We kick off our classic sci-fi arc with a viewing of ET. With some help from Techdrew, Audra checks out an old Atari game known to many as the worst game ever made. And we run down the week in geek including our Parsec win (w00t!), Marvel’s new Broadway-bound Spider-Man musical, and scientists’ first test of a real-life tractor beam (sort of).
Awesome! Already downloading and can’t wait to listen.
So I was curious after the cast and looked it up. Apparently the BMX bikes used in E.T. were Kuwahara’s which Mongoose and Diamond Back promptly copied parts of after the movie was released.
http://www.dreamgate.ne.jp/kuwahara/history/et.html
Sweeet!
Actually, I used my last Audible credit to get the last book of the Prince Rodger series. The ending is a bit open-ended, but still pretty cool.
Awesome cast, really enjoyed it.
RetroUSB is a great place for the USB controllers and adapters. It will be interesting to see Sean’s reaction to some of these games (if he get’s time ;)). So much of the greatness of the classic games are tied up in nostalgia I can’t separate the two. Chrono Trigger was one I missed back in the day, played a couple years ago and loved it.
Sean, did you every play through any of the classic NES games?
For the record, Chuck is totally a Viper pilot! The only reason we never saw him in the series is cause he was CAG on the flagship and it was the first targeted by the cylons.
I’m in the middle of the podcast, but wanted to pop in and say, I freaking love Super Mario Brothers 3. For me, it will always be the most perfect Mario. Wish I could play it now!
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“Penis breath”
I christened the term “Lucas Breath” during the frak. ^^
http://forum.galacticwatercooler.com/showthread.php?p=311370#post311370
http://forum.galacticwatercooler.com/showthread.php?p=311373#post311373 -
Award
Grats on the award. Post pictures of the award when you receive it. -
Shakespeare in the original Klingon? ^^
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Models. Can’t most actors qualify as models? ABC is like the only channel that put non-model looking actors to work. d:
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No surprise coming here, but my first and maybe all-time favorite arcade game was Pole Position. Then, racing games since then. I liked Pacman and all, but racing games was my thing.
I don’t have a racing game now because most are console based. And, current PC racing games aren’t as visual. Plus, the cost of buying a quality racing wheel/hardware (and where to put it) is an obstacle too.
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“No blood, don’t break nothing.”
Sounds like my mom. “I ain’t mopping no blood…” -
“Drew Barrymore flew by everybody in that movie at the speed of sound.”
Holy crap, you ain’t lying!! And, we’re having a Firestarter frak this Thursday btw. -
Lol! We made mushroom jokes at the beginning of the frak. (:
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Wow! I never picked up how fast ET was at the beginning compared to the rest of the movie. Thanks. Hilarious.
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I had the wind-up ET and a 8x10-ish 10-piece ET puzzle. Only problem… I had not seen the movie, and ET scared the crap out of me at the time.
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I’m with Sean on the Neil Diamond song… Maybe not to the extent he is, but still. (:
During our frak, we all had different moments and scene where we’d lose it. For me, it was seeing Gert cry. For someone else, it was when the flowers died. Someone else was blubbering ever since ET was found by that river…
Can you imagine never having seen the movie and guys trying to be macho and not cry? If someone actually managed not to cry, I’d imagine other ppl thinking there’s something wrong with that person…
One thing about the military in this movie, they didn’t treat ET like a security threat but a biological threat. They wanted to make sure they could co-exist and tried saving instead of just killing or letting him die for study. Not many movies and shows portray the military in that light outside this movie and Stargate SG-1.
Out of all the product placement in this movie, besides cars and maybe bike brands, only the Polaroid is no longer around.
You know I had the Parsec page with the announcement of GWC’s winning that award up on my screen and I still couldn’t frakkin’ say it right when I called in! Glad I wasn’t the only one…bwahahaha!
My early foray into computers was the C16, then the C64.
But the games I tend to remember are the following:
Arcade
Tron
Streetfighter II
Golden Axe
The D&D one - Guantlet?
Final Fight
Turtles
Killer Instinct
C64
Rick Dangerous
Stunt Car Racer
Micropose Soccer
Batman/Robocop/Platoon (Any Movie tie in with Ocean)
Raster Runner (A cheap light cycle game based on tron that was actually pretty good)
Megadrive
Road Rash 1/2/3
Sonic
Streets of Rage II
Turrican
Madden 98
I loved my megadrive
Does anyone remember the Captain N, and the super mario brothers cartoons that were big in the 80s.
On a last note, I’ve never had a reese’s pieces…I’m wondering what Uk chocolate do they not have in the USA?..Or are we so global now that we each have each other’s chocolates.
Oh yeah, we had an Atari 2600.
I had the Superman game. Looking back, it was so lame and so crappy, but I remember really enjoying it.
EDIT: Here’s the you tube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-wgQa6Hb78
I just loved this podcast.
First, congratulations on winning the Parsec Award. Y’all really deserve it.
I started out gaming on the old Ataris, moved to the NES through middle and high school’ and spent most of my college years on the Sega Genisis. I’ve given up on most of the newer system, because I find that I can’t keep up with all of the buttons. My brother is about 10 years younger than I am. When ever I go over to his house he loves to kick my ass on something like Madden. Last time he was over visiting, I downloaded Tecmo Super Bowl onto my daughter’s Wii, and got my revenge.
Sean - I am so glad that someone else thinks that Yo Gabba Gabba looks like it was created By some one tripping in an adult toy store. I walked past my daughter watching it, and thought the parental controls on my cable box weren’t working.
I really have to thank you guys for making me take another look at ET. When it was re-released a few years back my wife and I went to see it, and all could think was, “I don’t remember ET being this boring!”. I hadn’t actually thought of it as truly being from a child’s point of view. Really opened my eyes as to what true genius the movie was.
As for genius though, I recently saw a documentary on the making of Jaws. John Williams had to convince Spielberg that a musical score of only 2 notes would work. After months of argument, Spielberg conceded, and you now have one of the most iconic movie scores ever.
I’m glad to hear, from Sean’s report, that there are more heroic girls in children’s entertainment. There weren’t that many when I was a wee lass. I remember I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with my siblings, and we totally saw through any attempt to make April look “cool” or like a viable heroic figure. We all wanted to be the Turtles. Most of what I saw of good strong girl role models in media as a child were in books.
The podcast has led me and spouse to talk about what we did for video games when we were children (as we’re both kids of the early 80s, albeit on different continents). As I noted on Twitter today, I remember playing reader rabbit and some magical math game on the Apple II which I thought was awesome, and we played Oregon Trail in “computer class” in elementary school (when they weren’t trying to get us to type with a cardboard thing over our hands). Middle school, I got to do a special project to try to keep girls interested in science doing some web design (hello, mid-nineties!), and I took the computer science class in my high school, though as I noted earlier, all we learned was BASIC. After that though, I kind of stopped messing with computers (for a lot of different reasons).
In terms of gaming systems, the only one my family had when I was small was an SNES, though I got to play on the original NES sometimes when I was at someone else’s house. By the time I had lost interest in computers as machines and such (as opposed to a tool to be used to accomplish other goals), my siblings also had a playstation, which we played. And then a PS2…
Whereas spouse just played arcade games as a child, and ze has a very funny story about “borrowing” a Nintendo 64 from a girl who was interested romantically in hir. Ze didn’t have hir own gaming system until ze got a PS2, but we were already dating by then. Ze doesn’t remember ever using a computer in school… even at hir fancy high school, ze admits they probably had computers, but ze never got to use them!
And now, we both play MMORPGs on our PCs, and we have a PS2, a Wii, and a PS3. How times change 
Casilda’s story reminds me of about a decade ago when PS1, Genesis, Saturn, etc., were prominent. Instead of calling game systems their proper names, older generations generically called them all as “The Nintendo.” I’m just curious whether that’s still the case, have they started or learned to differentiate between them, or do they generically call them Wii or Playstation or Xbox now?
My brother and I had an Atari 2600 and 5200. He got a SNES after he moved out. I played the heck out of the 5200 so much that we had to get new controllers every 3-6 months (only twice). But, I don’t consider my experience with consoles as extensive, which is prolly why it slipped my mind to mention this previously.
Back in 2006 the band The Wintergreens did a music vid featuring the ET game.
ET videogame commercial
You know, that kid in the commercial is relatively calm watching ET get nabbed by the humans.
E.T.: The Extra Trivia
- Buckner & Garcia, the rock duo of “Pac-Man Fever” fame, wrote an ET song that was never released. It’s available at the tail end of this podcast, which covers the duo’s career. It’s available here…
http://jawboneradio.blogspot.com/2006/06/jawbone-117-pac-man-fever-interview.html
- The adventures of ET and Ellioooot continued in the novel ET: The Book of the Green Planet. If I remember correctly, it alternates chapters between Elliot and ET. The Wiki ET articlesays…
“William Kotzwinkle—author of the film’s novelization—wrote a sequel, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, published in 1985. The novel concerns E.T.'s return to its planet, Brodo Asogi; its subsequent demotion and exile to its childhood “farm”; and its attempts to return to Earth by effectively breaking all the laws of Brodo Asogi.”
The aliens have vast psychic powers, and can project little avatars all the way to our galaxy. But ET never paid attention in training, and his attempts to contact Elliot always come close, but never quite reach him.
And you can get it cheap here…
http://www.amazon.com/E-T-Book-Green-Planet-Novel/dp/0743216407
You know I’ve never seen ET, didn’t do anything for me when it was released and took so long to come around to telly I made a point of not watching it in protest over how much the BBC paid for the rights (yeah that’s pathetic I know:) ). Since then I’ve pretty much gone out of my way to never watch it especially with the bad press after the re-release of the movie.
In terms of old games I go back to text adventures on the PET and then the glory that was INFOCOM, great days:D
The burial of the E.T. cartridges in New Mexico was indeed true, at least according to Snopes.com. Sadly, it did not end up as buried treasure.
From the article:
In this case the rumor was accurate, although it wasn’t the first time Atari had destroyed cartridges, nor was E.T. the only game dumped in New Mexico. Some other video game manufacturers attempted to rid themselves of excess inventory by selling it at sharply reduced prices, but Atari, stuck with millions of games and consoles that were largely unsellable at any price, sent fourteen truckloads of merchandise from their plant in El Paso, Texas to be dumped in a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in late September 1983. In order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains.