COMM STATION

With Darren Maxwell

 

I see the age of 21^st Century pinball machines is here. A little while ago I saw the Star Wars Phantom Menace pinball machine, and unlike previous “pinnies” where the animated display was on the back board, this time it merges with the playing board and is in colour too. The animated screen is done in such a way that you can’t see where the playing board ends and the screen begins. The trouble is, you’re supposed to be watching the ball, not the pretty pikkies at the top!

 

With this new inclusion, there are now a total of four Star Wars pinball machines in existence, the other three being: Episode 1, Star Wars Trilogy classic (the blue one), Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition (with the curved style face board) and The Empire Strikes Back (in the wide box, with the same board layout as the Space Invaders pinball machine). So stick ’em all side by side and have a mega Star Wars pinnie play off!

 

I hear that Tim Burton is planning to do a remake of Planet of the Apes. Now wasn’t Arnold Schwazenegger meant to have been starring in a remake of Planet of the Apes too? Is it possible to remake a film that has already been remade? Or maybe Tim thinks Arnie’s version is going to be a bit dodgy so he’s getting in early to make his own remake… of the remake.

 

I see that they are planning to make a new Terminator film – or is that two Terminator films? As soon as I heard that James Cameron was NOT going to be involved I couldn’t help but shudder in fear. The guy is a genius film maker and I think only he could make another Terminator film that would be of the same high standard of the first two. So do you think it’s the dollar signs are driving this venture – as usual - and not the faithfulness to the story? Wouldn’t you hate to see The Terminator suffer the same fate as Alien, Superman, Batman, Battlestar Galactica, and all the other great films that eventually died under the weight of crappy “cash in” third and fourth sequel movies?

 

Whilst on the subject of up-and-coming film sequels, I overheard someone say recently that there are plans for another Alien movie: this time Ripley ends up on the home planet of the aliens. Wouldn’t that premise have been best suited for the third Alien film instead of the stuff we were served up in Alien cubed!

 

Another possible variation would have been the aliens landing on Earth and seeing the carnage there.  Either way, you know this film would’ve been a hit as a follow up to the excellent Aliens. But instead we’ve had to endure two very lacklustre movies while waiting for the right one to come along. Be honest: didn’t you think while watching Alien Resurrection which featured a cast of human bunnies stuck on a ship with a swag of agro aliens on the loose, picking them all off one by one, that you had seen something like this before?

 

Are you one of those people who can never get enough Star Wars? Well these days you can get a lot more than you ever thought possible. The Web site www.theforce.net is showcasing a number of fan-made Star Wars-inspired films, all downloadable for you to enjoy on your PC – including some Australian ones. I suspect the first Star Wars fan film to pioneer this new technology was the excellent Troops which came out in 1997 - which has probably also inherited the crown as the Hardware Wars for the newer Star Wars generation.

 

People love seeing the Director’s Cut of a film as they have those juicy missing scenes we hear so much about – thereby making them run longer. Terminator II, The Abyss, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Aliens, Blade Runner, Star Wars: A New Hope and Spawn have all been extended to appear the way the director originally wanted them. Well on the other side of the spectrum is the director’s cut of ……. Picnic at Hanging Rock which believe it or not has been made shorter! Yep, the director actually cut stuff out of it – now that’s gotta be a first (personally I think the girls were kidnapped by ET and his mates during their first visit here).

 

Do you get the feeling that DVD is increasing in popularity not for the films you can watch, but for all the other tidbits that are also available on the disk?. It seems that more interest is generated watching all the behind-the-scenes material than the actual film itself. The funny thing is that movie producers will probably now have to employ people whose sole job will be to film a kind of mini-documentary during a movie’s production, purely for inclusion into the DVD release later on. Speaking of which, I heard that Star Wars The Phantom Menace is being scheduled for release on video only, which is frustrating the DVD-ites no end.

 

I love finding out about sci-fi related car registration plates, and this one is a beauty. I ran into someone who said that they had seen the number plate TMA 1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly, which of course was the technical name for the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey). That’s a really subtle sci-fi plate if ever I saw one. Another nifty plate that was spotted recently by an avid FRONTIER reader was SG 1 (Stargate: SG-1), which is a cute little homage to the TV show.

 

 

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