Deadly Games

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Deadly Games was an American sci fi show that appeared on UPN as part of its 1995 season. The basic plot of the show is about video game characters that come to life, re-enacting their deadly plans in the real world.

Contents

[edit] Story

The first episode introduces the protagonist Gus Lloyd, an engineer who has created a video game in his spare time to exert his indignant feelings about people in his life who have treated him unfairly (his father, his ex-wife's mother, a high school football-playing bully, etc.); the villains of the game are modeled after all these people. The master villain is Jackal, who is a combination of the devil and Gus' father. The hero is "The Cold-Steel Kid," who is naturally modeled after Gus himself, and the helpless ingenue The Kid is always trying to rescue — "The Girl" — is based on Lauren Ashborne, Gus' ex-wife. In an accident involving an experimental laboratory project, Jackal and the villains step out of the game and into the real world.

Each week, one of the villains tries to carry out an evil plot according to the rules of the video game, and Gus, Lauren, and Gus' friend Peter Rucker try to defeat and destroy said villain. Almost indestructible and superhumanly strong, each villain is programmed with specific weapons and weaknesses based on that villain's "theme"; e.g., The Motivational Speaker killed people with a device that ejected audiocassettes that bound and crushed them with audiotape, and he could only be destroyed by eating his own words. Jackal is present in every episode, commanding the other villains and vexing the heroes.

[edit] Cast of Characters

[edit] Regular characters

The following characters appear in every episode:

  • Gus Lloyd/"The Cold-Steel Kid" (James Calvert)
  • Lauren Ashborne/"The Girl" (Cynthia Gibb)
  • Jordan Kenneth Lloyd/Sebastian Jackal (Christopher Lloyd)
  • Peter Rucker (Stephen T. Kay)

[edit] One-time villains

Each of the following characters appears in only one episode:

[edit] Promo Line

A quarterback who throws missiles. A mother who shoots killer icicles. A boss who fires deadly pink slips. Video game villains like this don't come to life everyday... just once a week.

[edit] Trivia

  • One of the reasons the show failed was the time slot, in competition with "Roseanne" and "Wings."
  • Leonard Nimoy served as executive producer and director for numerous episodes.
  • Many of the actors who appeared in the "Star Trek" franchise appeared on this series.
  • The show lasted one season. The only episode that did not get aired was "The Ex-Girlfriend."
  • Leonard Nimoy wrote about the experience putting the series together in his book, I Am Spock.
  • Because of Gus & Lauren's roles in the game, the villains always call them "The Kid" and "The Girl" instead of using their real names.
  • The villains do kill innocent bystanders in every episode, but never in the presence of the three protagonists; whether this is by design or just coincidence is never explained.
  • The Practical Joker is the only one of the villains who wasn't created by Gus; the real Danny Schlecht, a prankster and a computer expert, had programmed this character into the game two years earlier without Gus' knowledge, as a joke.
  • The villain "Evil Shirley" who is based on Lauren's mother fires icicles at her foes, and her weakness is mud because Lauren's real-life mother is such a compulsive neat-freak. The only way to kill her is to drop a house on her (she's later hit by a motor home).
  • The Car Mechanic's weakness is his reflection in a mirror (he even tapes up the rear-view mirrors on his own car).
  • The Boss is based on Gus's boss who fired him for working on his video game. His weakness is red ink, which signifies losing money (i.e., being "in the red"). There was nothing his boss hated worse than losing money.
  • Sebastian Jackal's weakness is the autographed baseball that Gus got from his father.

[edit] External links

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