After Action Report: Return of the Jedi

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club certainly enjoyed Return of the Jedi! It was great to see the original version (with the original songs!) again after so many years and it's just a tremendously fun, well made movie that continues to impact pretty much every space opera to this day in some way. There's always an argument that Empire Strikes Back is the 'smart' Star Wars sequel and that Return of the Jedi is somehow tainted because it feels more commercial… and it's hard to maintain that when you're actually watching the movie. It's a stunning piece of work that has as much artistry and thought as anything else in the Star Wars saga and I think it's particularly telling that Chris Roberts seems to come down on the Return of the Jedi side.

As we noted in the introduction post, Chris Roberts has credited the space battles in Return of the Jedi as inspiring combat in both the original Wing Commander and in the 1999 movie. And there's little question that that's true: Return of the Jedi's frantic third act fleet action was the gold standard for space combat for many, many years (and some would argue remains so). He had asked production designer Peter Lamont to consider Return of the Jedi's space battles alongside various World War II references and you can certainly see that in the work!

Wing Commander II takes two of its animated explosion from Return of the Jedi. The first one, which the game plays when a capital ship is destroyed, is taken from the shot where the Death Star first destroys a rebel ship. The Origin artist responsible for the theft mirrored the original shot. This explosion was then reused in Wing Commander Privateer as the 'player ship destroyed' explosion.

Here are 'sprite sheets' comparing all three explosions. The additional frames for the Privateer version were likely added by hand later and were not based on the original Return of the Jedi sequence.

The second explosion comes from a later shot where a TIE fighter crashes into the bridge tower of a Star Destroyer. This was used as the fighter explosion in Wing Commander II and then reused in Origin FX's 'Armageddon' module... and once again for Privateer's "big" explosion!

Here are the sprite sheets which remain pretty consistent from game to game:

Of course, those two explosions aren't the only thing the Wing Commander franchise borrowed from Star Wars…