High Quality Wing Commander 4 Trailer Found (with Bonus Hellcats!) (April 28, 2020)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator



All the talk about enhanced videos this week reminded me of a very cool high quality trailer for Wing Commander 4 that we unearthed a while ago. This is a slick version of the Original Trailer that was produced for glorious 35 mm presentations. It's a real beauty that I wish I could have seen in theaters back in the day! We have long carried a copy of the clip here in the CIC Holovids archive, but it's quite a bit blurrier with high compression. It does have music in the first minute or so that's missing from this new HQ encode though. Both include a CGI scene of a Hellcat taking off from a planet that doesn't appear in the final game, so it's nice to finally get a clearer shot of that here too!

This is a recently uncovered version of this trailer that features higher quality visuals but is missing some of the music in the first minute of the clip. This trailer is also notable for featuring at least one brief clip of a scene not found in the game itself.
Click to expand...



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Original update published on April 28, 2020
 
I have been trying to figure out what this missing scene is for over 20 years! Perhaps it’s the original departure scene from Nephele Spaceport before they turned it into a CGI Mos Eisley. You can also see this scene in the trailer voiced by Donald Leroy LaFontaine (you know, the 1990s movie trailer announcer guy).
 
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Love that trailer.
Is the aspect ratio a bit off? The sound also seems a little hissy. I'd love to see an improved one (maybe AI upscaled?). I point to the trailer whenever someone asks me what my favourite game is.
 
Pedro said:
Love that trailer.
Is the aspect ratio a bit off? The sound also seems a little hissy. I'd love to see an improved one (maybe AI upscaled?). I point to the trailer whenever someone asks me what my favourite game is.
Click to expand...

I converted this from a tape capture what feels like ages ago... I don't know if it was intended to be that wide or not. I'll have to do some comparisons and see if I can maybe do a better job (if I still have the source here somewhere). There's some other elements that feel like the editing on the scenes is a bit loose and maybe they cut this trailer before they even finalized all the scenes.
 
I have always wondered about the Hellcats too, and my suspicion is the same: a shot from Nephele that was dropped. I just found a magazine article from 1996 that talks about how Chris Roberts went back and cut several minutes from the intro VERY late (January 1996) and perhaps this shot was part of that change.
 
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