Saga of the Warrior King

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
It's Saturday morning, November 16th... 1996. 10:45 AM. I'd been up for hours - too excited about a new episode of Wing Commander Academy. It's smack in the middle of those thirteen perfect weeks where there was another Wing Commander story every Saturday morning - and then a weekend of talking about it in #Wing-Commander and at the Origin's Official Chat Board. My tape is ready - I've tuned in early so I can't possibly miss anything. I was always nervous when it came to taping things.

Savage Dragon is ending. It's an awful show based on a presumably awful comic book about a guy who turns into a dragon. A savage dragon. Hey, Michael Dorn is playing some sort of viking - that's neat. It's 1996, people still like Star Trek and the world is still pure and clean. It ends, I hit record and then... Mortal Kombat?! What the heck, man?! Mortal Kombat is supposed to be on at 11:30, after Wing Commander. The terrifying possibilities rush through my brain - did WCA get cancelled? Did they air it earlier?! What happened?! I know there's supposed to be an episode today, "Recreation" - the USA Network maintains a remarkably thorough scheduling website (for 1996).

Okay, breath. Watch Mortal Kombat, maybe there'll be a commercial. There is - Wing Commander Academy is next. Whew. That's a load off my mind. I'll tape it then. Who knows why it got switched around - I'll just be more careful in the future. The episode starts... a Kilrathi tug! Awesome awesome awesome. Wing Commander Academy at its finest! Huzzah!.

But wait... it's... Michael Dorn... as a space viking! What the hell?
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What the hell indeed. Though I did not know it at the time - and do not understand it to this day - Wing Commander Academy was playing a part in the strangest TV crossover ever imagined. Somehow - and I have in the last eight years seen no commentary on how or why this occured - four separate animation studios agreed to pool their efforts and have Michael Dorn travel as a space viking through their shows. The USA Network further obliged this insane plan by changing the airtimes of the shows so they would follow the story in the proper order - with Street Fighter first and Wing Commander Academy last. And doing <i>nothing else</i>.

If you watch only your show (Street Fighter, Savage Dragon, Mortal Kombat or Wing Commander) you will not know that there is a crossover. Nor was a crossover ever promoted by the network - there were no commercials, no between-show bumpers... nothing to indicate that the fact that Michael Dorn plays a Space Viking in all four shows is anything but the worst kind of coincidence.

The story starts on Street Fighter in "The Warrior King" (Season 2, Episode 9). The show opens with Space Viking ("Warrior King")'s castle under attack by wizards riding dragons. There's some exposition ("If the wizards get the orb, Warrior's World will be lost!"), and then a <B>good</B> wizard opens some sort of space portal and shoves Space Viking and his Magic Orb through. They end up in Street Fighter's version of the Middle East, where the evil army officer guy steals the orb and uses nature to destroy... whatever it is the Street Fighter characters are protecting. The world, I guess. Space Viking teams up with the girl Street Fighter and they save the world. At the end of the episode, the orb and the Space Viking get shoved in another Fry-hole.

... to end up in Savage Dragon! In "Endgame" (Season 2, Episode 8), Savage Dragon and Space Viking team up to rescue the orb again. I haven't actually seen this episode since 1996 - but I'm working on tracking down a copy. They save the orb and end up in another Fry Hole.

Next, Mortal Kombat, "Resurrection" (Season 1, Episode 9). The evil force that fights the Mortal Kombat people winds up with the orb, and uses it to fight the... Mortal Kombat... characters. The Mortal Kombat people recover the orb, and then open their own space-hole at the end of the episode. You see Space Viking for only a second, jumping after the orb as it goes into said hole.

Finally, Wing Commander Academy. "Recreation" (Season 1, Episode 9). There are no amazing space holes - Space Viking is found frozen on a sleeper ship, and escapes at the end in a stolen Scimitar. The Nature Orb Dealy is giving life to a barren planet full of weird aliens, and instead of stealing it to rebuild his planet, Space Viking decides to let it be in the end.

But why? And how? And... all sorts of questions. No one knows. No one I've ever talked to who worked on Wing Commander Academy was even aware that such a crossover existed. It's just... strange in every possible manner.

Why bring it up now? In 1996 I was horrified and wanted to hide it - it was... embarassing. In my old age, I'm kind of interested in preserving it... and I found out that two of the episodes are available on DVD. You can get Street Fighter's episode on this set (R1, NTSC) and Mortal Kombat's episode here (R0, PAL). I'm working on tracking down a bootleg of the Savage Dragon episode, so people can once again enjoy this strange and pointless piece of Wing Commander history.

(Reprinted from my livejournal)
 
That's Malar's kind of English.

First, I don't like the animated series of WC very much - but with beer, I can see all crap of this world without a braindead. ;-) (ow, and they wanted to make an animated series about Ultima, too - that's would be a sacrileg - a gay looking avatar and so)

Imho, it's a little shame, that this series called Wing Commander.

But they aren't so very bad. With another name I can accept it, the same applies to the movie.
Yes, not only the (Worf/Ultima 8 Guardian-) He-Man-Offspring is a strange and pointless piece of the Wing Commander history.

I've ever wonder, what that could mean.
When for the first time you released the download of WCATV for free on your site and I saw this series for the first time, I thought there is something wrong with this special episode 'Recreation'.

But now, you give the resolution about this enigma. Thanks ;-)
Maybe a dictated tribute to the tv cannel - they had to implement it into the cartoons.
And Foshko & co has made a nice story around it.
[It would be better, if the "alien" looks like an alien, and not like "He-Man" and a 'Space Viking' is still a complement - maybe it's his official classification!?]
 
Malar said:
First, I don't like the animated series of WC very much - but with beer, I can see all crap of this world without a braindead. ;-) (ow, and they wanted to make an animated series about Ultima, too - that's would be a sacrileg - a gay looking avatar and so)

Imho, it's a little shame, that this series called Wing Commander.

But they aren't so very bad. With another name I can accept it, the same applies to the movie.
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Crazy person, WCA is pretty high class animation.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Why bring it up now? In 1996 I was horrified and wanted to hide it - it was... embarassing. In my old age, I'm kind of interested in preserving it...
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Is that better? :)

Actually, this has the potential generate great debates about if the Mortal Kombat island is part of the WCU, or it Thrakkath could beat Subzero. And by great I mean terrible. :p

Anyway, nice job tracking all this very interesting info.
 
crazy Malar

Really? High class animation? You don't make jokes, or?

I didn't want to appear impolite. I stated only my opinion.
Simply the untypical designs of WCATV to WC does not please me, as well as its story and animation style.
Otherwise I found it involuntarily amusing. :(
I want only to say, that WC has earned much more than such silly cartoons.

Yes of course, my opinion doesn't count much in front of you and your fanprojects and fan knowledge - your WC-Portfolio.

But as a connoisseur of WC and not as a Fan, that was only my humble impression.

At last, I found it was worth to download it, and it was funny to me as I watched it, but nothing more. ;)
 
On a related but still off topic, Savage Dragon has one good thing. In one of his comics the devil is fighting god and I think the devil kicks god in the nuts, and god gets mad and says "Don't $%!@ with God!!!!!" Gay but humorous none the less.
 
Savage Dragon was a pretty cool comic for a while. The first issue of his series involved him attacking The Shrew with chainsaws while sporting a Fu-Manchu mustache and swearing a lot.
 
I wish I could find the cover of the comic that killed EC and made public comic book burnings popular. It's this amazing picture of a man from the waist down, holding a bloody ax and a woman's head with the tounge lolling out and her eyes rolled back. (But since the picture is tilted, you don't see below her neck, so the decaptiation is only implied)
 
It's fun, because that's exactly the sort of stuff that used to be in old fashioned radio plays all the time. There are all sorts of ones with great murders and people who start getting paranoid, cut off their wives' heads and build them into a wall in their house. The guy will be going "I've thrown her to the ground (thunk)... Now for the fatal blow (scream)... Oh god, what have I done? The blood... THE BLOOOOD IS ON MY HANDS!" Some of them are insanely disturbed, actually.

Man, radio plays are great.
 
They had an interesting show about the history of comic books on not to long ago. Around the time of the Communist witch burings in the fifties and sixties, a similar goverment investigation into comic books started. This led to an organization that was in essense a "quality" control group, this is where the stamp on comics came from.

They had rules on death and the occult and the undead, and especially against conflict with authority figures. This was a death knell to the horror comics that were more popular than "comics heroes".

IF you enjoy comics, if even just a passing interest this show was good. IF only I remembered the name lol.
 
TC said:
Man, radio plays are great.
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I have the majority of the Suspense! radio drama if you're interested. Most of them are in really low quality MP3s (64 or lower for most) but they still take up 7 CDs.
 
No thanks, I've probably heard most of them. A local talk radio station plays old radio plays from midnight until 3 am. Suspense! is one of the shows that they play rather regularly.
 
Hey thanks for bringing the Space Viking up, I was feeling the same sense of disconnectedness from the rest of the series. Interesting that a slew of USA-grade cartoons would team up for such a strange undertaking.
 
Now what I want to find are the episodes from The Legend of Zelda that used to show on fridays on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show (which later became "Club Mario", which was really lame)
 
Hurn, I used to hate it when they showed Zelda. I've seen them for download, though (and a couple episodes are on DVDs).

To update on the Space Viking project, I gnabbed a set of Savage Dragon tapes off of eBay yesterday.
 
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