Anyone who grew up with a controller in his sweaty little hands had at least one moment when a video game touched him emotionally. For some people, it was Sephiroth turning your girlfriend into a shishkabob. For others, it was Snake visiting Arlington Cemetery. But my most mind-blowing gaming experience was when I beat the Double Dragon arcade machine.
Actually, scratch that. I finished it; I don’t think I really beat it.
It was my freshman year of college. One rainy Saturday afternoon, my roommate Joe and I were contemplating the possibility of doing some actual work. Instead, we headed to Cutler’s Records, which had a row of classic arcade machines in the back. Our plan was to use only three dollars in quarters to win Double Dragon (and possibly pick up the new Britney Spears album while we were there).
We watched as the lovely Marian was gut-punched and dragged away by the Black Warriors. Then a garage opened and our two protagonists emerged: Billy and Jimmy, karate masters with tempers as fiery as their mullets. Joe and I cracked our knuckles and proceeded to crack dozens of digital skulls. The fighting raged through the city streets, a factory, a forest, and finally the headquarters of the street gang, which appeared to be some sort of Pagan temple.
Joe and I weren’t particularly adept, and the quarters balancing on the screen started to disappear at an alarming rate. But finally, we entered a room and saw Marian chained to the wall. At this point, we were low on health and cheering each other on loudly enough to scare everyone out of the World Music section of the store, which was probably just as well. A couple of jump kicks later, the last bad guy hit the floor and disappeared. We’d won.
Then, we saw this…
10 PRINT “Do you have a problem? (Y or N)”
20 INPUT $A
30 IF $A = “N” GOTO 120
40 PRINT “Can someone else help? (Y or N)”
50 INPUT $B
60 IF $B = “Y” GOTO 120
70 PRINT “Can you find them? (Y or N)”
80 INPUT $C
90 IF $C = “N” GOTO 120
100 PRINT “Maybe you can hire… the A-Team.”
110 GOTO 130
120 PRINT “You cannot hire the A-Team.”
130 END
Dan O'Bannon, apparently wearing some sort of bathrobe or kimono.
If you’re any kind of a geek, you’re currently saying to yourself, “But wait, isn’t George Romero the undisputed creator of the modern zombie?” Night of the Living Dead did indeed make zombies into one of our collective nightmares. But it was Dan O’Bannon’s lesser known Return of the Living Dead that introduced some of the big “rules” for zombies that are now almost universally accepted in the genre.
What’s interesting about the zombie is that it’s the only major movie monster that didn’t reach maturity in the 30’s or 40’s. Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941) created pop culture archetypes that were pretty cemented by Pearl Harbor. There were also plenty of zombie movies being made during this period. In fact, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Kenemore, the author of the very clever self-help guide The Zen of Zombie, and he told me one of his favorite zombie films is actually from 1941.
The film composer Howard Shore has written an opera. It is an adaptation of one of the movies he did the music for. However, it’s probably not the one you’d expect/hope. Here’s a list of operatic movies Howard Shore has scored, that are NOT the movie in question: The Lords of the Rings, The Departed, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Aviator, and The Gangs of New York.
Instead, Howard Shore looked back upon his body of work, and decided The Fly really needed to be an opera. And there’s a photo after the jump.
Dear Bryan,
First of all, l’m a big fan. The fact that you spent your evenings down at the drive-in in the summer of ‘69, when you were only nine years old, is truly awesome.
But I have an issue with “Heaven,” your first big hit. The lyrics of the chorus have always bothered me:
Baby you’re all that I want
When you’re lying here in my arms
I’m finding it hard to believe
We’re in heaven
To me, that always sounded like:
Baby, you’re all that I want when you’re lying here in my arms. I’m finding it hard to believe we’re in heaven.
Which makes it sound like you’re really underwhelmed and being sarcastic about it. “This is heaven? If you say so.”
That’s not you, Bryan.
Of course, it’s actually supposed to be read this way:
Baby you’re all that I want. When you’re lying here in my arms, I’m finding it hard to believe. We’re in heaven!
But to me, it just never scanned right.
So here’s my suggestion - just change the lyric “I’m finding it” to “It isn’t.” So the revised quatrain reads:
Baby you’re all that I want
When you’re lying here in my arms
It isn’t hard to believe
We’re in heaven
I think that would clear up a lot of confusion. Thanks, Bryan.
Sincerely,
Matthew Belinkie
