Subliminal images

Panzer Dragoon
1

I’m not sure if this has been posted in the past, but a while ago I noticed something quite odd in Panzer Dragoon Zwei’s “teaser” FMV - the FMV that plays right at the start of the game, before you reach the title screen.

Towards the end of this FMV, the screen flicks and fades between several clips of other FMVs from the game. Now of course this is done quite a lot in Panzer Dragoon FMVs, particularly in the vision / flashback sequences in PDZ and PDS; it achieves effects like the following, where we see clips from different FMVs overlayed onto one another:

http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_09.jpg http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_08.jpg

While playing this FMV on my PC though, I’ve found something odd: if you pause the film while it’s fading through these different clips, you can see extremely brief clips of FMVs that don’t appear in the game at all; for example, this:

http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_01.jpg http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_02.jpg

An Imperial battleship flying over a cloudscape, while an explosion goes off on its deck. Straight afterwards, there’s another odd clip:

http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_03.jpg http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_04.jpg

The body and tail of the Episode 4 boss (Rand-Doula) dart across the screen, but of course he doesn’t appear in any FMVs either.

The last two brief images I found aren’t so strange, but I’ll post them for completeness: straight after the Rand-Doula clip you can see a fuzzy silhouette of Shelcoof, and then finally there’s an artsy-looking image of Lundi walking up the steps in his village, where four Lundis are superimposed onto the same frame:

http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_05.jpg http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/pdz_subliminal_07.jpg

It’s the first two clips (the battleship and Rand-Doula) that strike me as most interesting, though. They appear and disappear on-screen so fast that it’s almost impossible to see them with the naked eye, so it’d seem strange if Team Andromeda created them just to include them here: the battleship clip in particular looks like a lot of work must have gone into it. I’ve got some suspicions of my own, but what are your thoughts on this?

(Oh, and has this in fact been pointed out before?)

2

Yeah, I noticed this too.I personally think they (the first two images) don’t correspond to some deleted FMV scene we didn’t get to see.

3

I think perhaps the bosses in the Panzer Dragoon games were going to have short intros to say “here’s the boss!”, but Andromeda took them out because they slowed down the gameplay, or something.

4

look at it very closely, it’s all an allegory for the inexcusable treatment of iraq prisoners. yeah, team andromeda saw it coming.

5

waves the wtf flag

6

I would say they are FMVs that for one reason or another were removed. Perhaps the FMVs no longer made sense within the context of the finished game or the scenes they were intended for were eventually cut from the game.

I remember finding an old Shadow Hearts II trailer from some months before the game’s Japanese release and it had several clips from cut scenes that never made it into the final game. Not only did it sport English-language voices different from those eventually used in the US, but the Japanese release didn’t use English dialogue at all.

This probably isn’t uncommon in the game industry. It’s just that it’s just less common for cut footage to still win up in game itself (spliced into another FMV).

7

The battleship and Rand Doula images look like they are composed of polygons, rather than being more smoothly finished than the other characters we see in the FMVs. Obviously, this still doesn’t explain why they appear!

I guess I’m going to go with the people who are saying that the images are from some deleted cut-scene or FMV - or maybe they’re just interspersed with the rest of the intro FMV for effect.

If not, something just plain weird and/or accidental is going on! :anjou_happy:

8

lundi represents the children of the world
the mutant coolia represents the torture
the dragon crest represents the photographs that made it to the media
the airship blowing up represents the bombing of iraq being aired across all the networks
randoula represents the belligerent nature of the american people’s ignorance to the global issues that created this conflict
shelcoof is a phallic symbol because those are featured in all subliminal messages
and the image of the lundis ascending the staircase is itself an allegory for the lemming-like nature of generations of people that do not learn the past and are then doomed to repeat it.

waves the i bet you thought i hadn’t actually thought about it before saying it flag

9

Really? I’d always considered that section to be actually an early example of product placement in computer games, attempting to instil in us an ardent desire to fill our homes with Stannah Stairlift chairs. Think how much suffering there is in the Panzer world, and as that clip shows that her populace is bereft of such marvellous devices as Stannah Stairlifts… well, the link is obvious.

10

[quote=“Arcie”]

waves the wtf flag[/quote]

:anjou_happy: Gold. Fucking GOLD.

11

I have an explanation…

Mind control.

Look closer, and you’ll find an “obey us or die” message in there. Well, not really. Give me time and the right video equipment and I’ll trick you into thinking it, though.