Display MoreGreetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club is marching on! We greatly enjoyed last week's screening of Glory, a movie most of us hadn't seen in many years (or at all). We found it was still very solid, a great example of that just-before-the-blockbusters era that produced movies like Memphis Belle. It's a timeless true story without too much exaggeration, one that it would be good for more people to know today. Matthew Broderick does kind of stick out today as you do not associate him with a heroic soldier today but the rest of the cast, with Denzel Washington in particular, is spectacular. The story of African American soldiers proving themselves in the face of racism remains powerful, though we couldn't help but notice that a great deal of the northern racism is treated as something that happens off screen. SOMEONE doesn't want the regiment to be paid or to fight on the front line… but not any of the characters we actually see. It was also interesting to me thinking about the movie in terms of how it every-so-slightly predated Ken Burns' The Civil War; as such, its Civil War shorthand (visual, audio, etc.) feels slightly different. We wouldn't associate the war with endless violins and sepia-toned photographs for another year!
Our big reason for picking Glory was to follow up the note from the Wing Commander II team that Denzel Washington's character, Silas Trip, was the basis for Downtown. We put together a dossier on Downtown during the leadup to the movie and now we can pretty definitively say we understand the connection. Like Downtown, Trip escaped slavery as a young man and then took up arms against his oppressors (and ultimately dies a hero fighting against impossible odds). Downtown's original character description says that he was "fiery and impulsive" just like Trip. We don't actually see this in the final game where he's actually something of a peacemaker, so it seems he learned the same lesson between his escape from Ghorah Khar and the events of Wing Commander II.
Our other big Wing Commander surprise while watching the movie was an appearance by none other than Pliers himself, character actor Richard Riehle, playing a corrupt quartermaster. There's a special joy to seeing particular actors show up in places, especially unexpectedly. Here's hoping it happens again!
There's also an appearance of Raymond St. Jacques as abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Admiral Tolwyn actually quotes Douglass in Fleet Action when he's confronting Baron Jukaga before the final battle: "Better to die as free men then live as slaves."
Beyond those notes, I thought it would be fun to collect some notes on other Civil War-related Wing Commander connections that don't necessarily tie back to Glory directly. It's not often we have an excuse to watch a movie set in the era! The most notable of these connections is a pretty simple one: the decision to name the new faction the Union of Border Worlds in Wing Commander IV. By having the enemy of the CONFEDERATION (itself established as such simply to be slightly different from Star Trek) be the UNION the writers were signaling American players a big clue as to what was going on in the story. Not every Civil War is based on the American Civil War (for instance, the five-way Kilrathi Civil War going on during Wing Commander IV) but the Wing Commander IV setup did take a fair amount from history. Similarly, the Border Worlds militia and its path to independence is based on real history, where the Confederacy was able to build an army from its states' lawful pre-war militias.
When I did the Star Soldier manual for Wing Commander Arena, I decided to give the Union of Border Worlds a little taste of their own medicine by having Hellespont secede in a news story based on South Carolina's attempt to exit the United States:
Rebellion in the Hellespont System
The Hellespont government has announced that it will withdraw from the Union of Border Worlds immediately, following highly charged elections which ended with a secession convention. Local lawmakers cite rising tariffs and increased government centralization in their official announcement, though many observers believe that the decision has more to with the increased political representation allowed less industrialized UBW planets, which suffered less during the Nephilim invasion. In a bloodless handover, Hellespont Militia units moved quickly to take control of the system’s shipyards and fortifications.
The situation is by no means isolated, with similar unrest evident in other founding Border Worlds including Orestes and Peleus. Spokesmen for Governor Hodge insist that these actions will not be treated lightly and that the Outerworlds Fleet Reserve will be activated if it becomes necessary to hold the star nation together by force. Hellespont is responsible for 5% of the Union’s gross exports and is home to the Second Fleet’s drydock facilities.Wing Commander Academy has several Civil War references and one of them is quite strange: Chain of Command has the TCS Trafalgar escorted by "a Manassas-class light cruiser". Manassas was the Confederate name for the battles at what the Union referred to as Bull Run. So it's a bit weird that the show chose the losing side's name for the battle! The Manassas-class itself is something of a fun oddity: it's the rare ship we've seen but also have no idea what it looks like! There was no model sheet available for the ship when it was referenced in Chain of Command and so the storyboard artists pulled a cool trick: only showing the ship at extreme distance (the tiny triangle in the distance) or incredibly close so it's just a hull filling the entire screen!
It was actually scripted and boarded to appear in act three of the episode but in the final version the sequence is shortened and reordered… and the shots of the Manassas are seemingly replaced with the Trafalgar! Compare the original eight shots planned in the boards to the five final shots in order:
There's also a scene in Expendable where Maverick tells Payback that one of his ancestors was a Blair who served as a general in the Civil War. A little research suggests that this would have to be Union General Francis Preston Blair. Blair was a congressman who resigned to serve as a Colonel (what else!) when the war began and he was part of a notable political family that were steadfast supporters of President Lincoln; his older brother, Montgomery Blair, was Lincoln's Postmaster General. Here's a neat article on their connection to the president.
The Civil War also had an interesting repeated impact on Wing Commander's ship prefixes. The developers had initially chosen CSS (Confederation Space Ship) but changed to TCS (Terran Confederation Ship) during development to avoid matching the Confederate States of America's CSS (Confederate States Ship). Wing Commander has generally (but not alway) been careful to use 'Confederation' instead of 'Confederate' to avoid the connection and this was an extension of that idea. One was missed during the editing, though: the Kurasawa series has a Shotglass conversation where he talks about the CSS Suffolk!
Then, it happened again! On the Wing Commander movie, the mostly European art department on set in Luxembourg again decided on CSS for the Confederation capital ships in the movie and used the designation on props like the shoulder patches. During post production the team in Austin decided instead on CS (used in licensed material) and finally went back to TCS for the supertitles in the final cut.
Department crew gifts still used CSS, though (along with the equally confusing CNV-2654)!
The movie also gives us another unusual Civil War-named ship. As we sweep into Pegasus in the opening, we hear on the comm: "TCS McClellan requesting flyby." General George McClellan is an odd namesake for a starship: President Lincoln put him in charge of the Army of the Potomac but eventually dismissed him after he repeatedly failed to take the offensive… and it's not common to name a warship after someone that served in the army!
And we'll note just one more unusual Civil War-adjacent namesake came even earlier: Custer's Carnival in the original Claw Marks is named after George Armstrong Custer, a dashing Union officer in the Civil War who would later meet his fate battling Native Americans after the conflict. Here, though, the name makes more sense as it's being used to refer to the Confederation's disastrous failed invasion of the G'wriss System.
And don't forget the novels! The second Wing Commander novel, End Run, features a pretty ridiculous Civil War reference. Early on, the Tarawa's up-and-coming pilots are introduced thusly: "A young pilot named Chamberlain, with the call sign of Round Top, and another sporting the call sign Mongol seemed to have a natural flair." This is a very silly joke: the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg is often credited to Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's 20th Maine Infantry Regiment's holding a hill called Little Round Top. Round Top is killed flying a Broadsword in Fleet Action.
Where did this dad joke come from? The answer is that Wing Commander novelist Dr. William Forstchen is himself both a Maine man and a historian whose professional work has focused on the Civil War. His 1994 dissertation even covered very similar territory to the movie Glory: "The Twenty-Eighth United States Colored Troops: Indiana's African Americans go to war, 1863-1865". He has also written the nine-book Lost Regiment series, a science fiction saga about a Civil War regiment transported to fight in an alien war, the Gettysburg trilogy with Newt Gingrich, an alternate history that imagines what would have happened if the Union lost the Battle of Gettysburg, and We Look Like Men of War, a "factually based narrative" (historical fiction) baked on his doctoral work. If you're looking to make the transition from pulpy science fiction to Civil War history, the works of Dr. Forstchen are a reasonable path! (Incidentally, the other pilot, Mongol, is a reference to the author's time spent doing archaeological work in Mongolia.)
Sully and his sister have perfected their Blair/Tolwyn Wing Commander IV promo stance.
