I'm Anthony Sitko from Capes on the Couch, a show that examines the mental health issues of comic book characters. Part of the Gun and Geek Network. Just like the show you're checking out now, shows on the network are individually owned and opinions expressed may not reflect others. Find other stupendously geeky shows@gunnageeknetwork.com and welcome to play Comics, where once again, we are here looking at a video game based on a comic property and how well it represents that source material. And today I have to confess something to you. First off, the confession is I have Andy Larson back because I roped him into this and said, come on the show or I won't be your friend anymore. And he said, all right, cool. I'll come on the show. I was going to do it anyway.
Yeah, yeah, no, I. I think I reached out to you. I mean, I saw on the Socials that you were needing somebody to talk about Buck Rogers, and I was like, well, I can talk about Buck Rogers. I mean, if you really want me to. So, yeah, don't twist my arm or anything, Chris. It's fine. It's fine.
So here's the other thing. If anybody has listened to the very first episode of Play Comics, you will know that I claim to have been looking at all of the Atari 2600 games all at once because they're really short. And I was trying. I was figuring out how the show was going to go. This was not one of them because I just missed it somehow. And I blame Wikipedia because I was fully trusting their list of video games based on comics.
See what happens? See what happens when you trust the interwebs? Shameful.
My teachers were right. Wikipedia by itself is not a good source, but it is a wonderful place to get started.
That's true. That's very true, Chris.
So, like we've alluded to already, we're here to talk about Buck Rogers, which, despite what you may think, close enough to start it as a comic.
Absolutely. Way back in 1929, it was one of the first comic strips, I believe, that was specifically about science fiction in major newspapers throughout the United States and kind of created a boom in terms of that sub genre of not only comic strips, but eventually comic books, which again, has continued to go on for many, many years now. I mean, it's. I mean, nowadays, you know, capes and stuff. But one of the nicest things about comic books nowadays is we're really starting to. With a lot of the indie. Indie creators, we're really starting to embrace Westerns and horror and sci fi comics. Again, you don't have to just have comic books with, you know, superheroes anymore that you can have a variety of different topics.
So.
And I'm a huge, huge fan of science fiction comics, to be honest. And so not as much I like. But I like Flash Gordon more than Buck Rogers. But I'm a pretty big Buck Rogers fan.
So somehow I have never really gotten into a bunch of the science fiction comics. Like, I mean, I know I've read stuff, I've enjoyed it, but it hasn't been because it's science fiction, which is weird to me because TV movies, those weird books that don't have any pictures in them, science fiction stuff all day long. And I don't know why I haven't just said, all right, cool, here's a science fiction comic. I'm going to read it because it's science fiction.
Does that go the same for manga? Do you. Do. I mean, because I. I'm thinking of like, you know, manga, like Akira, like that science fiction. Like, you know, there's a ton actually of manga out there that. That deals with it. And I know that you talk about manga quite a lot on play comics. So I was just, I was curious, like, is that. Does that go just for American comics or just comics overall?
It's the manga too. For whatever reason. It's like, it's the same thing. I'll sit there and. I mean, I'd probably go read Akira now because I've seen the movie or I'll read some other thing because of, I don't know, future Chris will make up something to fit in here or not. But I won't be like, okay, it's a science fiction manga, or like, it's just weird and I don't know what it is. And part of it might be because science fiction gets really tropey. And looking at Buck Rogers here, I mean, let's admit it, it's tropey as hell, but it's tropey as hell because it's been around since 1929.
That's true. That's very true. And I wouldn't feel too bad about that, Chris, to be very blunt, lots of folks, you know, throughout comic books over the past several decades weren't really into sci fi comics. And it really goes Back to the 1950s, the seduction of the innocent, when they were basically burning comic books. And in essence, really, a lot of comic book publishers moved to Capes because it was a safe genre. You know, Superman, Batman was very safe. And so really, it was abroad that you actually had sci fi comics continue to, you know, expand the tent and become more and more interesting. Like again, the European theater. You, if you've ever heard of heavy metal, which started off as a French series called Metal Heront, which you can get a lot of stuff through Humanoids, which is a great publisher. But yeah, heavy metal and that kind of stuff they continued. And then it kind of came back over to the United States when people started picking up especially UK comics like Judge Dredd and things like that. You start pulling it back. And now finally in the United States, we're starting to see a lot of those sci fi comics, but it's really because they continued to, to gain ground in again, manga and the European theater. So if it hadn't been for those ones, we might not have sci fi comics, even though the roots go deep. I'm talking 1929. That's almost a hundred years ago.
No, it's not. That's not how time works.
No, almost a hundred years years ago that they were talking about that. Boy howdy. You want to talk about some interesting stuff, Here I am. I, I picked up a, a collection, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the Complete Newspaper Dailies, Volume 1. It collects 1929 and 1930. Right. And for this show, I decided to go back and I decided to read it for you, Chris. And within the first, I don't know, six pages, they're already talking about lie detectors again, before the lie detector was even developed. They're like, we should have a machine that can tell whether or not you're lying. Buck Rogers about being from the 20th century. And they hook him up to it and they find out that he was lying and, and, and it's like, wow. Like they're thinking about things that we need in terms of technology again, that's, that's good sci fi. And it's was happening as far back as 1929 with this stuff. So neat, neat, neat stuff in this book.
I tried so hard to go find a place to read these and I was looking online because that's just how I was going to do that. Say what you will, but I'm not going to go spend a bunch of time and money on a book for me to read potentially for like an hour. And that's it. I couldn't find anything, like hardly online at all, which is crazy because 1929, like, you should have stuff in the public domain and it's just not there because of people fighting about the rights and who has it. And who does it, and people just don't want to touch it. There's a wonderful place called the digital comic museum online that I'll link to in the show notes. And they have a bunch of public domain comics on there and there's a big old notice on there. Hey, no Buck Rogers stuff, because we just don't want to deal with it.
Right.
You can pull those pages out of anything that he's in, but no Buck Rogers or we will end your comic uploading thing.
Right, right. And it's sad too, because Buck Rogers was one of those comic books that. Or comic strips that was eventually reprinted in some of the first comic books in the golden age. Like again, famous funnies was one of the first comic books, if not one, you know, probably the first comic books. And really all it did was it took a bunch of comic strips and it basically reprinted in a collection or a book format, kind of like an early trade paperback. The interesting thing about the Buck Rogers reprints is later on in the late 40s, does the name Frank Frazetta ring a bell? He started some of his illustrations doing the covers for these Buck Rogers reprints. And so if you ever are online, all you have to do is type in Frank Frazetta, Buck Rogers. And trust me, even though it's early Frank presented, it's still awesome stuff. Just awesome stuff. So like. But. But you're right, Chris. It hasn't. Buck Rogers has not aged as well as some other comic strips from. From that time. Again, I. I keep on going back to Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon currently has an awesome series out by Mad Cave. They're reprinting all of the original Alex Raymond strips. And again, they're still optioning movies with Flash Gordon. He's much more popular as somebody that just. Folks just know who Flash Gordon is. He's kind of like the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet. People just know him because he was in Dynamite and Dynamite comics and all that other stuff. Buck Rogers again predates Flash Gordon by about five, six years, but still, like, I think the last time I saw Buck Rogers comic was at Dynamite, and that was more than like 10 to 15 years ago. So, like, it's just not a property that people seem to be interested in as much as the swords and sword. The. The swords and you know, sex. That is Flash Gordon.
So the other interesting thing really about Flash Gordon makes me really want to jump in and find some of this stuff is like, Andy, what is some of your favorite science fiction franchises from more current times?
Well, you know, it's whether it's Star Wars. Whether it's, you know, the fifth element, I love that. Again, a lot of that stuff. If you especially things like, again, the big one is Star Wars. I love Star wars and everything that Star wars, but you don't have Star wars unless you have Flash Gordon, unless you have Buck Rogers. You really don't. You know, again, I tell the story about George Lucas originally wanted to make Flash Gordon as a movie. He wanted to copy the old Flash Gordon movie serials with Buster Krab. Couldn't get the rights, and so he made Star wars instead and took a lot of the ideas that he had from that and put it in. And again, I don't want to keep on talking about Flash Gordon, but he is one of my favorites. And it's really hard when you're on a show about Buck Rogers to not compare, because I think that people think of the two things almost like the same time. They're like, oh, fat Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon. But they're different strips and they're completely different thought processes. Again, Flash Gordon is more like Star wars where it's kind of like science fantasy, right? Where they go to a different planet. There's a lot of different alien races, they're running around fighting with swords. There's a lot of swashbuckling, There's a lot of high adventure. Buck Rogers is actually more like Star Trek in which they're trying to show you what the future would look like. Like, they're taking ideas and things that they've seen in the news and saying, well, what happens if we take that and we add, you know, 200 years or 500 years in this case, and say, like, where is that technology going to be in 500 years? Are you going to have weightless belts like that allow you to jump, you know, 50ft in the air? Are you gonna have rocket ships with, you know, are you gonna have deep sea devices? Are you gonna have lie detectors? And so I think, like, although I've never been a huge Star Trek fan, I can really appreciate that. Like, you wouldn't have just like Star Trek and the fact that you have folks that made MP3 players because they saw it on Star Trek first, there's a lot of technology that they're coming out with because they saw it on Star Trek. It was the same thing with Buck Rogers. They would read it in the Buck Rogers comic strip and they were like, well, wow, why can't we have something like this? Why can't we have technology like this? Maybe this is an interesting idea. Let's see if this will work. And so it's a much more like. It's more like hard science fiction. Even though if you read it, it really is, it hasn't aged as well as it should.
And the fun part here too is you don't have to read it. You can go back and see the theatrical movie or the TV series and you know, you're still getting Buck Rogers. It's just, it's a little more modern made, but it's also still set in the future. So you get to see all that past futurism stuff that. There's a fancy word for that I can't remember. And, you know, just getting to see what people think the future is like is always fascinating to me, especially when you can get to the time period that they're in. I don't think we're going to get to the 25th century in our lifetimes, but eventually somebody will and they'll be able to look back at Buck Rogers and man, look at this technology. Look how right they are.
Yeah, yeah. And, and it was, you know, again, I was looking through some of these, these pages and again, some of the concepts that they're throwing out here. They find this guy. I think it's, I don't know, like a year into the strip. They find this guy, Prince Talon. He's from Jupiter. Although, like, they say that Jupiter has, you know, a surface and whatever under all the clouds, which is not really good science. But long story short, they find him and he was, he was kept in suspended animation and kind of like a cryogenic tube. The same thing with Buck Rogers. He's kept in cryogenic, you know, he's kept alive in suspended animation. These are things that, like, again, these are things that we still talk about with science fiction. Can you put somebody, you know, in deep sleep? Can you, you know, and I think this Prince Dallin guy, he was put in, in suspended animation because his spaceship broke down. His spaceship broke down. And they're like, we don't know when people will be coming to get us. So we'll put you in suspended animation so that you can sit out the. Maybe decades, centuries, whatever it happens to be, until somebody comes to rescue you. And you could write a science fiction movie today, put that up on the big screen about that and people would understand what that is. And so, like, there's that stuff in Buck Rogers, which I just think is kind of neat. Is it also, you know, science dumb because they have Tiger Men on Mars? Yeah, yeah. But like, you have to take the good Stuff with the bad. I guess when it comes to this thing they were trying, they were throwing out a bunch of ideas and saying what was gonna stick. And some of the stuff did. Actually, it still, it still permeates throughout science fiction today.
I mean, I think they hit the most important aspect of doing dumb things like that to where they're not just dumb things, they're fun dumb things. And fun dumb things are always welcome.
That is true. That is true. If you're gonna take a swing, you might as well take a big swing and have fun with it. And another reason I will say that I'm not as big of a fan of Buck Rogers compared to Alec, to Flash Gordon is because Alex. Flash Gordon had Alex Raymond on art. And like Hal Foster, you're talking about titans, genuine titans of not only comic book art, but just art in general. Illustrators. I would challenge anybody to go and type into, you know, to Google and say, Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon, and see some of the images that come up on your screen and not say, oh my gosh, is that gorgeous? And that was happening in a Sunday newspaper. That's crazy. Buck Rogers was, was done by Bill Noland and Dick Hawkins. Dick. Dick Hawkins. And although it's good, the art is nowhere near as polished or as, as, as just wonderful to look at than Alex Raymond, but it's still interesting to look at. So I do think that there's, there's still that hook. Again, very detail oriented. There's a lot of diagrams and Flash or Buck Rogers, they show how the spaceships work, where the, where things are riveted together, where the engines are, where. This is a lot of thought about practicality of this machinery and how it would really work in the in and how it would work with the science they knew at the time, which I think is interesting.
And I just really love old media like that. So when I can finally get my hands on something here, I know I'm going to be all over this. I know, like the Little Nemo comics from back then are amazing to look at. So I mean, I'm imagining I'm going to have the same kind of enjoyment there.
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. If you're a huge fan of the Little Nemo stuff by Windsor McKay, again, it's a little more fanciful, it's a little more fantasy driven than Buck Rogers, but it's the same, it's the same, I don't know, deep imagination like this Wellspring. And I think that that's important. Again, a lot of the concepts that we're talking about started here, you wouldn't have rocket ships. You wouldn't have visual representations of rocket ships. Without Buck Rogers, you wouldn't have ray guns. It's amazing that I did some research for the lead up of today's show. The ray guns that were developed as, quote unquote, toys based on the Flash, the Buck Rogers comic strip that they would sell, some of those are highly collectible because they were made out of, like, real metal. They were like pop guns and cap guns. And they had variety. They had different versions of them. And for those folks that may have a couple CDs at home, I don't know if anybody recalls the first album that the Foo Fighters ever put out. It actually has a Buck Rogers ray gun on the front cover of that album. So, like, if you want to see, like, kind of the detail, and that's begun. Because Buck Rogers was so detail oriented, they wanted to show you how the gun was put together and say, like, this is how, you know, you would have a ray gun. And so they became very sought after. And it really stirred up people's imaginations for what the future might hold, which again, is continuing to this day.
You're just making me want to find Buck Rogers stuff more and more now.
That's what I'm trying to do here. That's what I do on the last comic shop. That's what I'm trying to do on Play Comics. I'm trying to get people excited about, again, things that they may not know about comic books, things that they might not be reading, things that they might not be checking out. So that when you go to a local comic book shop or you go to a comic con, and like me, you find a collection of Buck Rogers comic strips, you know, for five, $10 in a used book bin that you're not going to pass it by. You're going to be like, you know what? Even though this looks really old, I'm going to check it out. I'm going to take a, take a gander at it because you're. Again, it's, it's melodramatic. It's. It doesn't age well in terms of certain racial stereotypes. I hate to say it like it doesn't age well. It is from a particular time. But if you can get past some of that stuff, I think you can really find some, some, some diamonds in the rough among these strips. Just make you start thinking about, like, yeah, there's a reason why this was so popular and why some of those ideas continue to this day.
Well, on that note, we're going to take a nap and see when we wake up while I drop some promos for a few other shows.
Hey there, Hell Spawn. Is your regular podcast rotation missing a show that dives deep into the gritty darkness of one of the greatest superhero creations of the 90s? Well, we've got a show for you. I'm Pierce Lydon with George Marston, and this is Spawnography. We're two longtime comic book journalists who are ready to take you from the alleys of New York City to the depths of Hell itself as we dissect each arc of Spawn, unraveling its mysteries and celebrating its legacy along the way. New episodes drop every Monday, wherever you.
Get your podcasts for Todd so loved.
The world he gave his only begotten Spawn.
Spawn.
What is up, Everybody? Patrick Hickey Jr. Here, editor in chief and owner of Legacy Comics. Tune in to our weekly podcast, Talking Comics, where we discuss the entire comic book industry, what's going on here at Legacy Comics, and so much more. Oh, yeah, those are some great shows to check out, but first, let's finish up here. Andy, how long do you think we were asleep for?
I'd say about 50 years. It was kind of a cat nap. Kind of a cat nap. Not very long. We probably have, I don't know, maybe one of those giant mechanical walkers. I always thought those were the coolest thing, right? I'm a huge Star wars nut. I remember seeing the. The. The ad ATS or the AT ATS for the first time on the big screen, and just like, my gosh, like, I was so, so in love with those. I'm like, look at those giant robots. They're awesome. And so I. I love giant robots. They're my favorite thing from sci fi.
I think 50 years is a good amount of time to be asleep because that means we get to wake up just a few years before Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom comes out.
Oh, that is true. That is true. Now, have you played Buck Rogers on the 2600?
I tried to get my emulator working. Now, granted, I tried to get the Colecovision emulator working and completely wasn't even thinking about the 2600 because I was so frustrated by the ColecoVision one, and I should have known better because of the controller on a Colecovision just before that. That's an adventure in itself.
Is that the one with the. The dial pad and the numbers like the old Intellivision? Yeah, yeah, that's. That's no good. But I. I applaud you. Because the 2600 version of this game, I hate to say it, it's crap. Like, it's terrible. Like a lot of 2600 games, it is a poor representation of really what you were going to get, especially in the arcades. When it came to Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom, I think it was. It was done by Sega. And the biggest thing that I know about this is it was the precursor to a lot of games that would become highly popular for Sega later on. I'm talking about Space Harrier. I'm talking about Afterburner, Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom kind of set the tone for that kind of shump. That kind of straightforward enemies coming at you, you're shooting at them. You know, basically flat landscape going off into the distance. That's the kind of game that Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom was. And the closest emulator to that, I think, is some of the Atari versions that you can get. I had it when I was growing up for the Atari 800XL, which was our home computer. So it was comparable to the Atari20 5200 version. And so, like, I remember playing it, you would zoom through basically what looked like futuristic telephone poles, and there would be, like, little spaceships, like little flying saucers that would come up, and eventually something that looked like a robot octopus would jump at you, and you would shoot that, and eventually you go into space, rinse, repeat, four, four levels, and then it was again, high score. Which is probably why I didn't like it.
I mean, I don't mind those kind of games at all. That. That part doesn't bother me, honestly. The only thing that really bothers me is that I was dumb and tried to get the Colecovision going. You know, I could have done 2600. I could have done 5200. I could have done any number of home computer systems. Like, in all reality, I probably just should have done the arcade game.
Yes. Now, that you should have done. If you can fire up a maim, if you can find it, like, that's. That's the version that you should play, because that is genuinely a game that is. That has aged well. I would still play Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom from the arcade version. I think it's a. It's a terrific game. And if it was on, like, the Genesis or whatever, it would have been a perfectly fine game. I said that I wasn't a huge fan of it because at the time, when I was younger, I didn't really understand shumps. Like, I didn't understand the appeal of them because it was the same. Like enemies would just come at you constantly. And I didn't realize that it was all about high score. And like you were supposed to play against other people. And I think, like, again, that's something that you get from the arcade mentality. Doing it on one quarter, getting your high score, putting your name, your initials up there and saying, who's going to beat me? Who's going to beat me here? When you're playing, you're five years old, you're by yourself, eventually it just gets old. And I think that's why I moved on to other games like Donkey Kong or, you know, Popeye. I think I had Popeye for the Atari as well, which I was a huge fan of. Those kind of Nintendo games, which I, which I enjoyed much more. But I won't lie, after we graduated from the Atari 800, the next system that I had and was the SEGA Master System, I didn't have a Nintendo growing up. I got a SEGA Master System. And one of the games I played for it was Space Harrier. And I could see like, oh, this is just Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom, except there's giant mushrooms and weird jumpy things coming at me instead of space octopus. All right, whatever. Giant dragon things. Still a fun game though. Still a fun game.
And I really like how you also have that Buck Rogers, I guess, tradition, heritage, whatever you want to call it of here. Let me do this thing really early in the lifespan of a medium so that other things can come later and build on it. Because you've got all those shoot em ups there.
Oh yeah.
Just building on this game. And I know you don't know this, but listeners will know that I previously recorded an episode last night, actually, as we're recording this one, looking at BC's quest for tires and it, it's the same kind of thing, just run through and get a high score. But it's the same level over and over and over again. This one, it at least gives you those rotating levels in there. So not only do you get the satisfaction of a high score, you also can get the satisfaction of, okay, I got to see the next area and I got to see the next area and I got to see the first area two and three and four times.
Right, right. Plus the graphics are good. I mean, I won't lie. I think at the time I was playing Buck Rogers, one of the things that really captured my imagination, even for the Atari version, was how cool the spaceship was. Right. You don't you. Only you don't see the full spaceship. It's not like Galago, where it's a little pixel at the bottom of the screen or something. It's got fins, it's got giant engines on the back. It looks like a sports car. Like it really is built cool. And you just see it from the back. So all you see is those big thrusters and the big wings as it swoops in and out. And it just looked neat and it's blasting and stuff and, and even though I, you know, at the time it was coming off of the tail end of the, the very popular 70s TV show with BDB, Buck and I, I wasn't. That was more. My older brother, he watched that show. I, I just knew Buck Rogers, the name and it didn't matter. I, I like that. I, I did like that game because of the spaceship. I remember drawing the spaceship, you know, on, you know, my notebook or whatever, just because I thought it had a cool design. And so that's another reason why you should give it a try is because the graphics are cool. They did spend a lot of time thinking about, like, what would look neat in a video game, which again, I think was 1983, which was pretty far back there for game design and not.
Only making a cool ship, but understanding what the console was able to do. So doing a cool ship within those limitations, and that's something I'm always going to appreciate.
Yeah, yeah. That's why you should never play it on the Atari 2600. It's just awful. You don't get the cool spaceship. I mean, again, I think if you're gonna play it for all those folks listening out there, if you're gonna play it, find the 5200 version on Atari. If you want to try, like the home console version, I think that's, that's the easiest way to go. Or maybe the Atari home computer version. It's. It was basically the same game. They poured it into both things. But really, if you want to try it, find yourself a main. Play it on. Play the arcade version because that, I would challenge you not to play that game and not smile because I think that is a pretty decent game. It, it repeats a lot, but cool video cool. And the spaceship looks even cooler in the arcade version. I mean, it's got the, you know, 16 bit graphics and whatever, you know, cutting edge at the time for Sega. And Sega always did good visuals. Like they were always leaps and bounds ahead of people when it came to visuals.
And because the game is so old you don't have any actual voicing in there or anything. So you can listen to one of your favorite podcasts while you play it.
That is true. That is true. Or fire up, I don't know, some King Crimson or some sort of new, new wave stuff from the 80s at the same time. I don't know. It's. It, it's. It is. You're, you're absolutely right though. But if you have like get yourself a joystick, that's the best way to play it. I will say this. I. The. One of the nicest things I saw recently was Atari RE released their, their classic one button joystick for the PC. And so get yourself one of those suckers, throw it on your. Throw it on your. The arcade version and go to town. You're not going to find a better experience than that. And again, has nothing to, it doesn't have anything really to do with Buck Rogers. It's not like you see like Buck Rogers or whatever they think the coolest thing is like the COVID Like there's like this cool astronaut guy holding like a shield and he's like, look at me. I'm so, you know, bad. It's cool. He's not in it. He's not like flying around. He's not, you know, finding people in suspended animation. It's just they use the name to say this is future looking and this is a cool spaceship. There you go. That's. That's what it is.
Eagle eared listeners, I don't think eagles have good ears. Some really good hearing. Animal listeners will notice that we haven't mentioned anything about the plot of the game. That's because the plot of the game is very, very literally, hi, I'm a spaceship. I'm going to go shoot stuff.
Yeah, yeah. There's no, there's no storyline here. I know that on play comic books you often like to talk about. If you played this video game, would it get you interested in the comics? I don't know. I don't know. Because it's not like the game has some sort of story that you're like, oh, I need to find out more about this Buck Rogers cat. It's just like Buck Rogers has a cool name. And you're like, yeah, let's just throw that. Slap that on a game about a cool spaceship. Let's go. We can't call it Star Wars. We might as well call it Buck Rogers. Sure. And I guess in the, in the 80s people still knew who Buck Rogers. Again, it comes off of that, that TV show that would have just wrapped up in the 70s. But still, like, I know as a kid, wasn't like, I was like, yeah, I need to track me down some of that Buck Rogers stuff. And no, I think about that at all. I was like, I'm going to read me some more Star wars comics, to be honest, because that was what was available and that's what I had. And you know, you could have slapped the name though. You could have said this was, you know, Star wars in the Legend or the Planet of Zoom and it would have just been the same for me. It was just a cool looking spaceship flying around, shooting flying saucers. What, what else did you want?
I mean, it sounds like you're saying that just the Buck Rogers vibes are generally what this one gives. Really gets. Right. Looking at it and comparing it to the Buck Rogers property.
Yes, I think that you're, you're absolutely right, Chris. That the, the general thread that ties these two books, these two things together is Buck Rogers has always been synonymous about the future, the cool stuff that you might see in the future. Right. Like the, the possibilities of science fiction and the possibilities of neat stuff stuff. Right. And so anytime you slap Buck Rogers on there, you're kind of like, yeah, getting ready for the future. The cool things that are possible out there in our imaginations. And that's what you get in this game. You get a cool looking spaceship flying around, causing a lot of havoc, shooting its blasters. You get some cool, you know, sci fi visuals. And so yeah, there is a thread there because as far back as 1929 we were talking about Buck Rogers making the future cool. And it does it here in this game too. Yeah, you're right with that, Chris.
It has cool spaceships. I mean, really, what more do you need? Lots of other things have cool spaceships, but Buck Rogers has cool spaceships and you can never take that away from it.
And it does, it has much cooler spaceships than a lot of spaceships I used to play. I mean at the time, you know, some other spaceships or shumps that I had on that old Atari. I had Defender. Defender has a pretty cool spaceship, but it's just a pixel. Like, it's just like a weird triangle pixel thing. I had Space Invaders, that's barely a spaceship. I had Caverns of Mars, which is just a weird looking spaceship if you've ever seen that. It just kind of looks like a sideways sea. So those were the other games and then you had Buck Rogers and that looked like a spaceship for the first time. I Even had a Star wars game. I had, I think the adaptation of Return of the Jedi the Parker Brothers made. And you got a Millennium Falcon in that and a Death Star, but they were just a bunch of pixels like in the Millennium Falcon again, look like a sideways kind of look like the Millennium Falcon, but it didn't have any detail. You couldn't see thrusters on it. You couldn't do anything like that. So what were you supposed to do? And then you got Buck Rogers and you have this cool little thing, bins, giant turrets on the side. You knew where the laser blasts were coming from. And it's dodging in between like these posts and miles of empty tech wasteland below. You just spread out as far as the eye could see. It was kind of neat from a visual. You didn't get it with other games.
What does this one get wrong? Looking at Buck Rogers, what does this.
Like any sort of again, other than it just portraying the coolness of science fiction, right? And the coolness of the future and that stuff. It doesn't talk about Buck Rogers as a character. Doesn't talk about any of the. The years of continuity that the Buck Rogers doesn't get you excited to read a Buck Rogers comic book. Doesn't get you excited to read these comic strips. Because you pick up these comic strips and you're like, this one's from 1929. Is that cool? Spaceships. Nowhere in here. Like, where's that cool spaceship that I saw in the video game? Like so. So from that perspective, I do want to say that I think Sega saw a very popular name, a name that had some sort of brand recognition and slapped it on a. On a title about a spaceship. Like, they were like, we need to call this something that will appeal to American audiences. Let's call it Buck Rogers. People know what that is. Let's go. They could have called it Flash Gordon, to be honest, and would have. Same thing. Could have called it Star Wars. Same thing. Probably couldn't get those licenses. Called it Buck Rogers. Let's go. And so I think that gets it wrong if you are a purist about Buck Rogers, which hell, I'm not. I again, I'm more of a purist about Flash Gordon. But like Buck Roger, I can believe it or I can take it, but it's still kind of cool. Two things. But yeah, that's what it gets wrong.
To be honest, Chris, I think this game is the epitome of you're technically not wrong because it's not like it's giving you any misinformation but that's only because it's not really giving you any information at all beyond the fact that you're in space.
Yes.
Yeah. So I will give it the slightest bit of credit for not leading anybody in the wrong direction.
Okay, that's fair. That's generous, Chris. That's very.
I'm feeling very generous today.
See, here I am, like, just cutting it, no breaks, and you're like, well, it didn't lead anybody astray because it didn't lead anybody anywhere. Like, that's fine. That makes sense. I agree. You're right. Without a plot, it's not like, I don't know, they didn't give you any preconceived notions about what it was going to be. Plus, I mean, it was years and years after. I mean, again, like, I. I doubt anybody really. You know, it was just cool. It was. But they could have called it Battle Scar Galactica. They could have called it, you know, anything. That was something. They just couldn't, in my opinion. They couldn't get those licenses. So they just said, oh, we can get Buck Rogers. Let's go, let's roll.
So it sounds like there's basically no way in hell and space that you would give somebody this game as a primer course on Buck Rogers.
No, no. If I was going to. Honestly, if I was going to give somebody a primer or the comic strip Buck Rogers, well, first I would probably give them the Alex Raymond Flash Gordon strips and see if they liked it. If they liked it, I'd be like, well, there's this other thing that's not, not as good as this, but you might want to check it out because it came first. Right. But really, if I was going to give somebody a primer to Buck Rogers after that, I'd be like, hey, you remember that Foo Fighters album? Yeah, the ray gun off the Foo Fighters album. That's a Buck Rogers ray gun. They'd be like, oh, that was super cool looking. Well, you should check out the comic strip because they were all talking about those, those ray guns and that. There you go. That's. That's how I get. Not this game. I would just tell people to play this game because it's a cool game from 1983. And actually, if somebody came to me and said I liked. I remember playing afterburner in the arcades, you know, in the sit down cockpit and everything like that. I'd be like, you want to try Buck Rogers? Because that's the precursor to that. Like, that's the same game. I Don't think it had a. A cockpit, but it's the. It's. They built on that to make games like Afterburner later on.
See, I'm feeling very generous on this, too, because I would show people the COVID and say, hey, do you think this is cool?
Yeah.
And then when they say, yes. All right, cool. Let's go check out Buck Rogers stuff.
Right? Well, that's true, too. I have to give you credit, Chris, because that box art for Flash Gordon or for Buck Rogers in the Planet of Zoom is super cool looking. Again, there's not. That guy doesn't appear anywhere. Except maybe you could, you know, picture him in the cockpit of that cool spaceship, which I did. But it's cool. It's cool art. And like Gar's Revenge or any of that awesome Atari 2600 box art, it sells you a story that hopefully the game will deliver on. Sometimes not in the Atari 2600, but I think in the 5200 era, I think the game definitely at least delivers some goods with being a decent game.
So since this Buck Rogers character that's on the COVID never appears in the game, if you can get this game and somehow they magically had enough memory to have an actual end screen and you can see the pilot coming out of there. Which Muppet has been flying the ship the whole time?
Which Muppet? Oh, geez, man. All right, so which Muppet would be. Well, it's got to be one of the pigs in space, right? Like, I mean, they're. They're the ones that go into space. So what was the name of the. My favorite pig in space was always the one with the glasses. Like the old. Was that Dr. Swine something. Maybe I forget what his name was. Crap.
I can't remember their names to save my life right now. I can picture.
But you're. But you know who I'm talking about.
Yeah, exactly.
He had the glasses and the, like, the grandpa. The weird, crazy grandpa hair, and he was always. He talked in that. He was the. He was the best. He was always the best. But, yeah, I'd have him come out because then he'd be like, oh, wait a second, him. Ah, but at least he'd be a pig in spa.
Well, Andy, it has been great talking to you about all of this. If people want to hear more from you, where else can they find you around the Internet?
Well, I am the host with the most, Andy Larson. You can find me every single Tuesday over at www.lastcomics. it's a terrific website where you can Rate, review and subscribe to the Last Comic Shop podcast. It's a tremendous podcast that we review a book every single week. We talk about other comic books, make recommendations, everything to bring folks into the comic book tent. There is a comic book for everybody out there. We want you to be excited about it. We want you to be able to go to a comic book shop or a bookstore and say, yeah, I know about these characters. I heard about this book. I'm gonna pick it up and read it for myself. So make sure that you're checking us out. And again, We've got over 200 back episodes in our archives, all of them Evergreen. So if there's a book that you've read recently, comic book wise, and you're like, gosh, I wonder if the Last Comic Shop talked about that. Take a look at our back archives, find that episode, listen to it, you will be well rewarded. You can also find us on all the social medias over at Last Comic Shop. We primarily are on Bluesky nowadays. It's where we found our little niche. So check us out there. But we're on the other places as well.
And as always, you know, we'll have links down in the show notes because clicking links is so much easier than trying to remember to spell things. And, you know, tell the Last Comic Shop not only how great their show is when you listen to it, because I know you're going to, but also how much you want to hear the other co hosts come over here and take a guest spot. Because so far I've only had Andy and I think the rest of them are fake.
Oh, no. Chad and Ja, you just have to find, you know what, if you ever do one of those Star Trek, you do a Star Trek video game. My co host, J. Scott, he played all of them. He was a massive Star Trek fan growing up. Played all of them as far back as the Atari versions of Star Trek. So if you can find one, I'm sure he played it and he'd love to come on and talk about some Star Trek comic books and the Star Trek video games that go along with them.
Those backwards episodes can get fun.
Yes. Yes, they can. Yes, they can. But thank you so much for having me on, Chris. Thank you for helping, for letting me talk about just video games and comic books that are decades, almost centuries old that people probably don't know about. Getting an opportunity to educate. And again, hopefully I made you a fan of Buck Rogers at least. Wanted you to check out the Buck Rogers comic book. I've done my job here. On Play Comics.
Thank you for making a wonderful show over there and a wonderful show for me being able to edit this one up because you just make easy shows to edit and I appreciate that. And I don't know if that's going to stay in there, but it probably will.
Oh, well, Chris, thank you so much. From one host to another, thank you again for having me on today.
If you want to hear more from me, then the best place to do that is over on Play Comics, where there's links to all the social media things and stuff, which is mostly Blue sky because that's just. I mean, I have time for one super consistently and that's just the one that I've settled into. So yeah, Blue sky, that's great. If you want to be on the show, then, you know, for one thing, Blue sky is where I announce most of the time that I'm looking for guests. And especially if I'm looking for specific guests for specific episodes, then that's where a lot of it happens. Or there's a link down in the show notes where you can see the list of everything I'm looking to get booked the soonest. If something on there catches your eye, if you have a friend who you think is going to catch your eye, especially if that friend turns out to not be a good fit for any of the things that you told me would be good for them, but something else catches their eye and you fail the task successfully, then yeah, that would be a good reason to go look at the list of what I'm looking to get booked the soonest. And you know, let's make something happen because it'll be fun. Not that that has ever happened before, especially not in the past two days. If you want to help support the show, then you can be like, oh no, look, class or Dan McMahon and give the show money. You know, there is the Patreon that's set up, which granted, I do need to be better about putting things up there, but it does exist. And you can give the show money because unfortunately it costs money to make a podcast. But this is cheaper than therapy or going to the flea market every weekend. So you know I'm going to do it. Or you can just share the show with friends or enemies or random people on the street or, you know, the cool bus driver or the not cool bus driver driver. I don't care. More people listening is good, so I'll take that. Don't forget, the Play Comics is a part of the Gunageek.com network, home to such wonderful shows as Legends of Shield where right now we're looking at Daredevil Born again. And I just cannot see how this show is going to end at all. And I don't think Charlie Cox is going to be able Charlie Cox can probably see it, but Matthew Murdoch can't see how the show is going to end either. Yeah, I went there because I'm stupid and not only did I go there, I re recorded all of this and I went there again to try to make up for being a horrible person like that. Carrington Martin and I are looking at all kinds of media that we experienced growing up, taking all the lessons we learned from there, all the lessons we could have learned from there because it was just sitting there in front of our face and we missed it and wondering, hey, why are we supposed to forget now all these lessons that we learned as kids? Because they suddenly don't apply anymore now that we're adults, we don't know and we're exploring that idea coming probably mid April. We're still ironing out the details there. April at some point because April just seems like a good month. Which, oh crap, is next month. When did that happen? If you like the music that I'm rudely talking on top of, head on over to BackingTrack GG to check out all the great music over there and maybe grab something for your own project. But most of all, just grab a game, grab a stack of comics, and go find yourself a new favorite character.