Today, we’re discussing the recent port of the game to the Nintendo Switch as well as the release of Massimiliano’s recent fantasy art book, Fragments of the Past. Most of this session was spent discussing the creative process. We’ll be discussing more about the book next week, so just a taste this episode.
There are many, many beautifully rendered painting in the book which we’ll explore more next episode.
By the way, if you haven’t gotten the chance to check out the 80s retro soundtrack for Nirvana Pilot Yume done by Retroxx, check it below or here:
Since we’re essentially talking about the nature of the creative process in this episode, I thought for this segment, I’d post a little on the circuitous path Dave Stevens’ creation, The Rocketeer, took flight, first on paper and, eventually, on screen. From the April ’91 edition of Comics Scene:
See you next week for Part 2!
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There are now Thirteenth Hour toys! If you’d like to pick up one of these glow in the dark figures for yourself, feel free to email me or go to the Etsy store I set up (https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThirteenthHourStudio) and get them there.
If you haven’t checked out “Arcade Days,” the song and video Jeff Finley, Brent Simon, and I finished one year ago, click on the link below to do so!
You can find more pictures and preview clips of “Arcade Days” on IG as well as this podcast’s FB page.
Empty Hands, the synth EP soundtrack to the novella, Empty Hands, is now out for streaming on Bandcamp.
Stay tuned. Follow along on Spotify! There is also a growing extended Thirteenth Hour playlist on Spotify with a growing number of retro 80s songs.
Follow The Thirteenth Hour’s Instagram pages: @the13thhr for your random postings on ninjas, martial arts, archery, flips, breakdancing, fantasy art and and @the13thhr.ost for more 80s music, movies, and songs from The Thirteenth Hour books and soundtrack.
On this week’s show, I had the opportunity to continue the discussion with Jim and Hal from the Rocketeer Minute podcast, which if you never heard of the Movies by Minute podcast movement (I hadn’t until stumbling upon their show), it’s where people dissect a movie, generally one minute at a time. Check out episode 249 for the first part of the conversation.
In the intro, I’m reading from a book I spent hours flipping through as a kid, The Smithsonian Book of Flightby Walter Boyne.
I always enjoyed the first third of the book since it was devoted to the pioneering and golden ages of aviation, that time when a garage tinker could put something together that – even if it might not ultimately fly – the dream was there, and it seemed attainable. So I’m reading from the introduction of the book on the Experimental Aircraft Association (at least, the 1987 iteration of the organization), Hal’s employer, since we’ll talked a bit about them last time and will be again at the end of the episode but also because making the goal of aviation attainable for everyday people captures the kind of hopeful spirit for a better tomorrow that The Rocketeer inspires.
The first aviation meet from 1910 …
To the yearly EAA gathering …
The barnstorming photo my daughter was commenting on at the start of the episode …
The “E” in EAA stands for experimental! Back to the roots of aviation.
We then continue talking about the idea of what makes for a rewatchable film. That was my regular pattern for a number of years as a kid (getting up early on Sundays, usually, to rewatch movies I’d already seen). Most of those films ended up being ones I’ve talked about in some fashion on this website or on the show, ones like Labyrinth, Real Genius, Karate Kid 3 (the only one I had), Some Kind of Wonderful, The Last Starfighter, and, of course, The Rocketeer).
If you enjoyed The Rocketeer, you may enjoy these films:
–Zone Troopers (also written by Paul DeMeo and Danny Bilson)
–Out There(also starring Bill Campbell, playing the same kind of earnest, down on his luck character to Cliff)
–The Brylcreem Boys (also starring Bill Campbell, playing the a downed flier similar to the sort of character you’d expect Cliff to be had he enlisted in WW2).
It was great to connect with Jim (of TVDads.com) and Hal (of the EAA) to discuss the making of their show. Here’s how to find out about their show and/or connect with them.
–The Final Mission by Chris Henry and Hal Bryan. From the EAA product page: “This book tells the powerful and personal stories of some of the people who have stepped back in time by taking a flight on the Experimental Aircraft Association’s restored B-17 bomber, Aluminum Overcast.” Just got mine and am looking forward to reading it!
This little animated .gif is, of course, from the point in the movie where the Rocketeer, not above a little self conscious vanity, asks how he looks. Peevy, not above a little blunt honesty, says “Like a hood ornament!” The Rocketeer blasts off for the first time, Peevy gets blown backwards into the hangar, and I get a name for this part of the podcast!
Stay tuned for more Rocketeer talk next week! Stay safe!
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There are now Thirteenth Hour toys! If you’d like to pick up one of these glow in the dark figures for yourself, feel free to email me or go to the Etsy store I set up (https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThirteenthHourStudio) and get them there.
If you haven’t checked out “Arcade Days,” the song and video Jeff Finley, Brent Simon, and I finished one year ago, click on the link below to do so!
You can find more pictures and preview clips of “Arcade Days” on IG as well as this podcast’s FB page.
Empty Hands, the synth EP soundtrack to the novella, Empty Hands, is now out for streaming on Bandcamp.
Stay tuned. Follow along on Spotify! There is also a growing extended Thirteenth Hour playlist on Spotify with a growing number of retro 80s songs.
Follow The Thirteenth Hour’s Instagram pages: @the13thhr for your random postings on ninjas, martial arts, archery, flips, breakdancing, fantasy art and and @the13thhr.ost for more 80s music, movies, and songs from The Thirteenth Hour books and soundtrack.
On this week’s show, I had the opportunity to connect with Jim (of TVDads.com) and Hal (of the Experimental Aircraft Association) from the Rocketeer Minute podcast, which if you never heard of the Movies by Minute podcast movement (I hadn’t until stumbling upon their show), it’s where people dissect a movie, generally one minute at a time. So one minute of the movie = 1 episode. The 1991 Rocketeer film, based on the original comic by Dave Stevens, screenwritten by Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson, and directed by Joe Johnston, is 108 minutes long. But there are actually 116 Rocketeer Minute Podcasts if I counted right, making for over 60 hours of listening. That’s one hell of a DVD commentary! (Rocketeer fans have long had to deal with a dearth of any substantial extras on the official DVD releases of the film, but even if there had been a DVD commentary, the amount of material on the Rocketeer Minute podcast would be over 30 times whatever was on the disc!)
As mentioned, I found their show totally by accident. Ever since I learned about the internet in the mid 90s, I would occasionally type “Rocketeer” in whatever search engine was used at the time just to see what popped up. As I recall, there was really only one Rocketeer site in the mid 90s (when I first realized that the internet was someone more that those AOL Online floppy discs that used to come in the mail – we never had AOL Online, but for awhile, that’s what I thought this “internet” thing was). While there was never a ton of info online about the film and comics, there were always a few sites and fanart pictures on places like Deviantart. Earlier this fall, I was doing what I usually did, this time typing in “Rocketeer” in Twitter (which I only half understand), and lo and behold, something called The Rocketeer Minute popped up. (I’d looked around on iTunes in the past, back when I did episode 53 on my first rewatching of The Rocketeer since childhood and hadn’t found any podcasts devoted to the Rocketeer; turns out I was about a year too early.) I listened to the first few episodes that night and was hooked.
It took about a month and a half to listen to all the episodes, and like when I was a kid watching the film over and over again (more on this next week), I was kind of sad when it was all done! (I’ve come to wonder if that is the mark of any meaningful work of art – you miss it when it’s gone.) This was also around the time that the Disney Jr Rocketeer cartoon was released, allowing me to introduce my children to the Rocketeer. The timing of both made me realize there was so much I wanted to talk about when it came to The Rocketeer and also hammered home the realization that there were quite a few other Rocketeer fans out there lurking under the surface that might also like to be interested. And since so much of The Rocketeer influenced my writing of The Thirteenth Hour, I figured, why not just keep it as part of the same podcast as its own recurring segment:
Before we sign off for this week, I’ll leave you with this little spread of pictures from a 1991 issue of the kids’ magazine, Disney Adventures, which thanks to the magic of eBay, I was finally able to read ~thirty years after originally wanting to.
I totally remembering wanting the water rocket Rocketeer as a kid but never being able to find one.
Next week, we’ll talk a little bit more about the EAA, Hal’s employer, in the intro and during the episode. In the meantime, please check out The Rocketeer Minute’s Bulldog Cafe Facebook Group for more pictures and behind the scenes info from the movie as well as the episodes.
This little animated .gif is, of course, from the point in the movie where the Rocketeer, not above a little self conscious vanity, asks how he looks. Peevy, not above a little blunt honesty, says “Like a hood ornament!” The Rocketeer blasts off for the first time, Peevy gets blown backwards into the hangar, and I get a name for this part of the podcast!
Stay tuned for more Rocketeer talk next week! Stay safe!
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There are now Thirteenth Hour toys! If you’d like to pick up one of these glow in the dark figures for yourself, feel free to email me or go to the Etsy store I set up (https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThirteenthHourStudio) and get them there.
If you haven’t checked out “Arcade Days,” the song and video Jeff Finley, Brent Simon, and I finished one year ago, click on the link below to do so!
You can find more pictures and preview clips of “Arcade Days” on IG as well as this podcast’s FB page.
Empty Hands, the synth EP soundtrack to the novella, Empty Hands, is now out for streaming on Bandcamp.
Stay tuned. Follow along on Spotify! There is also a growing extended Thirteenth Hour playlist on Spotify with a growing number of retro 80s songs.
Follow The Thirteenth Hour’s Instagram pages: @the13thhr for your random postings on ninjas, martial arts, archery, flips, breakdancing, fantasy art and and @the13thhr.ost for more 80s music, movies, and songs from The Thirteenth Hour books and soundtrack.
This week’s show is about the idea of the reluctant hero, an archetype in literature and film to describe an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and as a result does things beyond what he or she could ever had imagined. We also talk about various definitions of the word “hero,” from the ancient Greek usage, to hero in terms of an idol, to a hero in terms of someone who does something selfless to help someone else, whether in the everyday or out of the ordinary sense.
I didn’t read this segment in the show, but here a chapter in The Thirteenth Hour which describes this idea where Logan, the main protagonist, first becomes a reluctant hero:
The day before the end of basic training, I went into town to find a shoe repair shop. A buckle on my left shoe had broken a few days ago and now, every time I stepped down with that foot, my heel would slide out of the shoe. It was getting annoying, but I’d finally managed to put together enough money to cover what I thought it’d cost. One gold piece came from a poker game where I’d gotten lucky, and the rest I’d gotten from picking pennies off the street, which is what you do when you don’t get paid.
I asked a man on one of the crowded streets for directions. When I got to the shop, there was a big sign that said, “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS, WILL REOPEN IN TWO WEEKS.”
“Figures,” I thought to myself. “Two weeks? Maybe there’s another shop in town.” I went back to kicking a stone and trying not to fling my boot off in the process as I wandered through the downtown merchant sector, considering what to do next.
So there I was, minding my own business when I heard an ear–piercing scream. I spun around, forgetting all about my shoe and the rock. Right in the middle of the dirt road lay an old man, struggling to get up. About ten yards away, barrelling down the road at full speed was a four horse carriage. The driver in front was shouting out commands to his horses, but they weren’t listening. There was a big crowd of people watching from the sidewalks. I saw the woman that had screamed; she was still screaming.
“Somebody do something!” Apparently, that didn’t include herself.
In fact, everyone stared around blankly, waiting for someone else to make the first move. A few people new to the scene made faces and hurried off.
“Do something!” she screamed over and over.
Aw, shit, people, the lady had a point. Though I had half a mind to throw something at her to get her to shut up, I pushed past the people on the edge and jumped into the middle of the road. The next few seconds seemed to be in slow motion. Unfortunately, in what was to become regular pattern until progressing to a more advanced stage of cognitive development, I didn’t think first before doing something idiotic.
At any rate, the man was sitting up, dazed. I don’t know how close the carriage was, but it couldn’t have been far, because as I dove at the old man, tackling him around the waist, a horse clipped the loose heel of my boot, the busted one, sending it spinning off into the gutter. We rolled to the other side of the road, missing the remaining hooves by a heartbeat.
I sat up and looked around. The old man looked all right as far as I could tell, just a little shaken. Suddenly what seemed like hundreds of faces crowded around us.
“Are you all right?”
“Bravest thing I ever saw.”
“Somebody call a doctor!”
“That was a pretty rough fall that old fella took, is he okay?”
I stood and bent over the old man. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed. He looked like he was in pain, but he didn’t utter a sound when I asked if he felt alright.
“What happened? What happened? I didn’t see,” someone yelled.
“Well, this old fella was walking across the street, he tripped, and he couldn’t get up … mebbe ’cause he’s so old. Anyway, doesn’t matter now ’cause that’s when the kid jumped in. Tackled him around the waist.”
“The kid’s a hero!” said someone else. They looked at me, expecting me to say something.
“Well …” As usual, words failed me.
“Now, don’t be modest, you’re a hero, son.”
Okay, if these people wanted me to be a hero, then what the hell. Heroes are entitled to certain privileges, like new boots. Any takers?
Just then, a man in a white coat pushed his way through the crowd saying, “It’s okay, I’m a doctor!” He bent over the old man, briefly examining him.
After he had finished, the man said, “Probably just a twisted ankle. No serious injuries I can see from here, but let’s get him on that stretcher. Watch his head, and keep his neck still. We’ll carry him to my office. It’s just a few blocks from here,” said the doctor.
“I don’t need no damn stretcher!” yelled the old man.
“Everybody goes on the stretcher,” the doctor said emphatically.
“Ah, go to hell! At least let me talk to the kid that saved my rear end! Hey kid! Come over here!”
I walked over.
“I just wanted to thank you. My name’s Wally. What’s yours?”
“Logan.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Logan. I’m been living in this stinking kingdom for eighty–five years, and now I guess I’ll be able to stay for a few more years, huh?”
Now was that a good thing?
“You know, kid, you got a real set of marbles to do something like that. Hell, I wouldn’t have done that even for me! But hey, no complaints, glad you did. I could use a kid like you. What do you do for a living?”
“I’m … a soldier, I guess, in training.”
“No kidding! That’s perfect. Meet me at this address tomorrow; you won’t regret it!” he said, handing me a little white card.
“What’s it for?”
“Let me put it to you this way. You ever see a magician?”
I said I had once.
“And did you like it?”
I said I’d enjoyed the show.
“But weren’t you disappointed when you discovered that he was a fake? I mean, that he wasn’t using real magic, just tricks?”
I said I was disappointed when he told us that there was no such thing as magic.
“Nonsense! The lousy bastard didn’t know what he was talking about! See, you have to understand, real magicians like to keep that a secret … until it’s needed! So, of course there’s magic. I’m really not supposed to be telling you that, but, what the hell, kid, you just saved my life.”
“How do you know about magic?”
The old man looked both ways suspiciously. Motioning for me to come closer, he said, almost in a whisper, “I’ll get to that in a minute. This is what I’m proposing. How would you like to learn some genuine, old–fashioned magic? No bull now. Just the real thing. And get paid for it!”
“Well, sure, I guess.”
“Alright. You like traveling? Seeing new places?”
“Well, I haven’t really done any, but I would like to.”
“Great! How about sports? You like running, climbing, jumping, fencing, things like that?”
“Um, yeah, they’re okay.”
“Would you like to be better at those games? You’ll get better in this job!”
“Sure … I guess. What is this job, anyway?”
“Yeah, so it’s all set then. Meet me tomorrow. I’ll see to it that an announcement is made tomorrow morning.”
Just then the doctor motioned to his assistant, who picked up the other end of the stretcher.
“Umm, that’s nice and all, but I live in the castle training grounds. It’s awfully hard for anyone from the outside to get inside there.”
“Oh, silly me! Did I mention that I am one of King Darian’s wizards? Well, that’s me. Wally the Wizard at your service. I’ll see you tomorrow!” he shouted as he was being carried away.
Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Something sounded fishy here. What was one of the King’s wizards doing outside the castle walls? They supposedly always stayed locked up in one of the remote wings of the castle. This one was an awfully smooth talker. I wondered if this had something to do with what those two knights were talking about; one of them had mentioned the King’s wizards. Something didn’t sound right. He never even told me what the job was. And …
“Wait!” I yelled. “What’s the catch?”
But the wizard was too far away to hear.
“Ah, shit,” I muttered to myself, finding my left boot wet and slime–covered in the gutter. I wiped it off on some grass and secured the loose buckle as best I could. It squished every time I stepped on it. Something wasn’t right, but like the proverbial stinking turd, I’d stepped right in it.
Well, I thought, kicking another stone the rest of the way back to the castle, on the bright side, at least I am walking away. Of all the ways to end up dead or in the hospital, getting trampled was not one I’ve ever wanted to experience.
This little animated .gif is, of course, from the point in the movie where the Rocketeer, not above a little self conscious vanity, asks how he looks. Peevy, not above a little blunt honesty, says “Like a hood ornament!” The Rocketeer blasts off for the first time, Peevy gets blown backwards into the hangar, and I get a name for this part of the podcast!
I first learned of the term “reluctant hero” from an ad for The Rocketeer. Cliff is not motivated initially by much other than a desire to make some money and get in the good graces of his girlfriend, a rising starlet with an eye for the finer things in life (at least from Cliff’s perspective). There are lots of other great examples from cinema and literature.
One of my favorites is from the 1992 movie, Hero, with Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis, Andy Garcia, and Joan Cusak. The Dustin Hoffman character is a minor conman, if I recall right (I need to watch the movie again) who becomes a reluctant hero after he saves a bunch of people from a plane crash but can’t take credit for the act. I love this ending scene – both for its life lessons as well as its insight into human nature. As hinted above in The Thirteenth Hour passage, a lot of people don’t want to do heroic things, especially when eyes are on them. They might act when someone else initially steps in, but making that first step (like Logan does above or Bernie does in the scene below), takes a certain, well, heroic disregard for what other people think, and as social animals, that’s not always the easiest thing for humans to have.
Although I hadn’t seen Hero yet when I originally wrote The Thirteenth Hour, I had seen The Last Starfighter – many times, in fact – and the way Alex Rogan behaves through most of the movie is very much in keeping with the way of the reluctant hero (as well as one of the influences in the creation of Logan). Here’s when he’s first offered the chance to be a Starfighter:
Stay tuned for more Rocketeer gear talk next week! Stay safe!
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There are now Thirteenth Hour toys! If you’d like to pick up one of these glow in the dark figures for yourself, feel free to email me or go to the Etsy store I set up (https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThirteenthHourStudio) and get them there.
If you haven’t checked out “Arcade Days,” the song and video Jeff Finley, Brent Simon, and I finished one year ago, click on the link below to do so!
You can find more pictures and preview clips of “Arcade Days” on IG as well as this podcast’s FB page.
Empty Hands, the synth EP soundtrack to the novella, Empty Hands, is now out for streaming on Bandcamp.
Stay tuned. Follow along on Spotify! There is also a growing extended Thirteenth Hour playlist on Spotify with a growing number of retro 80s songs.
Follow The Thirteenth Hour’s Instagram pages: @the13thhr for your random postings on ninjas, martial arts, archery, flips, breakdancing, fantasy art and and @the13thhr.ost for more 80s music, movies, and songs from The Thirteenth Hour books and soundtrack.
I recently rewatched the 1991 film, The Rocketeer, one of my favorite films from childhood, if not my all-time favorite. It encapsulated just about everything a kid could hope for – airplanes, jet packs, shootouts between gangsters and Nazi storm troopers – not to mention a great cast of characters with a plucky heroine and a dashing hero that was just enough of an Everyman to be easily relatable. Sometimes, movies that seemed great as a kid don’t always make for great films for adults. So although I owned the DVD of The Rocketeer and have rewatched bits through the years, I was always a bit hesitant about watching the film start-to-finish again, I guess out of fear that it would inevitably fall from grace after years had tarnished the nostalgia factor.
Nope.
I’m glad to say that didn’t happen. Not only did I watch the whole thing, I was glued to my seat and daresay I enjoyed the movie more than I did when I was a kid.
In many ways, it was ahead of its time. Superhero movies weren’t really as big at the time as they were now, and in this age of global terrorism, it is comforting to think that heroes exists in our midst that can stand tall when they’re needed. And in many ways, that’s what the Rocketeer (a.k.a. pilot Cliff Secord) was – just an ordinary guy who, though a mixture of good/bad luck (depending on how you look at it) and the serendipity of circumstance, becomes a reluctant hero in an uncertain age (at the dawn of WWII). Part of me suspects that the original creator of The Rocketeer comics, illustrator Dave Stevens, created Cliff with exactly that I mind – not so much a hero chosen to have superpowers but an average citizen who ends up in the role and has to balance using his rocket pack for the greater good (fighting crime/Nazis, saving innocent people) vs. his own personal agenda (making money, impressing his girlfriend).
While I was watching the film this time, I was struck by how many similarities there are between Cliff Secord and Logan, the protagonist of The Thirteenth Hour. In many ways, it’s not surprising, since The Rocketeer was one of my favorite movies all throughout high school, and The Thirteenth Hour was written the summer after I graduated. Both have a boyish, child like sense of gee-whiz! wonder about them. While both are, at heart, good people doing their best, both are getting by on a lot more than special abilities and natural talents. They’re carried along as much by a combination of pluck, luck, help from others, and just, plain old bumbling incompetence that favors the optimistic, idealistic, and brave … the very image of characters that are holding it together not because they are super prepared or organized but with a combination of chewing gum, spit, and twine. (In fact, Cliff’s rocketpack is held together by chewing gum at one point.)
So, it’s not surprising that there are some parallels, both in character and appearance. Here are a few of the latter:
-I think ones of the reasons I drew Logan with the haircut he has was largely due to an the unconscious influence of Dave Stevens.
This is one of the tamer pictures of Cliff Secord’s do out there. He usually is a bit more disheveled:
-Cliff also worn a leather button-up jacket that, while looking a real pain to put on and take off, sure looks cool). I gave the Imperial Rangers in The Thirteenth Hour tunics with a similar aesthetic, though I didn’t opt for the buttons.
I recently found a little replica of the hoverboard from Back to the Future 2 in a thrift store – that made my day.
If you’re interested in learning more about real-life attempts to create rocketpacks, you can check out the book Jetpack Dreams (an excerpt on The Rocketeer is below):
More on the Rocketeer in the future! Listen for the clip from the soundtrack by James Horner on the podcast as well as more postings on social media.
There are many excellent depictions of the Rocketeer since Dave Stevens’ passing. This is a fine example by Alexey Mordovets.
As always, thanks for listening!
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The Thirteenth Hour 