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Long Live the Confederation!
It should come as no surprise that the Wing Commander movie club loved Terminator 2: Judgement Day. We were, after all, all about eleven or twelve years old when it came out. It's very interesting comparing The Terminator, which we watched two weeks ago, to this movie. I'll maintain it's a coin flip as to which is better. Terminator 2 is a nearly perfect organism, the product of a lot of creativity but also a lot of money and the kind of oversight that would allow such a picture to come together. The original Terminator isn't as polished and it wears its lack of money on its sleeves… but it has an incredible creativity and an energy behind it that it's hard to find anywhere else. Together they're a hell of a pair!
Here's the polydichloric euthimol! James Cameron included it as the explosive used to destroy Dr. Dyson's laboratory in honor of Outland, which we saw last week (also pictured). In Outland, the substance is a drug that allows miners to work until they go crazy. I guess it's all about how it's concentrated! Wing Commander III features a line about a delivery of polydichloric euthimol to the Victory in its "wild lines"... do you think it's for medical purposes or to blow up Kilrathi?
And here's an updated grid of Privateer VDU comparisons. I do think that these guys are based specifically on the original Terminator appearances rather than the Terminator 2 ones… though Terminator 2 would've been one of the biggest movies in the world when Privateer was being made!
Earl Boen appears again in Terminator 2 as the hapless Dr. Silberman! He played two characters in the first episode of Wing Commander Academy, the Kilrathi captain and the Flight School commandant. He would go on to appear two more times in Terminator productions: the T-2 3D ride film in 1996 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003.
Wing Commander III swipes a shot right from Terminator 2's intro, too! We see a future Terminator crush a human skull exactly like a Kilrathi foot stomps a skull in WC3's losing endgame.
Interestingly, the scene is not quite such a direct steal in the script:
But it's hard to express how much Terminator 2 was in the zeitgeist at the height of Origin's output. Its visuals and ideas were echoed everywhere. Origin even had an SNES game called Metal Morph where you played a liquid metal robot sent through a portal to battle aliens in another galaxy! But it was subtle in addition to direct; just look at Privateer 2's "flowing water" aesthetic for its in-universe UI. And just look at how Bioforge adopted the Terminator robot arm for its award-winning packaging...
The October 7, 1994 issue of Point of Origin quotes a Wing Commander Armada player quoting the movie online:
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Original update published on October 30, 2026
Here's the polydichloric euthimol! James Cameron included it as the explosive used to destroy Dr. Dyson's laboratory in honor of Outland, which we saw last week (also pictured). In Outland, the substance is a drug that allows miners to work until they go crazy. I guess it's all about how it's concentrated! Wing Commander III features a line about a delivery of polydichloric euthimol to the Victory in its "wild lines"... do you think it's for medical purposes or to blow up Kilrathi?
And here's an updated grid of Privateer VDU comparisons. I do think that these guys are based specifically on the original Terminator appearances rather than the Terminator 2 ones… though Terminator 2 would've been one of the biggest movies in the world when Privateer was being made!
Earl Boen appears again in Terminator 2 as the hapless Dr. Silberman! He played two characters in the first episode of Wing Commander Academy, the Kilrathi captain and the Flight School commandant. He would go on to appear two more times in Terminator productions: the T-2 3D ride film in 1996 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003.
Wing Commander III swipes a shot right from Terminator 2's intro, too! We see a future Terminator crush a human skull exactly like a Kilrathi foot stomps a skull in WC3's losing endgame.
Interestingly, the scene is not quite such a direct steal in the script:
But it's hard to express how much Terminator 2 was in the zeitgeist at the height of Origin's output. Its visuals and ideas were echoed everywhere. Origin even had an SNES game called Metal Morph where you played a liquid metal robot sent through a portal to battle aliens in another galaxy! But it was subtle in addition to direct; just look at Privateer 2's "flowing water" aesthetic for its in-universe UI. And just look at how Bioforge adopted the Terminator robot arm for its award-winning packaging...
The October 7, 1994 issue of Point of Origin quotes a Wing Commander Armada player quoting the movie online:
"Hasta la vista a los gatos!" - Vaquero
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Original update published on October 30, 2026
