Display MoreWith a grand 'happy birthday Comchia!' we enjoyed a screening of George Lucas' American Graffiti last week and the response was... that it's a pretty good and surprisingly forgotten movie. It's very interesting seeing how THX 1138 and American Graffiti lead to Star Wars in wildly different (and often unexpected) ways. And it was very interesting seeing what helped form the core of what our parents think of nostalgia, even if it's a little bit alien for us. And I'm very eager to see how this one comares with the similarly themed but radically different The Deer Hunter, which is coming up someday in this series.
As we said in the introduction, we added this movie to the canon because George Lucas was one of several directors who had a star system named after them on the Wing Commander Universe map. A region of the map centered in the Enigma Sector has about two dozen systems named after science fiction writers and directors, with writers making up the bulk of us. So our question today is: should we add movies based on the works of these authors to the queue? The end result is a bunch of additional science fiction movies... some classic and some pretty unknown! Movies have to have been released before the games in which they're referenced, so no Hitchiker's Guide film for Douglas Adams. And in several cases we've already watched the obvious movie (like 2001 or 2010 for Clarke) so we had to go with something weird! Here's what we came up with:
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - Verne
- A Boy and His Dog (1975) - Ellison
- Damnation Alley (1977) - Zelazny
- Destination Moon (1950) - Heinlein
- Fahrenheit 451 (1966) - Bradbury
- Genesis II (1973) - Roddenberry
- Hyperland (1990) - Adams
- Johnny Mnemonic (1995) - Gibson
- Nightfall (1988) - Niven
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) - Vonnegut
- Soylent Green (1973) - Harrison
- The Beast Must Die (1974) - Blish
- The Tunnel Under the World (1969) - Pohl
- Trapped in Space (1995) - Clarke
Sound off on the forums or Discord if you think these should join the queue!
Sully isn't one for fast cars; he likes to spend his time before leaving for cat college cleaning his paws atop a Wing Commander III Premiere Edition pizza box.
