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The Wing Commander movie club is back from our vacation to Westworld and, well, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. The movie holds up very well, it's still tremendously fun. Objectively, you recognize that it isn't much of a story as over half the run time is devoted to setting up the world and explaining how the theme park works… but subjectively, that's the fun part and Michael Crichton made exactly the right choice focusing on what's actually most interesting here. And after so many somber British war movies, its breezy sub-90-minute run time was certainly a nice feature!

We already talked about Michael Crichton's star system in the intro post so there's not a lot more to say about Westworld's connection to Wing Commander! We did manage to find one almost-reference: hidden in Privateer 2's data is a list of ships for an earlier version of the booth database which is totally different from

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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 Crash (1996) 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!

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Last month, we published an article cataloging the wings worn by Wing Commander's various fighter pilots. We failed to include one pretty important reference: Jazz's wings from Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi! You may remember that these wings played an important role in Wing Commander II's treason mystery and as a result got their own closeup shot! When Jazz shoots Specialist McGuffin for discovering his communications with the Kilrathi, McGuffin grabs his wings as he dies. Jazz then steals Stingray's wings and he is blamed for the murder (until Sparks provides an alibi). Of course, as we pointed out in the initial article there's not a clear place on the Wing Commander II duty uniforms where wings are worn! But the scene provides a great look at them:

In case you aren't familiar with the joke about this scene, Specialist McGuffin is named after the idea of a "MacGuffin" which is a word

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A BlueSky user named revenant was recently noodling around with the SNES port of Wing Commander and made a pretty exciting discovery and a cool tool for taking a closer look at the game's assets! Revenant turned ROMs of the two surviving SNES ports into in flight object viewers that let you explore the in-game background layers, essentially letting you scroll through the different ships and objects stored in the game! Their first thread starts here.

completely pointless activity of the week: hacking a Mode 7 object viewer into the janky SNES port of wing commander

(d-pad cycles objects/frames, start button exits)

right now this only shows the 'up close' frames for ingame objects (which are background layers rather than the sprites used for distant objects)

also the displayed names of objects come from the list of text strings which doesn't always match the actual object - i.e. unused Venture graphics are

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Hopefully you were able to secure some great deals over the weekend, but if you're still looking to check things off the list for the Wing Commander fan in your life, here's a rundown of WC items for sale!

Print Art

End Run Cover by David Mattingly $20-$100 (search for "Wing Commander") Malcolm McDowell Autographed WC3 PSX Print $65 (15% off through December 31)

PC Games ($2.99 each through 12/2)
Wing Commander 1&2 Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4 DVD Wing Commander Prophecy & Secret Ops	Wing Commander Privateer Wing Commander Privateer 2 Wing Commander Academy Wing Commander Armada

Movies & TV

Academy DVD: Amazon $10.96 | Walmart $12.86 | Deep Discount $8.16 Movie Digital: Amazon $9.99 | Fandango $9.99 | Google/YouTube $9.99

Novels ($6.99)
Freedom FlightBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple BooksB&N NookKoboGoogle Play	End RunBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple BooksB&N NookKoboGoogle Play	Fleet ActionBaen EbookAmazon KindleApple

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The Wing Commander movie club had a good time with Westworld; it's a movie that spends most of its time just explaining its setup... but that's just fine because that setup is delightful. For this week we asked members to select a type of thriller (as defined by the Wikipedia) from our queue and the surprise winner was the 1996 erotic thriller Crash. It's a David Cronenberg movie about people that are sexually attracted to car crashes, so this should be an interesting one! (You know, Star Trek Discovery star David Cronenberg.) You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along. Please note and plan appropriately: Crash is rated NC-17 for "explicit sex scenes" (but not car crashes?).

Crash is another movie that was used to temp track the 1999 Wing Commander movie. A track from Howard Shore's score, Triton, was chosen to play from Blair's fight with Hunter through to his conversation with Angel in