PHIL AUSTIN: In 1983, Peter and Phil and I went to work for The Record Group in Burbank and for three years or so, we hung on for several projects, the biggest of which was called "Danger in Dreamland", a Nick Danger interactive game designed for CD-I, a kind of early CD-ROM. These were the days when the standards of the medium were being argued out between Sony and Phillips, for instance. Our company was allied with Phillips. "Danger In Dreamland" is a strange project, too complicated for its time, but it was just exactly what eventually happened in CD-ROM programming. It is a Hollywood backlot kidnapping mystery which features various films, one a kind of John Garfield drama about spud-hunting in the Deep South and another featuring Tex, the (singing) Hassidic Horse. You had to be there. On a backlot filled with intrigue and ... well, danger, Danger roams. The only part of it that was eventually produced was a test sequence in which Andrea Marcovicci, the torch singer, played Lune Chardonnay.
Here's an excerpt . . .
(We see Dawn take her place high up on the bridge, lashed by fake wind and rain and lightning.
She clings to the thwarts of the bridge.)
DAWN: Darn you, you damned old bridge! They said I was trouble when I was born in the old hummock shanties. And they were right. They said I'd spoil before I turned rotten and they was right. I am a bad wild girl and I never belonged with the damned gentry. I wish this ol' bridge would fall and take me with it and ... our unborn child!
(Down below the bridge, FARLEY and his companions are intent on hunting spuds. You fire your spud gun, with its hot aluminum nail, straight down into the ground.)
PARKER: I say, chaps. What's that up on old Shakey?
(SPUD HUNTER): By Jove, old man. I do believe it's a bit of a skirt.
(Someone fires into the ground)
PARKER: Hello! You've nailed a spud!
(SPUD HUNTER): Old Farley's bagged his first spud!
(The bridge begins to crumble. Dawn will fall.) |
| PHIL AUSTIN: During this scene, as Nick watches it filmed, the star Lune Chardonnay is kidnapped. The action of the game is that you direct Nick in his pursuit of her. Dawn
Nightenbird, the girl on the bridge, is one of the chief napper suspects. There are five different stories, all with multiple endings and possibilities. The game is designed so that you can't really get the same result twice in playing it. It never saw the light of day. The CDI standard would not support it, there was no real platform and TRG itself fell on hard times. We were
jettisoned. |
