The original teaser trailer for The Empire Strikes Back included no film footage, just concept art by Ralph McQuarrie:
McQuarrie was an interesting character. He served in the army in Korea — and survived a shot to the head! It was his idea that Vader wear breathing apparatus.
As a kid, I loved flying cars, amphibious vehicles, etc., and I balked at the explanation that they weren’t more common because they weren’t any good. All the extra parts add weight and complexity.
One of the coolest such vehicles from my childhood, the submersible Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me, was just a prop, but that prop has been bought by Elon Musk, who plans to convert it into a working model with an electric powertrain.
That’s the beauty of an electric powertrain: no heavy mechanical transmission to duplicate, just a cable leading to an electric motor where you need it.
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is the second of the three Sinbad films that Ray Harryhausen made for Columbia. It was released in 1973 — 15 years after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
It struck me as very… D&D.
I’m assuming that’s where D&D’s homunculus got its wings. (The original concept is just a little artificial man.)
The Harryhausen films seem like a more powerful influence than the books mentioned in Appendix N.
The original 1976 Star Wars teaser trailer seems oddly menacing — and thus more Dune-like, I suppose:
One of the most iconic movie scenes of my childhood is the scene from the original Star Wars of Luke Skywalker grabbing Princess Leia and swinging across the chasm.
I recently watched The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the 1958 fantasy film featuring special effects — in Dynamation! — by Ray Harryhausen, and I couldn’t miss the obvious inspiration for Lucas’s later scene.
I’ve mentioned the skeleton scene before.
Near the end of the movie, Sinbad unchains the dragon guarding the cave entrance so it will fight a cyclops just outside, and the fight is a clear homage to the classic stop-motion match between King Kong and the T-Rex.
Kong uses superior technique:
Everything is a remix.
Larry Bond was a US Navy officer when he published his war game, Harpoon, in 1980 — which brought him to Tom Clancy’s attention:
Foreign Policy: How did you and Tom Clancy meet?
Larry Bond: Harpoon was published in April 1980. I would get letters from enthusiasts with questions about naval systems and stuff. Tom Clancy’s was one of the letters I got with questions about naval warfare. I answered it. Didn’t think more anything about it. Tom sent a follow-up letter with more questions, and we eventually started talking on the phone. We became good friends. He would call and we would chew the fat for hours. That’s why I always answer my mail. You never know where a letter is going to lead.
FP: What was Clancy like?
LB: He was knowledgeable and asked questions. He was always playing with concepts. Can you do this in real life? How does this thing work under the hood? For instance, electronic support measures (ESM), which is using an enemy’s radar and radio signals to determine his location. And he not only figured out how to use cross-bearing to triangulate the target, but he would ask, how wide is that beam? What is your margin of error? He really wanted to know how things worked. He was always exploring whatever issues interested him. He would bang the rocks together and come up with very correct answers.
When we were plotting Red Storm Rising — the core of the story is a NATO-Soviet war in the North Atlantic — he looked at Iceland and said, “this is a strategic piece of real estate. The Russians are going to want this.” I told him the Russian Navy wasn’t set up for this. They didn’t have the amphibious groups we have. Tom goes, “no, no, they need to take this.” We set up a Harpoon battle called the Great Keflavik Turkey Shoot that sort of validated what Tom was saying. If there are U.S. fighters based in Iceland, and Soviet Backfire bombers tried to strike convoys in the Atlantic, even just a few fighters would indeed tear a hunk out of the bomber stream. But what I couldn’t tell him at the time was that I had been working at the Center of Naval Analyses where there were several very classified studies going on about the strategic nature of Iceland. People were thinking about this hard, and Tom just pulled it out of the air.
FP: Is it true that Harpoon was the basis for the Hunt for Red October?
LB: Harpoon was one of the data sources for Hunt for Red October. The real basis for the book was the Storozhevoy Incident (where a Soviet destroyer unsuccessfully attempted to defect in 1975). Tom looked at that and thought, “What if that hadn’t been a surface ship that could be stopped easily, but a sub which couldn’t be easily found? And what if it was a brand-new ballistic missile sub?”
As far as technical stats, there are very few numbers in Hunt for Red October. People always focus on where he got all his information. If you pick up The Boy’s Book of Submarines, and The Boy’s Book of Sonar, you have 90 percent of what Tom had. What he got out of Harpoon was some weapon names, speed of ships, and so on.
When I wrote Harpoon, I was still in the Navy, so I deliberately did not go to any classified data sources I had. But there was a Navy training game called NAVTAG [Naval Tactical Game]. It was classified, which made it hard to distribute. So I wrote Harpoon as a training game. It wasn’t classified so we could leave the game lying around. I wrote it with simple rules because most naval officers are not gamers. But I was thinking about making Harpoon a commercial release, so in the game, I explained things like what a convergence zone was, or how passive sonar worked. And I think that’s what Tom liked. There was so much explanatory text in the game.
Scharlach was surprised at the honesty of Ken Burns’ Prohibition, which links the unpopular movement with abolition and women’s suffrage:
Sailer points out in today’s Taki column that the coupling of women’s suffrage and prohibition seems odd to us today. If we expand the coupling to a trifecta — women’s suffrage, prohibition, abolition — the one in the middle seems even more out of place. If we expand it even further — women’s suffrage, prohibition, abolition, federal income tax, democratic election of senators, labor laws — then we have the pantheon of the early progressive religion. But only one of them failed. And today, ironically, prohibition, the progressive failure, stands in many people’s minds as the example par excellence of inappropriate (read: conservative) federal intrusion into local life. That abolition, federal income tax, labor laws, or women’s suffrage might likewise be examples of federal intrusions into local life is an insane right-wing suggestion.
I haven’t kept up with The Simpsons for the past couple decades, but the intro to the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXIV intrigued me:
This video notes many of the references but misses a few.
In 1981, before the Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian movie came out, Mattel released its He-Man toy — with an illustrated He-Man and the Power Sword booklet:
These Sengoku Batman prints amused me — especially Gordon summoning the Bat:
Just looking at the cover art to Andre Norton’s Forerunner will start you thinking about Dungeons and Dragons, Mordicai Knode says, as the pitch black skin and pale white hair match Gygax’s vision of the drow, or dark elves:
The first thing I did, then, upon seeing the cover for this, was flip to the copyright page — 1981 — and then look up the drow on Wikipedia. The drow’s first official mention is in the AD&D Monster Manual, 1977, with their first appearance in Hall of the Fire Giant King (G3) in 1978, which really nailed down their signature “look.”
Just an odd coincidence? Perhaps not, since Norton definitely was affiliated with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons. She wrote Quag Keep in 1979, the first official D&D tie-in novel, about a group of people from the “real world.” How did she know so much about the hobby? Well, because she played in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk game in 1976, of course. Which means…well, what does it mean? I guess it probably means that either Norton thought Gygax’s dark elves looked cool, and cribbed it, or that they put their heads together and cooked that look up together, and that Norton repurposed it for Forerunner. An ancient race of ur-aliens, a pre-human proto-culture that explored the stars before the human species left their home world for the first time? Yes please!
When I learned that Tom Clancy passed away, I was surprised, because I didn’t think he was that old. He wasn’t. He was just 66.
I’ve been meaning to read some Clancy since, well, forever. I didn’t realize that he used the wargame Harpoon to develop The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising:
Clancy’s hallmark, of course, is his realism, particularly his attention to detail in weapons and technical systems; and here we find tell-tale indicators of Harpoon’s influence. For example, when the V. K. Knovalov fires off a pair of “Mark C 533-millimeter wire-guided torpedoes” in the climactic underwater confrontation at the end of the novel, the weapon type and characteristics are taken directly from the data annex in the Harpoon rules; as Larry Bond has told me, the game system’s “Mark C” wire-guided torpedo was simply a generic extrapolation from assumed real-world capabilities since there was no public data for this weapons system at the time. (An examination of later editions of Harpoon published after the collapse of the Soviet Union reveals that these generic listings have been replaced by their correct identifications.) At some point in this process, Clancy struck up a correspondence with Bond over some of the ship data, and the two met in person at a convention not long after.
This meeting was to be the basis for one of the more interesting literary collaborations of the era. Despite enormous pressure from his publishers for the next Jack Ryan book after Red October’s success, Clancy instead pursued an idea he had hit upon with Bond: to write a lightly fictionalized account of a full-scale conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact using Harpoon as an integral part of their creative arsenal to “game” the scenarios and situations in the book. Bond, at the time, was still a naval consultant and not the best-selling author he is today. Understandably, people were nervous. In correspondence to his New York City editor, Clancy declared that the outcomes of the game sessions would furnish “a matrix of detail within which our characters will operate” (the book, meanwhile, had just been given a million-dollar advance). Red Storm Rising, whose working title was “Sunset,” thus became a best-selling work of fiction some of whose key sections—notably the “dance of the vampires” carrier battle and the Soviet airborne seizure of Iceland—were gamed using a tabletop wargames system. (Bond, for his part, was not just the gamemaster, but took an active part in the writing as well, as Clancy’s author’s note at the beginning of the novel makes clear.)
But while Harpoon was integral to the plot, it was not deterministic. For example, the gaming sessions suggested the Soviet bombers might not get through a carrier battle group’s outer air defenses, but Clancy and Bond knew that the “bad guys” needed to win a big one early on for the book’s dramatic arc; Clancy thus independently arrived at the Soviet drone tactics, which is one of the most dramatic (and prescient) episodes in the book. The games did allow Clancy and Bond to maintain consistency as regards the complex interplay of ships and systems and sensors that make up a modern naval battle. The game sessions (dubbed “Vampire I, II, and III” in Bond’s notes) thus quite literally plotted the book in the sense that they offered precisely the temporal and spatial “matrix of detail” that Clancy had promised to anchor the detail-driven narrative prose (I describe the integration of the game sessions with the novel’s plotting in more detail here based on access to Larry Bond’s personal papers).
Red Storm Rising was published in 1985 and immediately shot to the top of the best-seller lists. If portions of it read like what grognards would call an After Action Report, that’s because that’s exactly what they were. For an English professor like me the novel represents a unique example of how games can influence fiction. (Interestingly, the Dragonlance novels, derived from an AD&D campaign, were being published at about the same time.) Moreover, eventually board game versions of both The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising were released, so we arrive at a situation where games have influenced novels that have then had games produced from them!
This Tragedy comic reminds me of the giant-hornet situation in China — even if it’s more of a late-summer phenomenon:
Jimmy Fallon, the Roots & the cast of Sesame Street play the “Sesame Street” theme on classroom instruments:
