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The NBC streaming platform Peacock launches tomorrow, July 15, and with it comes Wing Commander Academy streaming for the first time. All thirteen episodes of our favorite television show will be available sandwiched between Will & Grace and World of Dance. It's normally $5 a month, but if you preorder it tonight it comes to just $30 for the first year, which is quite a markdown. An ad-free version is $80 for the year. Additionally, Comcast Xfinity customers get free access to Peacock via Flex or X1, so it's worth getting the right setup. We have no kind of advertising or affiliate sponsorship with anyone - we're just trying to find fellow Wingnuts the cheapest ways to experience Wing Commander! The series is still available on DVD for $8, but I'm excited to rewatch the show in a new way. Just seeing the thumbnail on a modern interface like that is cool! And there are likely to be slight

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70er Jahre Junge has conducted a super fun interview with veteran game developer and musician Barry Leitch. He's well known as a game music composer, but his claim to fame with the Wing Commander series came as the spaceflight dialogue editor for Wing Commander 3. There's some fun anecdotes of his time at Origin where he edited over 11,000 lines of speech for it. He also did music and sound effects for Privateer Righteous Fire and Wings of Glory, among other local contemporaries. Mr. Leitch has a wealth of knowledge about the industry and a good easy-going way of sharing it. You can find his personal site here or check out the conversation below! You can jump to the 30:10 point for the specific discussion on Wing Commander and Origin.

Barry Leitch is an absolute legend among computer game composers. The Scotsman has written the soundtracks of games such as Lotus Turbo Challenge, Gauntlet Legends,

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SNEScapades is running through the entire North American Super Nintendo library, and their journey has arrived at Wing Commander. The WC focus gets going about 24 minutes in after some miscellaneous discussion and Wordtris review. There's a history of Chris Roberts before the actual WC SNES portion starts at about the 34:30 mark. They kind of struggled to get into the game due to its controls, but were into the shipboard sequences. With some practice it's really not that hard to fly on the console port, but there is a learning curve to getting the hang of the SNES controller. You can find the landing page for the podcast here or listen on Spotify here.

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We're leaning into a new week with a couple of amazing new test clips from ODVS. He's not intending to reinvent the wheel each month, but there have been even better AI techniques discovered that further improve the quality of his enhanced video. Due to the exciting potential of this upgrade, he's made another WC4 example to gather feedback and see if he should release a new iteration of his footage overhaul.

I wasn't planning on posting anything again so soon - but then I got my hands on a new AI model!

So in the vein of returning to remasters past, here's a new version of the Vagabond comparison video. The new AI model does a far better job of adding detail without creating the nasty over-defined edges (in previous WC4 remasters, I've always toned the detail recovery down a bit because it had a tendency to screw up curves and shapes such as shoulders, uniform elements etc.).

I'll keep experimenting

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It's been quite a while since we checked in on EmuMusicFan's efforts to digitize a graphical novel of Action Stations-related material, and he's been steadily growing his stable of characters in that time. We start off with some nice angles on Melek. This is a WC3-centric representation even though most of his stuff is from much earlier in the war. He's also got a stocky guard this time around. I'm anxious to see more Haha Kaliagara in the future. You can see a little teaser of his helmet and tail armor, which is pretty neat!

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If you have “Dick Clark” on your WCNews bingo card, today’s your lucky day! Ripplin spotted this gem in a Classic TV repost of Dick Clark’s The Return of TV Censored Bloopers. These are well known outtakes that show up in various compilations, but it’s pretty awesome to see they were broadcast to a huge audience here. In the mid 1990s, Wing Commander 3 and 4 were rare success stories to cross over to the television circuit like this. Long before tech stations like G4 and modern steaming, this was a rare mainstream glimpse into the digital world. It’s kind of a reverse time capsule: for some of our younger fans, this is what passed for prime Sunday evening TV!

Dick Clark presenting what he says "might be the world's first CD-ROM blooper" featuring Hamill in Wing Commander III.