Quest of the Delta Knights

(some strange anachronistic Southern belles are roaming around a slave market)
Crow: Ashley Wilkes is coming a-callin’!

Oh my God. A Gone with the Wind reference. And I didn’t even have to stretch for it. Wow. It’s—it’s just been so…so long, you know? A torrent of memories flooded into my mind when dear, dear Crow said the above line. I…I think I’m going to…cry. Excuse me…


(Olivia Hussey is pacing)
Tom (singing): A time for us/ to be in a crappy film.

The more I hear that line, the more I’m sure it’s a reference to Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (which Olivia Hussey starred in)—specifically, Nino Rota’s famous theme for it. I’m apprehensive to call it as such because I don’t remember it having any words, but hell, it could have—after all, the Gone with the Wind theme was reissued as a pop song by the Duprees. In any case, Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (not to be confused with the lesser Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann) is a very good adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, using actual teenagers in the leads. Look for a really young Michael York as Tybalt. Or, if you want to see an even younger Michael York, watch Zefferelli’s Taming of the Shrew (starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), his screen debut.


(the Girl is sulking. Bah.)
Crow: It’s a Nicole Kidman in the wild.

Okey dokey. Nicole Kidman is an Aussie actress who first made her name as “Tom Cruise’s Wife”, and then, fortunately, showed herself to be a damn good actress. Her big season was summer 2001, wherein she starred in Moulin Rouge! (for which she garnered an Oscar nod) and The Others, both commercial and critical successes. She subsequently made Cold Mountain, based on the bestseller by Charles Frazier. And, what’s more, it was filmed right where I live! It was filmed on my college campus (we get a surprising amount of movies filmed in South Carolina), and I got to watch them film a few scenes, as a matter of fact. I personally like Nicole Kidman a lot (I’m a big Moulin Rouge! fan)—I pretty much like the whole Aussie Posse (them that I know of), and I hear they all hang out together (Kidman’s apparently been friends with Russell Crowe since they were sixteen), which I think is rather neat. They all usually all sit together at the Golden Globes. What I’m wondering is, did they let Mel Gibson sit with them? Would they have allowed it? Or did he perhaps sit on the floor beside them, or in between their table and the uh “20 Mil Club” that he belongs to? Could you see a 20 Mil Table? Gibson, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Will Smith, and…uh…hell, who else gets 20 million a movie?


Scary Peasant Lady: (Cockney dialect) It’ll bay a noice die if it dahsn’t rine…
Crow: Garn.

No, they’re not saying “gone” or “yarn” or even “gong”—they’re saying “garn”, or “go on”, in Audrey Hepburn-Cockney speak. Sort of like, “Get out of town” or “Stop pulling my leg” or “You bloody lying sod get out of here before I get out my rifle and don’t you ever come back you bloody guttersnipe or I’ll tell your mother on ya!!!” Well, maybe not like the last one but close. Audrey Hepburn plays Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and keeps telling Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins to “garn” or howls maniacally whenever he talks about throwing her out onto the street. This is a romantic comedy, by the by. I really like it myself—my favorite song is “I Could Have Danced All Night”, although “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “Get Me to the Church on Time” are usually the perennial favorites. I always wondered if Eliza Doolittle was related to Dr. Doolittle (also played by Rex Harrison, coincidentally) but then my teachers would rap their rulers on my desk and yell, “Stop daydreaming you little wretch or you’ll never amount to anything!” And by God they were right.


(T is yelling in slo-mo as his mother gets beat down)
Crow (flatly): My boat.

I myself have never seen Waterworld. As it’s become one of the most infamous movies of the 90’s, I’m not quite sure I want to. Actually, I did see the scene where Kevin Costner makes distilled water out of his own urine. Whoopee!! Isn’t that just screaming cinematic greatness? Waterworld (which is what Crow is referencing) was kind of a prelude to Kevin Costner’s even worse movie, Postman. Christ that was a ship wreck if there ever was one. Costner used to be a big name in Hollywood, and I suppose he still is a bit of a legend, since back in the day he actually did make good movies (JFK, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, etc.) but then…something just went wrong. Along came the aforementioned movies, followed by Dragonfly, Message in a Bottle, and some baseball movie whose name escapes me. It’s a bit like John Travolta. Having done classics like Grease and Saturday Night Fever, he went into a slump with the Look Who’s Talking movies and other trash. Then he came back full force (Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty) only to make over-the-top potboilers (Swordfish) and scientology sci-fi crap (Battlefield Earth). Strange, the parallels. Anyway, I haven’t seen Waterworld so I don’t know if Kevin Costner says “My boat” as flatly as Crow does. I can only assume so, since they also made of it as such in Attack of the She Creature.


(T and Leonardo are walking around the super-secret cave)
Servo (singing): Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?

Actually a reference to a Bee Gees song, “New York Mining Disaster 1941”. Not a reference to any sort of Sylvester Stallone, big-budget disaster movie. Sorry, folks.


(The Tree People are running around and screaming like banshees)
Mike: So Ewoks grew up to be these guys?

You know, if you think about it, this movie is a lot like Star Wars. You’ve got one whiny boy with magical powers on a quest to defeat evil (T in this film, Luke Skywalker in Star Wars), a snippy princess whom the whiny magic boy has a bit of a crush on (Athena in this film, and Leia in the other), and a smarmy braggart who’s also got a bit of a crush on the princess (Leonardo “from Vinci” in this film, Han Solo in the other). All of whom join together to save the world (or, in Star Wars’ case, the galaxy), from dark powers. Also, in Star Wars, Luke’s father turns out to be the bad buy, Darth Vader. While in Quest of the Delta Knights, T’s father turns out to be played by the same guy who plays the bad guy. Huh, huh? And, there are incredibly annoying forest creatures (Ewoks in Star Wars, which Mike is referencing). And, in the scene in Delta Knights, when The Bad David Warner and his henchmen walk into Archimedes’ Cave, one henchman hits his head on the entrance (a similar thing happened to a Stormtrooper in Star Wars). That there is conclusive proof that Quest of the Delta Knights is a rip-off of Star Wars, and not a very good one at that. Bah.


(Same as above)
Crow: I’m starting to like Willow.

Whoo boy. Willow was one of many fantasy films that came out in the 1980’s. It starred Val Kilmer as a thief, and Warwick Davis as the title character. It was also directed by Ron Howard, who fortunately went on to make good movies like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. It also features a particularly annoying Kevin Pollack as a little sprite of some sort who lives in the rafters of a bar. Ugh. There was an outcrop of mystical movies in the ‘80’s, for some reason, which included Excalibur (about the Arthurian legends, it starred Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, and a young Liam Neeson), The Dark Crystal (a very good Jim Henson movie), Legend (starring Tom Cruise, with Tim Curry as the Devil!), Labyrinth (another Jim Henson movie, starring a very young Jennifer Connolly and David Bowie [!]), The Never-Ending Story (the first movie I ever cried at [specifically, when the horse died in that swamp]), and—probably the best of the lot—Ladyhawke, starring Rutger Hauer as a knight who turns into a wolf at night, Michelle Pfeiffer as his One True Love, who turns into a hawk in the daytime, and Matthew Broderick as a kid named Mouse. Ladyhawke is far from a perfect film (Matthew Broderick’s British accent is grating, and the 80’s synthesizer music nearly wrecks everything), but the fight scene wherein Hauer, clad in black, rides into a cathedral on his Friesian and battles an evil bishop is bloody great. See it just for that scene. Oh yeah, and Michelle Pfeiffer sports some super-short, 1980’s Meg Ryan hair. That alone is reason to see it.


T: Who’s Kato?
Crow: Clouseau’s houseboy.

Ha. Okay, Kato was indeed Clouseau’s houseboy in the Pink Panther movies. He was played by Burt Kwouk, and if I remember correctly, he never (or at least rarely) spoke, although he did scream a lot when attacking Clouseau (played by the one and only Peter Sellers, except in the films made after he died…uh…of course). There were eight Pink Panther movies, beginning with A Shot in the Dark (the only Pink Panther movie not to have “Pink Panther” within the title, or the pink cartoon panther in the opening credits) in 1964, and ending with Son of the Pink Panther in 1993 (that starred Roberto Benigni, and was awful). Just because I know you care, the others are Inspector Clouseau, Return of the Pink Panther, Pink Panther Strikes Again, Revenge of the Pink Panther (which was Peter Sellers’ last Pink Panther film), Trail of the Pink Panther, and Curse of the Pink Panther.