Display MoreThe Wing Commander movie club had a great time with ace's birthday movie, Amadeus! (Happy birthday, ace!). It's not quite a historical movie as it is a movie that contextualizes Mozart's story for modern audiences… treating him as we would see a rock star-style musician today, so that we understand his humanity instead of some more stuffy analysis of his music. The result is a pretty energetic film that doesn't feel like it's three hours long at all!
Our big Wing Commander connection was the name itself, which was nodded to by the doomed medical transport at the start of Wing Commander IV.
There's a little Mozart in the Wing Commander movie, too! When Blair goes to visit Paladin in his quarters on the Tiger Claw, he's listening to a trio from Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte (translation below). It's not one of the operas we see him making in Amadeus, but they did make such productions look pretty fun. We'll check out a film adaptation of Cosi Fan Tutte in a future movie club!
Soave sia il vento,
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri/vostri desir.
Gentle be the breeze,
Calm be the waves,
And every element
Smile in favour
On their wish.
Bob also noticed a little connection to Wing Commander's cast. In fact, Mark Hamill had closed out the Broadway run of Amadeus just before the movie (replacing Wing Commander's Tim Curry in the role!). He was considered for the film but the powers that be decided he would remind audiences too much of Luke Skywalker. Not something Chris Roberts was worried about!
We also found a funny mention of Mozart in Origin's Wing Commander III Help File. Okay not so much Mozart himself but a sound card clone named after him. Sounds like Wing Commander III just wasn't compatible with the "Oak Technologies MOZART" card… so you shouldn't have picked that over, say, a Sound Blaster 16.
[8.3.1] Mozart by Oak Technologies
The MOZART sound card (created by Oak Technologies) seems to lock up
after the "fourth" or "sixth" dot. We are currently working with Oak
Technologies on a solution. There is no work-around for this problem at
this time, you will have to play the game with NO SOUND. You can
recognize a Mozart sound card by spotting the following lines in the
configuration files :
CONFIG.SYS : DEVICE=C:\MZT\MZTINIT.SYS /A220 /I5 /D1 /G /V7
AUTOEXEC.BAT : SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4
SET SOUND=C:\MZT
Sully-ere and his great rival, his sister Lumi.
