Dreamscape was a fascination to young lion because the ultimate super power was always being able to enter someone else's dream. It never happened, but young lion continued to imagine it for a long time.
Here Dennis Quaid is preparing to enter the hottie's dream.
Contrary to memory, there was no nudity, but it was provocative like most movies in the day. Helas, she ended up hitting it off with Steven Spielberg. As bad as this movie was, lions can only imagine Kate Kapshaw enjoyed making it more than Indiana Jones.
It was a dark movie, but most dreams are dark.
All the witty Dennis Quaid lines immediately came back. Like Voyagers, surprised how much lions remembered from just one viewing.
Lions always vagely remembered the father scene but not exactly that he was eating. That seems to be a common theme in dreams. A lot of what makes it work are the common themes we all dream about.
There's a gradual descent into darkness as we discover the psychics are a shady ex con & a vegetable. The next zinger is the revelation that dying in a dream causes death in reality. Already knowing the "old wives tale" made the beginning darker that it originally was.
Old lion pondered what problem could really be solved by sending a guy into a dream. He has no weapon, no vehicle, no tools, no cash, no super powers. He seems to have a hard time battling the snake man & depends on the kid in the end. A more productive intervention would be sending in something unattainable in real life, a hottie trophy wife, a weapon, cash. The only rationale for an unarmed guy is the story telling.
The final zinger, which lions forgot, was how they had super powers in the dream. That would explain how the president could be a lot more athletic than reality.
Didn't remember the ending. After the big reveal, there was a lot of cloak & dagger instead of dreaming.
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Speaking of cloak & dagger, its last viewing was in Nov 2010 from a rented DVD, with mono audio. An HD copy was briefly pirated in 2019, but that trend is dying. It miraculously managed to come down in 3 days, after fixing DNS on the VPN box.
The HD version has the same cropping.
San Antonio in 1984. Only the water tank is gone. It's 85F in November & 100F all summer. Still seems to be cooler than inland FL.
Young lion was actually confused as to when the father was on screen & when Jack was on screen. Young lion mildly suspected the father was playing both parts but it actually wasn't clear until the IMDB spelled it out & of course HD made it obvious.
Old lion sees Dabney Coleman's double role as the only point to the movie. That took a lot of camera tricks & costume changes. It was a study in the father becoming the super hero in the kid's imagination. It definitely took the edge off the father's incompetence to see him mocking himself.
The magic inside can finally be inspected in HD.
The shadow mask is visible in HD. It looks like a significant investment in level design, but it was all scrapped. Playthroughs on gootube look pretty boring. The player is supposed to traverse from 1 side to the other while hitting targets to earn points.
The graphics were from an arcade version of Agent X & not from a consumer atari. Other arcade games rotated the text colors. This one flashed bits of text. There was some kind of textbook of standard arcade graphics effects.
That moved too many pixels for an 8 bitter, young lion thought. Old lion can see how a commodore could have done it, but it would have been painful to sit through all the eye candy. We're looking at all character graphics & possibly a block of sprites for the human. They were colorful because palettes didn't have enough colors for greyscale.
The wireframe animation would have been barely possible with a vector animation program. The movie graphics were obviously SGI. To old lion, the bald eagle art looks lame. To young lion, the whole mcguffin sequence looked insane.
A real mcguffin hidden in a game would entail a complete graphics generator in the cartridge. It would render straight to the video RAM. In 1984, it would have been impossible to fit in there, though. Graphics on that level required a packed 12x12 board.
There was a bit of his own test program, undoubtedly still on the arcade.
That was the end of the mcguffin footage. It really disappointed young lion that it was only shown in 1 scene.
They got a lot of mileage out of that building.
Then the cliffhanger was revealed, the walkie talkie bomb.
Old lion couldn't understand why such an old couple would bother with espionage unless they were really financially screwed. Maybe they were seeking asylum in Russia after committing some crime. The movie had them fleeing to Mexico.
The hero coming of age was 1 of the most miserable scenes of childhood. Young lion actually wasn't sure if the villain actually saw Jack for a moment, through some super power.
HD clarity & old age showed the kid was clearly gesturing in that direction & the villain couldn't have seen anyone in just the 7 frames he was shooting. But this was the 1st moment Jack was shown translucent, indicating it might have been the real POV of the villain. Whether or not Jack was briefly visible before getting shot remanes 1 of the great movie mysteries.
The big question in the ending was why he didn't pop the emergency exit & throw the bomb out during the 2570 frames he was alone & the cabin wasn't pressurized.
38 year old mom was a hottie, even though all the adults were clueless.
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Those 1st 10 years took forever. Lions thought they'd never hit double digits. Then they thought they would never hit 20. That didn't change until 40. 40 was the 1st decade which felt like time was running out & plans needed to be done.
The current generations are now having their peak earnings in their 20's. Then they're coasting. The highest paying industries have been very youth focused for the last 15 years.
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