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Can you believe it has been an entire month since we learned about nuclear warfare and the rise of the Neo Sapien empire? I certainly can't, but it's time for another Wing Commander cartoon marathon this Saturday, December 20th! This time we're going to be checking off two Disney movies that actually feature Wing Commander games in them! Unfortunately, they're two mid-90s live action Disney movies rather than classic cartoons or beloved franchise. But load up the station wagon with all the kids for a completely family friendly Wing Commander movie club cartoon marathon (that features no cartoons). We're watching:

Man of the House (1995): It's Jonathan Taylor Thomas versus Chevy Chase in a classic tale of stepson versus stepdad that… also ends up involving the Boy Scouts and the mafia, maybe? Whoever wins, we lose! This one takes some odd turns but it spends most of its run time failing to be Home

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It's fair to say that everyone already loved Back to the Future, so it's no surprise that… everyone loved Back to the Future. It's an effortlessly entertaining movie that grabs your attention and keeps you entertained. It turns out that no amount of time as an unfortunate king of geek chic pop culture can dull its clean! Next week, we're having the first ever Wing Commander movie club holiday party and we're going to be playing a classic Christmas movie that happens to be referenced pretty directly in a Wing Commander novel. That's right, it's Frank Capra's classic about suicidal ideation, It's a Wonderful Life (1946)! You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

COMBAT ALERT FOR MOVIE CLUB MEMBERS: Since this is our holiday party, please bring the name of a movie you particularly love for our first ever Secret Santa movie exchange. We'll collect all the suggestions and then randomly swap

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The CEO of leading children's toy manufacturer Sandra's Workshop has once again requested help with parcel deliveries.
Sandra Corrs, the much-loved philanthropist who provides gifts to children across the core systems each year, has made similar requests in previous years. Last year, with the Thargoid invasion just beginning, her courier fleet was loaned out to help refugee evacuation efforts.
This year a different problem has emerged, as Sandra explained to Vox Galactica:
"We had Our Dolph's Routes transport fleet all prepped in advance this year, and with no Thargoids in sight, we thought we would finally have no more hiccups. Oh, how wrong we were!
This year, we've been hacked, and most of our location data for each present was wiped clean. We managed to restore the majority from a backup, but a few presents are going out that we still need help with figuring out where to deliver them."

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One of my strange passions is finding vintage magazines that comission their own artwork for article headers. And today we've got a good one! This is a review of Wing Commander: The Secret Missions for the SNES from Brazil's Ação Games (issue #46, November 1993). Doesn't your heart lift up just a little seeing those low poly Kilrathi ships and those giant, IP-denied block letters for the title?

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Here's a quick look at something most people don't think about: Wing Commander III's low graphics mode! That's right, if you set everything to low quality (even in SVGA as here) then you end up with a game that looks a lot more like X-Wing than Wing Commander! It's kind of a fun alternative to the textured version and the capital ships in particular look wonderful.

... and here's a quick comparison of Wing Commander Prophecy's three original graphics modes: 3dfx, Direct3D and software. Upgrading to a Voodoo card was certainly worth the money even for a broke high school student in 1997! I know the recent fan-led graphics update is spectacular but I'll always have a candle burning for that original look...

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The Wing Commander movie club has watched Crash (1996) and… that's all we have to say about that! In all seriousness, it's a pretty interesting movie. For all of the extreme sex none of it is really prurient… it's all in the service of telling a decidedly unsexy story. I think what we can say about it overall is that we still had people talking about it the morning after the screening and that's a credit!

We talked about Crash's actual connection to Wing Commander in the intro post… but since this is (probably) the only erotic thriller movie club will get it seems like a good (?) idea to catalog Wing Commander's sex scenes. Which is easier done than said, as Wing Commander is largely a pretty chaste IP. In fact, Chris Roberts famously avoided anything of the sort in Wing Commander IV because of the response to the 'kiss Rachel or Flint' mechanic in its predecessor. In spite of this, we have had a few