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Talking Pondo: The Last Starfighter and Night of the Comet
Description
In this episode, Marty gives Clif the film The Last Starfighter to watch and Clif gives Marty Night of the Comet to watch.
First up is Night of the Comet, the 1984 post-apocalyptic sci-fi comedy starring Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney and Robert Beltran. Marty revisits a movie he loved as a kid and discovers that watching it again decades later brings back a very specific snapshot of 1980s movie culture. Clif and Marty talk about the film's wonderfully strange combination of teen comedy, zombies, video games and low-budget sci-fi. They also discover a few familiar faces hiding in the cast.
Then it's Clif's turn with The Last Starfighter, the 1984 adventure about a teenager whose mastery of an arcade game turns out to be much more important than he ever imagined. Clif and Marty dig into the movie's groundbreaking computer-generated effects, the dream of seeing a video game become a real spaceship and the video game that almost existed. They also discuss the way The Last Starfighter captures that particular moment when video games suddenly felt like they were going to change everything.
Both movies are packed with video game references and both are unmistakable products of their time. And both have that quality of being movies you could watch repeatedly on cable or VHS until they practically became part of your childhood. Clif and Marty talk about the difference between today's instant-consumption movie culture and the old experience of living with a movie and watching it five, ten, twenty times because there simply wasn't anything else on.
Along the way: Tempest, Atari, the great video-game crash, Robert Beltran's convention potential, the Kevin Bacon game, Clint Eastwood and an orangutan, Catherine Mary Stewart, VHS and cable television.
Welcome to Talking Pondo. This is where it starts.
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The Love Song of William H Shaw
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Season One
Theme Song "The Rain" by Russ Pace
Photos by Geoffrey Notkin