Being a huge Terminator series fan, I am extremely excited about the upcoming Terminator Salvation movie coming out this week. But since today is Friday, I won’t be posting about the new film, but rather looking to the past with some…

Terminator 2 Madness

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is easily the best of the franchise and one of my favorite movies of all time. You can just feel the excitement building with this 1990 teaser for the film:

I remember going to see Terminator 2 in a movie theater when I was just 10 or 11 years old. What a fantastic experience. It’s amazing how the film’s computer-generated effects for the T-1000 “liquid metal” Terminator, groundbreaking at the time, still hold up very well today and even look better than some recent Hollywood films.

Despite the fact that the film is rated R, it was clearly marketed toward children as well as adults and it obviously worked on me, since I saw it at such a young age. While there is plenty of violence to be found throughout the movie, it’s fairly tame as R-ratings go. I’ve seen some recent PG-13 movies that were more inappropriate for kids than Terminator 2 is.

A huge part of marketing any film toward children is the toys that are released:

I had several of the action figures but never got the bio-flesh regenerator, even though I definitely wanted it. Best part of the commercial: “Battle… damage… must return to… bio-flesh regenerator…”

Terminator 2 also holds the title of being the theme behind what is quite possibly my favorite pinball machine of all time. Here’s a very long promo video (in two parts) showing all the details of this excellent game:

From the shotgun trigger to launch balls into play to the interactive games on-screen, Terminator 2 pinball was the most advanced pinball game I had played at the time and I jumped at every chance I had to play it. I mean, how can you not like a pinball table that has an endoskeleton head with glowing red eyes?

In addition to seeing the movie, buying the toys, and playing the pinball game, I also loaded up my Windows 3.1-running 486 33mhz computer with a couple Terminator 2 screen savers, one of which is available for download here, called “Termo Vision,” which emulates what a Terminator sees. The other screen saver I had (which I can’t seem to find online) was a Skynet factory that filled the screen with different stages of endoskeleton production.

The coolest collectible to ever be released for the Terminator series is the life-size endoskeleton from Sideshow Collectibles:

I remember seeing one of these in the now-defunct Sharper Image store in a mall when Terminator 2 first hit theaters and I’ve wanted one ever since. It’s over 6 feet tall and costs nearly $6,000, so it’s obvious why I don’t have one. But if I ever hit the lottery, it will be one of the first things I buy. Here’s a video from Sideshow talking all about it.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is so much more than just a big-budget, sci-fi/action film. On top of all of that, it has a great story, interesting characters, and, most importantly, some big themes to think about. While on the surface it is a story about super-intelligent machines taking over the world, the underlying message is all about what it means to be human. The film features the interesting split between John Connor teaching the T-800 how to act more human and Sarah Connor trying to act more like a machine in an effort to protect John. While one character is learning to have emotion and feeling, the other is trying to rid herself of any feelings that might get in her way, though all the while caring for her son.

I could go on and on about why Terminator 2 is such a great film, but I’ll leave it at that. After all, this isn’t a film study post but rather a Friday Flashback. I’m just happy I didn’t have to end up naked in a glowing lightning ball for this trip to the past.