to, you weaken your overall argument.
 
If you're truly interested in the how and the why of the movie................

You're saying that the movie had to be made completety different to appeal to the mass market and not just the relatively few devout Wing Commander fans like us. I just don't follow the reasoning. The games were hugely popular for a reason, and keeping the same feel and atmosphere on the big screen could only have helped. The prop design was only one gripe of many that I have with what I feel was an overall lousy film, but it's probably the biggest.

Since they did feel that it was best to deviate that much from other established Wing Commander products, and since as you say, they were overwhelmingly aiming at an audience that didn't have a clue about Wing Commander, then why even call it Wing Commander at all? Why not make their space submarine movie and call it something else entirely?
 
Woe, for instance, to the person who comes up with an excuse for why Paladin puts on a hundred pounds and dyes his newly regrown hair in the course of a year.

I always thought the hair color thing was a mark of bonding post-SO2; Maverick and Paladin deciding to die their hair the color of the other as a sign of Black-Op Brotherhood.

.....Ok, you do better. :mad:
 
As a result, I treat the ships as the stars of the show. An X-Wing is always an X-Wing whether it comes alive on the big screen or in the depths of one of many novels. It was simply difficult for me to understand why the Tiger's Claw, the iconic carrier from WC1, MY SHIP appeared to be a foreign vessel on the silver screen.

I think that's an important point to recognize -- Star Wars is a game about a pre-existing game... Wing Commander is the opposite. To sell a Wing Commander movie they needed to interest the masses, not the people who played the game.

That said, look at X-Wing -- they started off with beautiful simple 3D models... and by the time the series ended they'd slopped horrible ugly textures all over them that completely changed the feel of the thing. There's more to any work of art than how it literally looks.

I'm not quite sure what to say here, except that the misunderstanding is a result of an inability to articulate my point. The motives behind changing the ship design for the movie are quite different, I think, than those behind altering the visual character of the "stars" of WC1 for SWC. I'll have to think more about this; I see SWC and WC the movie as two very different situations. I realize as a fan that we need to be greatful anytime an additional opportunity is created to enjoy the WC universe, but I think using a different cast to tell the same story is unfortunate.

I think the two situations are very similar, actually. The idea behind *both* is to bring the original 'concept' to an audience who didn't play the original game. SWC cold redo the ship designs in a way that worked on a 3DO/Mac because it was for an audience which had always lusted after but never actually gotten to use the original game.

While I agree that the movie needed to redesign things in order to create that specific submarine feel and all, I really have to point out that this part of your argument is extremely weak. You know very well we're not talking about thirty-pixel sprites - there most certainly would have been enough good references to allow for faithful, great-looking high-quality recreations of the game ships in a movie... had this been appropriate for the movie Chris Roberts was trying to create. It obviously wasn't - but when you go on to explain how not only Chris Roberts didn't want to do it, but in fact he could not do it even had he wanted to, you weaken your overall argument.

I'm not quite sure I follow you -- that isn't really what I'm trying to say. I certainly don't believe that it would be *impossible* to build a 'high resolution' Tiger's Claw... simply that it was unnecessary and ultimately undesirable to do so.

That said, I do disagree with your "you know perfectly well" jab -- the fact of the matter is that the same people who cry bloody murder because the Tiger's Claw looks different in the movie would be doing the same thing if it were exactly like it was in the game but a different color (and we saw this, when Academy was new)..

Wing Commander's "thirty pixel sprites" are beloved because of what we turned them into in our minds eye, not because there's some secret perfect look to them that was abandoned by the evil movie. The Claw Marks lineart doesn't upconvert into a giant movie rendering in any sort of obvious way, as neat as it is -- you would have to add all kinds of details that would ultimately just make the people that you were going beyond your means to please unhappy.

That goes back, somewhat, to the point about different medias having different scales and audiences. Think of Star Trek... over the years, they added more and more details to the Enterprise. Little lines on the saucer, little spots of light on the hull, etc. The original model is a *mess*... when you go and look at it today, it's nothing like how you imagine the ship. For the first movie, they threw the whol thing out and went with something that worked with the look and feel of the film.


You're saying that the movie had to be made completety different to appeal to the mass market and not just the relatively few devout Wing Commander fans like us. I just don't follow the reasoning. The games were hugely popular for a reason, and keeping the same feel and atmosphere on the big screen could only have helped. The prop design was only one gripe of many that I have with what I feel was an overall lousy film, but it's probably the biggest.

You aren't thinking outside the end of your nose. Wing Commander was a huge success because it was Star Wars you could be part of. A linear, non-interactive movie *automatically* throws that out... and so in order to make it a success, you ned a better gimmick. Wing Commander isn't a hit because the Tiger's Claw has littl wings with turrets on them, not to anyone but a few hardcore fans.

Moreover, though, actually read this thread -- we've already discussed *exactly* why a game being a huge hit is nothing like a movie being a huge hit. In its awful box office showing, several times the number of people who ever played a WC game went to see the movie.

Since they did feel that it was best to deviate that much from other established Wing Commander products, and since as you say, they were overwhelmingly aiming at an audience that didn't have a clue about Wing Commander, then why even call it Wing Commander at all? Why not make their space submarine movie and call it something else entirely?

This isn't Star Trek, the captain is *bald*! went out with the Usenet. The movie very, very, very clearly was the Wing Commander IP, from the story on down. The fact that the Tiger's Claw looks kind of different doesn't change that at all, given any kind of objective analysis.

Regardless, Wing Commander was (and is) a valuable IP.. people *know* the name, people have had some encounter with the game or the press surrounding the FMV stuff over the years...

You go into "Wing Commander" with a slight edge over the competition... not only in terms of your opening a movie, but in securing a budget for it. "It's this sci fi idea I had!" doesn't sell a film to FOX anywhere near as quickly as "It's the best seling video game!" does
 
That said, I do disagree with your "you know perfectly well" jab -- the fact of the matter is that the same people who cry bloody murder because the Tiger's Claw looks different in the movie would be doing the same thing if it were exactly like it was in the game but a different color (and we saw this, when Academy was new)..
Well, what I mean is that there's been more than a few fan renditions of the various WC1 ships, and some of them (particularly Howard Day's stuff) are very detailed indeed, while remaining faithful to the original.

Of course, I do realise that a movie model would need to be... oh, probably about a hundred times as detailed as any of Howard's models. I don't think this would be all that much of a problem, though - it just wouldn't make a particularly good movie, that's all.
 
Well, what I mean is that there's been more than a few fan renditions of the various WC1 ships, and some of them (particularly Howard Day's stuff) are very detailed indeed, while remaining faithful to the original.

Of course, I do realise that a movie model would need to be... oh, probably about a hundred times as detailed as any of Howard's models. I don't think this would be all that much of a problem, though - it just wouldn't make a particularly good movie, that's all.

As great as Howard's models are, though, I've certainly see people ague about them -- why did he give the Dralthi that kind of finish, were all the little detail lines on the Hornet necessary, should the cockpit be so wide, etc. Hardcore fans are a group who, by their very nature, will always pick out problems.
 
As great as Howard's models are, though, I've certainly see people ague about them -- why did he give the Dralthi that kind of finish, were all the little detail lines on the Hornet necessary, should the cockpit be so wide, etc. Hardcore fans are a group who, by their very nature, will always pick out problems.

...and question everything! Thanks to all for helping me complete some logic leaps here on understanding what's really important in the WC universe.

I think I have learned more on this subject from my visits to the CIC in a few months time than all the years since the release of WC that I was an "independent" fan!:D
 
In the WCA episode Red & Blue, if I was that defector I could never have went through with it even if I was extremely vengeful. The Kilrathi would obviously get what they wanted and have no problems with killing you

so nasty :(
 
I guess that, for a lot of fans, the problem is that the movie's Tiger Claw didn't feel like the game's Tiger's Claw, not that it didn't look like it. As with any adapted work, fans of the original will always find a lot of problems, even when the movie is a huge sucess, and there's plenty of examples of that happening. It has nothing to do with how well the movie was received by the critics and public.
 
In the WCA episode Red & Blue, if I was that defector I could never have went through with it even if I was extremely vengeful. The Kilrathi would obviously get what they wanted and have no problems with killing you

so nasty :(

Its pretty obvious to us, the viewers, that it would end badly. But that is because we have insights that confed residents don't have into the lifestyles and personalities of the kilrathi. The average confed citizen has whatever the propaganda machine feeds them to rely on or whatever his personal experience with the kilrathi happens to be. That defector had obviously gotten the wrong idea about the kilrathi honor system.
 
In the WCA episode Red & Blue, if I was that defector I could never have went through with it even if I was extremely vengeful. The Kilrathi would obviously get what they wanted and have no problems with killing you

They didn't kill Jazz, though. We discussed earlier in the thread that there's an inherent disadvantage to killing defectors -- both because it prevents their use for future purposes and because doing so prevents others from defecting in the future.
 
Yes, but they would have once total victory was achieved and there was no longer any forseeable use for him.
 
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