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This month we're going to look back at some actual Saturday morning cartoons! That's because Ellen Guon Beeman (then Ellen Guon), who wrote for Wing Commander II and all four of the early expansions, got her start in Hollywood writing episodes of some of the shows we loved as kids. I'm excited to see how these compare to her novels and her Wing Commander games; she has always been quite a writer! Then we're finishing things off with a fun collection of bloopers that includes what would've been the first nationally broadcast footage from Wing Commander III…

MoonDreamers (Season 1, Episode 6 - "The Dreamkin"): I… don't know what MoonDreamers was. This is one of those 'multiple short episodes' style series so "The Dreamkin" is just a ten minute short. I happened to catch the theme song as I was organizing the files and I think this'll be a pretty interesting start to the day.

Jem (Season 1, Episode 19 -

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The Terminator is one hell of a movie, there's s no question! This week, we're moving on to part two of our sequence with a movie that's a little less well known: Outland (1981). This one is from 2010's Peter Hyams and it stars Sean Connery as a space cop on a Jovian moon. Sounds pretty compelling for a movie you've never heard of! Join us Friday at 10 PM Eastern in the Wing Commander CIC Discord!

What's the connection to Wing Commander… and to Terminator? It's a weird one! The psychotropic drug at the center of Outland is called Polydichloric Euthimol. And then from one of Wing Commander III's wild lines (the PA announcements that play in the background on the Victory) we hear: "Unloading of polydichloroeuthamol lots fifty-seven and fifty-eight will be completed on schedule." But there's a stop between those two references: as we'll see next week, Polydichloric Euthimol is also an explosive in

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tlwr: Electronic Arts has announced a new "30th Anniversary" version of Wing Commander III with cutscenes recovered from the original high quality tapes created when filming the game. This is now making the rounds in the mainstream gaming news!

On Saturday, October 11, Electronic Arts producer Jim Vessella hosted a panel at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo called "The Lost Tapes - Preserving the EA Vault and Restoring an FMV Classic". He revealed that he has located over 600 tapes stored by Electronic Arts which include the source video footage for Wing Commander III. This footage is being restored and will be included in a new release of the game, Wing Commander III 30th Anniversary Edition. We still have more questions than answers about the announcement but we thought it would be valuable to collect everything we do know in a new post. We've also included some of the major questions we're seeing even

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There's stunning news out of the Portland Retro Gaming Expo tonight as a panel on game preservation has revealed that Electronic Arts has found tapes containing high quality source video for Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger! Here's a BlueSky post from an attendee, solon's haunted library:

We're getting WING COMMANDER FMVs, gang!!! Jim Vessella found over 600 source tapes in the EA archives and have been restoring them

The panel was hosted by Electronic Arts producer Jim Vessella, already known by the retro gaming community for his work on the 2020 Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. The original description talks about tapes but not Wing Commander specifically:

The Lost Tapes - Preserving the EA Vault and Restoring an FMV Classic
BLUE, SAT. 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM
Featuring: Jim Vessella (Electronic Arts)
Moderated by:

Jim Vessella has been a Producer for over 20 years. In recent years, he has also

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Here's a brief look back at mentions of two cancelled Wing Commander games. We've got a brief appearance by Wing Commander II for the Sega Genesis (later SNES) in the March 1994 issue of Gamefan. We suspect this is a stock PC screenshot rather than specific to this version. And then we have the slightest mention of Wing Commander III for the Sega Saturn in the September 1995 issue of Sega Visions. It's hard to tell it it's stock text or if it is intended to say that the Saturn version would include the ground attack missions cut from the other console adaptations.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Electronic Arts

This technologically astounding sequel in the Commander series puts you in a world founded on tomorrow's technology. It’s a thrilling space sim, and you're the wing-commander pilot of a brand-new Terran ship in the bitter war against the Kilrathi, Gameplay speed is a warping 30 frames per

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The Wing Commander movie club's informed opinion is… that The Phantom Menace holds up pretty well. It actually seems fairly different watching it a quarter of a century on: what once felt like wall to wall CG is actually endless practical shots. Stuff that felt like it flew by at the time is actually slow and thinky compared to modern action movies. It's interesting!

We talked all about the endless–and ultimately pointless–battle for the Phantom Menace trailer and Wing Commander… so how did the story end? The Phantom Menace immediately invited a different look at Wing Commander; the much more expensive SFX weren't particularly better and it actually felt just about as 'different' from the original Star Wars movies as Wing Commander did. And in the end, the movie that tried to stifle a video game was itself felled by a video game: analysts blamed the Pokemon-inspired anime craze on Phantom Menace's lack