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FLASH! As you may imagine, we loved Flash Gordon (especially Brian Blessed!) and now have the theme stuck deeply in our brains. Happy birthday, bob! This week, voting is back and everyone was hoping to finally choose Terminator... but we didn't and instead John Woo somehow won the poll for what returning director we'd like to see. So this week we'll be watching his Chinese-era masterpiece Hard Boiled (1992) which was surely a favorite of the Wing Commander III team! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

After greatly enjoying Hard Target, John Woo's American debut, we were interested in seeing one of his earlier Chinese movies. When we watched that movie, we talked about how John Woo was referenced repeatedly in Wing Commander III's quotes file. "Two-Fisted John Woo Action" is specifically cited in the list of the team's inspiration and programmer Chris Todd's section shouts out to

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At last report, Tyrel Lohr had expanded their lineup of 3D print-ready Wing Commander ships to add the mighty Kilrathi Hakaga. Now we're happy to report that many of the models shown in earlier updates are now available for purchase on Tyrel's Cults Store. You can find listings for both Confederation and Kilrathi ships and as you've seen in earlier updates they look wonderful printed. Many are free and the rest are all extremely affordable at between $1 and $4! There's also a Patreon that gives access to models before they're listed in the store.

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut event happening on Discord this morning! Join us at noon EST/9 AM PST for a fun filled morning of television... that all connect to Wing Commander somehow! This month we're looking at a series of shows across three decades that are referenced in... Wing Commander Armada! You can find details on the shows included as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. Be sure to download the episodes so they're ready to play with the group!

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With 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

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Flash Gordon (1980) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

And don't forget our ninth Wing Commander Cartoon party is early tomorrow!

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One of my favorite things to collect information from is early articles about Privateer 2... specifically, ones from the summer 1995 press junket which showed the game as just 'The Darkening'. We didn't know to preserve these articles when they first ran and looking back at them for the first time often reveals new tidbits of information or behind the screens photos from the outlets' set visits. You can find a big collection of other The Darkening previews here. The first of the new finds is EA's Dark Forces from the September 1995 issue of UK-based Computer and Video Games (no. 166) magazine:

EA'S DARK FORCES

Origin's interactive movie game The Darkening starts to take shape at Pinewood studios.

The next interactive movie to come from the EA and Origin stable is currently being filmed at Pinewood studios. It's called The Darkening and has a working budget of approximately £5 million and stars the