Display MoreWe had a great time watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a cold and unforgiving movie, for sure, but it also contains multitudes. It's inspired a million other things and it's hard to imagine what both film and science fiction would look like today without it. So let's take a look at some Wing Commander references both real and imagined!
Here's one that was pretty easy to catch: HAL 9000 as he appears in the film versus his cameo in the SNES port of Wing Commander. For those curious he does not appear in the port of The Secret Missions because the takeoff sequence is completely replaced with a cool mode 7 treat.
The AE-35 antenna, referenced in Wing Commander Secret Ops as a winning password, is the McGuffin that HAL uses to eliminate Frank Poole.
And the other 2001 password is TMA-1, which refers to the monolith discovered on the moon and seen in the 1999 sequence. TMA stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly.
We noted that the spindly Wing Commander III transport must have been inspired by 2001's Discovery. Like the Discovery, the Clarkson-class has a drive section at the very rear and then a spindle that can carry cargo and equipment. The Discovery was originally designed to feature a nuclear bomb-throwing engine but Kubrick decided it wouldn't make sense to audiences to see it functioning on screen.
2001's magnificent low earth orbit station is what's sometimes called a von Braun wheel, after the German rocket scientist that helped popularize them in the 1950s. That got us thinking about Secret Ops, which has two such wheel-shaped space stations: Talos and Krieger. The idea was that the station would generate artificial gravity inside the ring. In the end, it turned out that we specifically WANTED microgravity for orbital science!
You probably remember Jupiter in 2001 as a brilliant orange striped planet and you might be surprised to find that it isn't. We'll see a more modern Jupiter in 2010 but in 2001 it's usually kept in the shadows… because no probe had taken close up photos when the movie was made! We thought we'd compare that to Wing Commander's similar jovian planets. Can you name all of them? That's Torgo, Jupiter, Jupiter and Planet 415 in the Dakota System.
The life signs that appear in the original Wing Commander's barracks are absolutely a nod to 2001's frozen science crew aboard the Discovery. Which terrified me as a kid!
2001's pod scenes are often borrowed… including the introduction to Wing Commander Prophecy where the TOBY drones even use some of the same shots!
The scene at the start of Wing Commander III where Blair reads the news aboard his shuttle seems like it's conscious of Dr. Floyd's trip aboard the Pan Am space clipper.
A case of art imitating life in both instances but we couldn't help see a little Tarsus in the clipper cockpit!
... and the shots of Frank using the pod look a bit like a tractor beam mission from Wing Commander 2!
True story: at the start of the movie the apes howling made Sully go crazy and run around… and then at the end his sister Lumi had to help Dave Bowman disassemble HAL!
