Cinematech Episode 194: “Lorne Lanning”
In this ep, Cinematech put the spotlight on Lanning and the Oddworld games he helped create. Let's start with his commentary on the intro cutscene
of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee.
- Lanning: Here we are on the first Abe's Oddysee opening movie, and this was really the first thing people ever saw from Oddworld. What we were after was, we were after the sense of like third world laborers that were really just being completely absorbed by mega, global corporations. And yet, we wanted to do this with a sense of Irony and humor. And these were some of the themes that inspired us, and what we wanted to do was, even take the idea of these mega corporations, and how they related to food, and third world labor, and things of this nature, and turn it into something digestible that was fun, and a lot of the influence for the designs, if you'd look at this meat processing plant at Rupture Farms, we were after sort of an Industrial Revolution look, but also that felt menacing in the way that looking at nuclear silos feels menacing. That it felt like power plants.
Then, they show Abe (voiced by Lanning), the hero of the Oddworld games (save for Stranger's Wrath), chained up in a cell.
- Abe: That's me. My name is Abe. I was Employee of the Year.
Then, they show Abe walking past advertisements for Rupture Farm products.
- Lanning: Here, we have Abe walking up to the advertisements of the products that they make. His race, and his ancestry, and his culture, had a relationship to these creatures that was like the Native Americans and buffalo, and yet here, he's looking at Paramite Pies and going, “Mm!”, you know, “Yum!”, and describing Rupture Farms: “This is Rupture Farms.” Y'know, it was kinda depressing, because we started at the end, and made you unfold the story, to find out how he got there, and depending on how you got there, or got him there, altered his fate. And what he didn't realize was that, there was a world outside of this factory, and to a lot of degree, that's how a lot of us feel today. Our lives are being absorbed by so much work, and oddly enough, you know, at Oddworld, we are just working all the time trying to bring experiences that are about how bizarre it is that our world has been consumed by work and we're not really living as much anymore.
In the intro cutscene, poor little Abe, a member of the Mudokan race that's so ugly he's almost cute, accidentally stumbles upon a Rupture Farms board meeting and sees a new product being pitched: Mudokan Pops, Mudokan heads on sticks. The board loves it. Abe does not, and tries to flee the facility, beginning his adventure.
- Abe: I just had to escape. I just had to be free. And I didn't even know... I had a destiny.
They cut to a scene where Abe has escaped the facility and gotten to the outside world. He sees the moon, and realizes that there was something odd on its face: the shape of his three-fingered “paw”.
- Lanning: One of my favorite artists was Picasso. In the beginning of Cubism, from his intent, was largely about recognizing how man was becoming less of an individual being and more of a gear and a wheel in a factory. It wasn't the guy out, you know, harvesting his crops anymore, it was just a guy pulling a lever over and over and over. And his faces of his characters became more structured and angled, and his landscapes became more geometric, because he was saying the rolling hills were going away, and the factories were replacing all this. And the basic shape of the landscape was becoming more cubic and angled. And so his characters did well, because he was saying our people today are becoming more and more mechanized. They're becoming the machine. In a lot of ways, I feel similar about the world, and with all the conversations we would have at Oddworld about how we were gonna approach the design, we wanted this feeling that these characters were cogs in this machine world that were becoming mechanized.
Timecode: 9:41: The intro to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee (2001, Xbox).
- Lanning: Now here we are with '''Munch's Oddysee. It's kind of devastating to me that we never manifest Munch in his full glory, which was, he was a Jekyll and Hyde type of character. But beyond that, game production is full of failures and lessons. And we were a little ambitious in what we tried to achieve, and as a result, we didn't achieve as much as we wanted. And what we wanted to do with Munch was, we wanted to create this sensibility that... we had a character who was The Last of His Kind. We show a little flashback here where you see what happened to the rest of his kind, and now he's alone. And that sense of loneliness, we hoped, was something that made you more empathetic to who the character was, and the condition that was coming. And, much like Abe, he embodied a sense of naivety, and he was kind of, the face only a mother could love. I mean, he's a bizarre-looking guy. And, in the process of it, like in this ocean scene, in the sense was, desolation. Emotional desolation, like, how do we really... you know, middle of a huge lake like the Great Lakes, no one around, and he's trying to find his own kind, and he's calling to them... and eventually, he gets this huge, like, burst of energy because he gets a response that suggests he's not alone. There's another of his kind.
Munch was part of an aquatic species called Gabbits that had a strange, hand-like foot on the undersides of their bodies that they could use to hop around on land. In the opening scene, a giant net scooped up the school of Gabbits that Munch was swimming with. Desperate and alone, he tried to call out to them over and over again, until he finally heard what he believed to be a response from a fellow Gabbit. He hopped onto a nearby island, only to find that the noise was being made by a device attached to a bear trap. Completely naïve, poor, confused Munch walked into the trap, suffering until someone came to retrieve him.
- Lanning: This was kind of the idea of like mass marketing, you know, in a consumer-driven society that's kind of leading you to your doom. And, you know, like cigarettes or something, you know. So Munch is hearing this response, and ultimately, it's a trap. It's a trap for Gabbits, and Munch is a Gabbit. It was this idea of sort of reckless commercialism and reckless industry that is really looking out for itself and its shareholders, but nothing else. And so, this was kind of inspired by the idea of animal rights, and what's really going on in the world. If people really knew what was going on with the subject matter in the real world, they'd just be appalled. So we live in a society that really is in denial. It can't face a lot of the realities of the darker side of what makes out lifestyles so convenient, and comfortable, because if we knew, they're too disturbing. And part of what we wanted to do was show it from he perspective of the people from the bottom of the food chain.
Munch's introductory scene is actually a story being told by the Almighty Raisin to Abe and the Mudokans he rescued over the course of Oddworld: Abe's Exodus. The Almighty Raisin tells the Mudokans that Munch has been taken to Vykkers Labs and if they want to find more of their fellows, they have to rescue Munch. The Almighty Raisin's instructions on how to rescue Munch are cut off by his falling asleep, so the Mudokans have to figure out to rescue the little guy.
- Lanning: And then we introduce the Vykkers, and the Vykkers sort of represent like, Nazi scientists, of which there are many in the world still today in different shapes and forms who really believe in the religion of science, and, at the expense of anything else, find, as long as they are able to further their patents and their copyrights and their wealth and their achievements, they don't care who gets screwed over in the process. We were kind of inspired by that theme when designing these characters who were just really bizarre and out for their own interests and insensitive to other peoples' interests. So, a lot of what we were trying to achieve at Oddworld was sort of creating these characters who would be archetypes of a mind state, of sort of a spiritual mind state of different personalities that we find in the world. And we can say that's the, you know, corporate backstabbing career climber, and those of us that live in, you know, corporate environments, we sort of understand what that means right away. What we tried to do was take some of those personality traits that we find in this world, and come up with these sort of bizarre designs that seem to be a distilled concoction of what that energy might look like if it were its own species. So we're really trying to take sort of archetypal personalities and behaviorisms and turn them into their own species so that they distinguish what their interests are and you know, maybe create a world that's reflective of our own in an ironic, satirical, funny way? And then if we can start playing off of some of those themes, then we though that could resonate deeper, and give deeper emotional connections to the characters, to our heroes.
A Vykkers scientist gave Munch a sonar implant in his head, which, unbeknownst to them, would give little Munch the means to escape his imprisonment.
15:42: Finally, we have the intro to Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (1998, PlayStation). This was the second Oddworld game. It had Abe uncovering some of the history of the Mudokan people and how they were exploited in the past, even before Rupture Farms decided to turn them into food on a stick.
The intro opens to the three-fingered moon and pans down to a pile of bones on a forest floor.
- Abe: This is Necrum. Long ago, the Mudokans brought their dead here.
The bones fade into a pile of bones resting in a mine cart. Behind the cart, countless Mudokans fade into the distance, slaving away at exhuming Mudokan bones in Necrum.
- Abe: That was before the Glukkons started stealing our bones.
A Mudokan slave turns to face the camera, and we see that his eyes have been sewn shut.
- Lanning: This is the beginning of his discovery of the world that once was, and a deeper understanding, and really, the passage in the classic, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. This is his step into the other side. This is his step into the unknown, that awakens something in him that has been dormant. And, the idea for us is that we all have this awakening that can occur in us, and when it happens, we're changed forever. We never see the world quite the same, and we all know someone that, in whatever way, shape, or form, this has happened to, whether a pet died, or they were in a horrible car accident. And I remember the story of George Lucas being in a horrible car accident, and it's what was the main catalyst for his pursuit of becoming a filmmaker to the degree that he did. So these events happen, and they happen in ordinary lives, and that's what was important to us, was Abe, who – every time we show Abe, you know, we just wanted this schmuck who's looking like, 'I dunno what's goin' on', I'm just tryin' to figure it out', you know? He's just kinda representing the naivete in all of us. And if we did that successfully, this little chump could become a hero, even though he's kind of clueless, his heart is always in the right place, and that was the idea. That we create a character whose integrity at the core of their soul is unshakable, and even though they were naïve, uneducated, and ignorant, it didn't mean that they couldn't be something great.
Part of the storyline in Exoddus is that Abe's fellow Mudokans become addicted to the Glukkons' Soulstorm Brew, and so the Glukkons get them in their clutches by trading work for more Brew.
- Abe: At first, the Glukkons gave their brew away. But, once the Mudokans started drinking it? They couldn't stop. Then those Glukkons told them that if they wanted to work, they could have all the brew they wanted. They fell for it.
There's something funnily matter-of-fact about how Abe says “They fell for it” in that scene.
So basically, the Oddworld games were about Abe's journey from dweeb to adorkably badass hero.
- Lanning: Abe became for us, an icon of that idea of, making the most of what you could be, even though you're in the worst possible position, and you're the weakest guy in the weakest way, that, even if that's who you are in this lot of life – stitched lips, very strange-looking, your friends' against you – all these things, it doesn't mean you can't become something more. And to us, we felt like video games were a medium of expression waiting to become more like film or novels where the stories took on a more interesting trait, not just to carry the gameplay, but because maybe there was more contemplative ideas that were inspiring. And ultimately, as storytellers and game designers, and as storytelling and game designing continues to merge, maybe the content will become more and more inspiring. Not just that you're victorious, but that you're something more. That you learned something from it, in a way that makes you feel empowered to take on your own risks in life. And in many ways, that's what Abe was all about.
I played some of the Oddworld games, but a lot of the meaning behind Oddworld Inhabitant's decisions went over my head. I didn't really appreciate them until I revisited this episode. I think their themes are just as relevant now as they were back then, if not moreso now. From a technical standpoint, I find that even the oldest Oddworld game has smooth CG cutscenes that have aged very well, unlike higher-profile games such as Final Fantasy VII. The alien creatures in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee look better than the CG humans in FFVII, where they would occasionally switch between superdeformed and realistic proportions. Squaresoft kept improving their rendering in subsequent years, with vastly superior results, however.
I am now of the opinion that Oddworld Inhabitants were way ahead of their time to present such ideas without making their games pretentious. It probably helped that the games were occasionally funny with slapstick humor and clever dialog. Even back when I first saw this episode, I took Lanning's explanations and the fact that I had experienced some of what Lanning was talking about at the end there from other games for granted. I appreciate it when games make me feel things that no other games have up to that point.
So I would say that this is one of the greatest episodes of Cinematech, even though it only features four games, simply because Lanning's commentary is so thought-provoking.
Exoddus ends on a Sequel Hook, showing some despairing Mudokans locked up in a cell somewhere.
- Abe: But we knew there had to be more of us out there. And we're gonna find 'em.
Abe holds his paw up to the moon, he camera pans out to show many of his fellow Mudokans following suit, and the three ancestral ghosts shrug in confusion. Then, a Slig (basically, a half-robotic creature that patrols and guards the Glukkon facilities) interrupts the ending for emergency bulletin from M.O.M. News.
- Slig: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. Rumor Kontrol reports that Abe, the mastermind behind the destruction of Rupture Farms is also behind the Soulstorm Brew atrocity.Angry Offscreen Voice: I HATE THAT GUY!Slig: Stay tuned for more on this story as it develops. This message brought to you by...
ODDWORLD INHABITANTS
