The movie simply has more resonance for the director than WarGames. Why this is done is worthy of its own article, but suffice it to say that Spielberg has a unique and personal kinship with Stanley Kubrick, which began on the set of The Shining. In fact, one of the defining tests (which we’ll expand on later) is based wholly around WarGames, whereas in the film, its closest mirror is when the High Five have a reluctant stay in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. In the book, Cline and Halliday are obsessed with a specific type of ‘80s culture, such as Parzival’s undying love for Ladyhawke and WarGames. However, many more of these changes were done to match Spielberg’s sensibilities and that of his broader audience. Rex from his own Jurassic Park and Peter Jackson’s specific rendering of King Kong. While the cinematic DeLorean ride includes the KITT scanner on its grill (which is also in the book), presumably Sony was not as open to sharing its licenses as, say, Universal, who provided Spielberg with the T. Namely, in the book, he tags it with a Ghostbusters logo on each door. Yet the only one that feels like a real missed opportunity is that Cline included the “customizations” he’s made to his own personally owned DeLorean to the one Parzival drives around in the OASIS. This is likely due to the limits of even Spielberg’s reach in rounding up licenses. Star Wars, Spider-Man, and Mario Kart get name-checked, but none of them are visually present like Batman, Superman, or Resident Evil. In terms of copyright, it is noticeable that no property owned by Disney or Nintendo is visually featured in spite of numerous mentions.
This is likely done out of a combination of copyright necessity, commercial viability, and simply because Spielberg’s sensibility is larger than the one Cline zeroed in on. It was Halliday’s escape, and it is the tone and tenor of its pop culture interests personified in one place. In contrast, Ready Player One as a movie broadens the expanse of the pop culture landscape being traversed. Crucially, one of the most important discoveries of literary Parzival’s journey is found in a recreation of a dimly lit bowling alley/pizza joint with an arcade in the back. It also just so happens to be Cline’s youth too.
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But the book also has half-forgotten TV shows like Max Headroom, PBS cartoons such as Schoolhouse Rock, and really obscure relics of nerd culture, like the Japanese Spider-Man TV series from the 1970s.īy its nature, the OASIS in the novel is trying to transform the media of the present into the pop culture past of OASIS creator James Halliday’s youth. Yes, major touchstones like Back to the Future and Street Fighter are featured in both. Whereas the film version of the story focuses mostly on popular movies and video games, with some miscellaneous love thrown to the occasional cartoon, anime, or kaiju, Cline misses nothing. The Movie Expands On the Type of Pop Culture Referencedįor the formative years he grew up in, Ernest Cline wrote the definitive literary time capsule with Ready Player One. However, rather than listing all the individual shifts-which given the sheer volume of homages on Cline’s page would be a fool’s errand-we’ve compiled the biggest changes into the handful of comprehensive categories below. Fox rinsed his hands in during an episode of Family Ties that was shot between Back to the Future movies. Oh yes, that also includes the kitchen sink, but it’s not just any kitchen sink it’s the one Michael J. Unrestrained by copyright limitations, a two-plus hour running time, or a strict adherence for narrative structure as found in the film’s classist director, Cline threw everything into the literary version of Ready Player One. As perhaps the definitive catalogue of pop culture forget-me-nots for Gen-X, Cline’s literary version is almost a different beast altogether. Yet this is par for the course for fans of Ernest Cline’s 2011 bestselling novel of the same name, which is far more overwhelming in its member berries than the film can ever hope to be. Steven Spielberg, the proverbial Walt Disney of 1980s entertainment, has made the ultimate love letter to 1980s entertainment, filled with more nostalgic references and easter eggs than a Lego movie, and stuffed to the brim with self-awareness. Like so many coins disintegrating across our DeLorean’s windshield, Ready Player One is finally out and consuming movie and geek culture all at once. This article contains major Ready Player One spoilers, for both the film and book.