The Badass Broadcast: Man On A Mission

This week for Badass Broadcast I'll take a look at some of the preshow clips that'll be running before Man on a Mission at the Drafthouse when it opens this Friday.

One the greatest, most awe-inspiring dreams that mankind has ever had is to cast off our terrestrial shackles and travel to the stars. So who among has achieved that loftiest of aspirations? The dude who made the Ultima video games! I'm not sure if this new documentary about him will be any good. The trailer alone uses two or three excerpts from his interview on the Colbert Report, which might indicated a dearth of original or compelling footage, but a guy using steadfast determination and the entirety of his large personal fortune to take a trip to space sounds like a pretty good story.

Here are some excerpts from the preshow.

This is a real classic from the tape trading era. Nowadays a new video seems played out by the end of its first week of existence. Back before viral video was a thing, embarrassments like this got passed around for years and years from one poorly dubbed tape to the next. Shit like this is responsible for laying the groundwork of what people want a viral video to be. Stupid, funny and inexplicably sublime. This is a grandfather clip. It's lived forever, it smells weird, but you still have to pay it respect, invite it over on holidays and listen to its stories.

Space seems pretty OK, but really once you've eaten an egg on the moon, once you've hit a golf ball on the moon, what else is there to do with it?

When the final NASA space shuttle was launched last year, it was a weirdly emotional moment. I think a lot of people were reminded of how breathtakingly incredible it is that we're actually able to travel to space at all. But at the same time it felt tragic, like we were abdicating one of our most incredible dreams. No more astronauts, no more adventures. Leave it to Carl Sagan to have just the right thing to say to put the moment in perspective.