Nov062007

Way Far Down the Geeky Rabbit Hole

This one took a little effort, but you kids are worth it: earlier this afternoon, my buddy Dave sent me a link to a short blog entry which reads as follows:

If you’re a child of the 1980s, you’re no doubt well aware of the movie The Last Starfighter, the fantasy epic about a videogame lovin’ kid in a trailer park who’s recruited by aliens as a gunner an intergalactic battle. I mean, based on that short description alone how can you not think the movie is awesome? The only problem is that the Last Starfighter game was never actually released. As crazy as it is, Atari developed the game but never released it for some reason. Talk about not following through on capitalizing on ancillary markets and product tie-ins.

Well, 23 years later the game has finally seen the light of day. Sure, its tech specs are less than impressive at this point, but you can’t beat the nostalgia value. It was custom-built into a cabinet that looks exactly like the one from the movie, but if you want to try it in the comfort of your own home you can now download the game as a simple exe file. Who knows, maybe you’ll be recruited if you try it out and are good enough.

Hmm, thinks I, this is intriguing. I remember liking The Last Starfighter back in the day. I would’ve been about 14 when it came out, and it was a perfect little piece of summertime adolescent wish fulfillment; what disaffected teen hasn’t dreamed of discovering they have some remarkable talent that will enable them to save the day? Or, in the case of Alex Rogan, the protagonist of TLS, the universe? The summer of ’84 was also the golden age of my interest in video gaming, so naturally I thought it be totally awesome to play a for-real arcade game just like the one in the flick. And now someone has finally made such a game? Awesome! Where do I click for more information? I tried here, the link referenced in the blog entry I quote above. Nope, not the source of this story, just another blog:

Who didn’t walk out of The Last Starfighter — yep, the Lance Guest movie from the ’80s — hoping to find a Starfighter game in the arcade? Sadly, the game was never produced. But some guys over at Rogue Synapse recreated a playable version of the actual game from the movie — it’s a free download — and offer drawings of the movie-prop game cabinet. Add a little MAME ingenuity and you’ve got yourself the arcade you dreamed of as a kid. (Just don’t leave me behind if Centauri comes for you first.)

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, a destination at last… and I’ll be darned if the screen caps of the game these guys have cooked up don’t look just like what I remember from the movie. Very impressive indeed… personally, I can’t imagine having enough dedication to any movie to spend the time and effort needed to develop a game, let alone build a cabinet to house it, but I am utterly blown away that someone out there has. It’s so easy to imagine myself walking up to this thing in the middle of a dark, cacophonous room that smells of sweat and ozone, a heavy wad of quarters dragging my pants pocket all out of shape, only moments away from becoming the hero of the story behind the screen, and in my own mind… sometimes I really miss being 14.

Nov052007

The Dancing Stormtrooper

My first day back at work went pretty much exactly as I anticipated: right back into the grind. No time to write a proper entry about the vacation, or even to catch up on all my blog-reading from last week. (I won’t tell you how many unread posts I had waiting in my aggregator. It’s too frightening. If I was wise, I’d just mark them all as read and start fresh in the morning. I never made any claims to wisdom, though.)

I did, however, stumble across this, which I will share with you now:

It’s our old friend Danny Choo, the Tokyo stormtrooper I’ve blogged about before, showing us some of his slick moves. I don’t know why I’m so amused by the sight of Imperial stormtroopers in everyday, terrestrial settings, unless it’s because the costumes — the good ones, anyway — look so real, literally like these guys just walked off a movie screen into our world. Star Trek-themed costumes, by contrast, very rarely look like the real thing — homemade Starfleet uniforms are usually just a little too obviously amateur jobs, latex Klingon foreheads don’t match the wearer’s skin tone, etc. But a guy (or gal) in one of these armor suits, well, they look the way they’re supposed to look. And it’s all the better when they’re dancing…

(Incidentally, I love the guy on the subway who is trying his darnedest not to look at the two-stepping lunatic in the white polystyrene Halloween outfit…)

Nov042007

C’est La Vie

A mere 48 hours ago, I was holding hands with The Girlfriend and feeling very uncurmudgeonly as we watched Tinkerbell glide down from the Matterhorn amidst a shower of gold and blue fireworks.

Now I’m preparing to put my Krazy Kat out for the night so I can get to bed and be fresh for the morning’s return to the New Proofreader’s Cave deep in the bowels of… aw, to hell with it. You get the idea. My vacation is over and tomorrow it’s back to Real Life™. Sigh.

I’ve experienced this letdown many times, but it always seems to take me by surprise anyhow. I simply can’t believe how quickly something that you spend a year planning and gearing up for seems to ultimately pass. Almost as if it didn’t happen at all.

I find it utterly depressing that the moments of your life when you feel the most truly alive, the most truly yourself, the most engaged and interested and happy are so rare and short-lived. Don’t anyone try to lay that line on me about how this fleeting quality makes those moments all the more special, because I’m not sure I believe it. The truth is that I think it sucks major rocks that so much of our lives are composed of the mundane and soul-numbing. It seems like it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Sigh again. Sorry to be a drag… so, how was everybody’s week while I was away?

Oct272007

All I Ever Wanted

Well, kids, this is it… my suitcase is sitting on the bed waiting to be stuffed, and in only a few hours, I’ll be breathing the sunny, ashen air of SoCal. (Those fires had great timing, didn’t they?) Play nice while I’m gone, remember to be excellent to each other, and Happy Halloween. Here’s a little something to remember me by:

Is it just me, or was Belinda Carlisle a lot hotter when she was chunky and using drugs than when she cleaned up and went solo? Maybe it’s me…

Oct262007

Star Trek: Rebooted

As you may have heard, Paramount is hoping to revive its venerable — and highly profitable — Star Trek franchise with yet another feature-film adventure for the original Enterprise crew, i.e., Kirk, Spock, etc., only this time there will be a whole new gang of young actors playing the iconic characters. J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, is writing and directing, and the final member of the core cast was announced just last week. Here’s the run-down:

Chris Pine (Kirk)
Zachary Quinto (Spock)
Simon Pegg (Scotty)
Zoe Saldana (Nyota Uhura)
Karl Urban (Leonard “Bones” McCoy)
Anton Yelchin (Pavel Chekov)
John Cho (Sulu)

The photoshopped image above (courtesy of ScreenRant.com) provides an idea of how the newbies may look in their roles as well as how they compare to the original actors. As usual, give it a click it to blow it up larger.

In addition to the core cast above, Eric Bana will be playing a villain named Nero, who is rumored to be a Romulan (plausible, considering the name and the fact that the Romulan culture of the original Trek was modelled on ancient Rome), and Leonard Nimoy is said to be appearing as a more, ahem, mature Spock in a brief cameo. That last bit suggests we can expect either a time-travel story (another one? Ho-hum…) or a frame story of some kind, no doubt intended to help legitimize the new cast by having one of the classic actors “identify” them as his old friends.

Based on what I’ve seen out there on the blogs, people seem to be generally positive about this effort to reboot Star Trek, with opinions ranging from flat-out enthusiastic to cautiously optimistic. I, however, am far more dubious of the whole — forgive the pun — enterprise.

Oct262007

Song in My Head

You ever wake up with a song already stuck in your head? Yeah… mine this morning is “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus,” by Jimmy Buffett. Make of that what you will…

Oct252007

Writers Will Understand This…

Give it a few seconds to get going.

I’m going to try and find a way to use the term “piss-midget” today…

Oct232007

It Really Was a Different Time, Wasn’t It?

I’ve been looking for some video from Salvage 1 to try and refresh my memory. I didn’t find very much, but there is this:

Honestly, more of my circuits fired in response to the ABC Sunday Night Movie graphics than the footage from Salvage, the TV movie that became the series Salvage 1. Remember TV movies, kids? Or the days when feature films ran on regular network TV about a year after they’d been in the theaters, back in the dark days before home video rentals, cable TV, or “on-demand” anything? Can you believe there was once a time when you could make a movie about a homespun junk dealer with a preposterous notion about flying to the Moon in a rocket made out of a cement mixer and a tanker-truck trailer, and it would actually garner enough viewers to justify a weekly TV series (admittedly a short-lived one, but still…)
Yes, we were all a lot more innocent then…

Oct232007

More Long-Lost Relics of My Youth Resurfacing?

I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD — either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn — because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early ’80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I’d say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it’s also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you’ll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)

As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise — a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts — but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn’t realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.

The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days…

Oct222007

The Night Belongs…

Finding that bizarre-o Budweiser commercial earlier got me thinking about some other ’80s-vintage beer ads that made quite an impact on me: Michelob’s “The Night Belongs To…” campaign comprised several atmospheric, one-minute-long masterpieces that featured music by actual rock stars instead of the usual generic advertising tracks. The best known of these was probably the one that featured Eric Clapton playing an updated version of his 1970 hit “After Midnight.”