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The Last Starfighter--The Musical!
nomadic writes "Yes, seriously. Some people have decided to remake everyone's favorite obscure 1980's Star Wars ripoff into musical form. Definitely sounds like a Troy McClure role..."
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It wasn't a ripoff of Star Wars, any more than Star Wars is a ripoff of every mythic story that came before it. That's silly.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Star Trek II was the first CGI scene (the genesis project filmette). Young Sherlock Holmes was the first to have cgi in a live action shot (the stained glass window knight)
The main computer used for TLS was a Cray XMP... one of the first (double headed) Cray machines outside a govt installation. There was a DEC VAX 782, a double headed VAX, that fed the Cray - there wasnt a really good way to work on the Cray directly. Digital Productions, the animation company,also used a farm of Evans and Southerland PS300s for digitizing/modeling and IMI 500s for motion. A couple RasterTech boxes were also used as frame buffers for test images. A specialized film printer was also used - one originally developed for Tron.
The same hardware was used on a number of other films from that era (2010, Ice Pirates, Labyrinth, etc) and numerous commercials.
The IMI 500 was a UNIX box and the VAX ran Interactive's Unix On VMS. The Cray had a small permanent on-site support staff to keep it alive.... along with some BIG AC units.
DP was bought by Omnibus Computer Graphics in 1986. Shortly afterwards Omnibus bought Robert Able Associates, thus merging 3 of the top 5 computer animation houses of the time.... and promptly went bankrupt. BofA had a 11mil loan on the Cray, and discovered that Cray had one in storage they couldnt unload for $3mil. They found out the landlords had taken the keys and the security company stopped sending guards 'cause of non-payment. This being the neighborhood where the LA Riots were several years later, BofA immeadiately sent a truck and crew to yank out the Cray.... Some of the animators pleaded with the workers to let it run just an hour more so they could complete some pieces...
Btw, Omnibus was the first commercial company not doing network development to have an Internet connection. Of course back then it wasnt called the Internet.
its a bit odd to have lots of 20-somethings tell me how much they loved that movie... i still remember creating the short proof-of-concept animation that got DP the job.