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. Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... UPN (which originally stood for the United Paramount Network) was a television network in over 200 markets in the United States. ... Namcos Pac-Man was a hit, and became a cultural phenomenon. ...

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. The protagonist or main character is the central figure of a story. ... Namcos Pac-Man was a hit, and became a cultural phenomenon. ... One popular concept of the villain, meant to mimic the purposely distinctive visage of villains from silent films of the early 20th century. ... The Devil is a title given to a supernatural entity, who, in most interpretations of the Abrahamic faiths, is the central embodiment of evil. ... Mary Pickford, a perpetual ingenue The Ingenue is a stock character in literature and film and a role type in the theatre, generally a girl or a young woman who is rather innocent and endearing. ...

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. The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. ...

Cast of Characters

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)

Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) from the movie Back to the Future. ...

One-time villains

Each of the following characters appears in only one episode:

• "Killshot"
• "Evil Shirley," Shirley Ashborne (Shirley Jones)
• "The Orthodontist," Dr. Kramer (Christopher Neame)
• "The Dental Hygienist," Sharon (Dr. Kramer's assistant) (Marjorie Monaghan)
• "The Boss," Mr. Metcalf (LeVar Burton)
• "The Divorce Lawyer," Courtney Lake (Victoria Rowell)
• "The Garbage Man," Roy Hopkins (Mike Starr)
• "The Motivational Speaker," Nathan Abrams (Dwight Schultz)
• "The Practical Joker," Danny Schlecht (Brent Spiner)
• "The Camp Counselor," Chuck Manley (Anthony Michael Hall)
• "The Car Mechanic," Ross Logan

Shirley Jones, in a still from the opening credits of The Partridge Family Shirley Mae Jones (born March 31, 1934) is an Academy Award-winning singer and actress, perhaps best known for her role as Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five children, in the television series The Partridge Family... Christopher Neame is a London-born actor, best known to television viewers for his roles in two 1970s BBC dramas dealing with the Second World War - Lieutenant Dick Player in Colditz and Flight Lieutenant John Curtis in Secret Army. ... Marjorie Monaghan (born March 19, 1964 in California, USA) is an American actress. ... LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge. ... Victoria Rowell as Drucilla Winters Victoria Rowell (born May 10, 1960 in Portland, Maine) is an American actress. ... William Dwight Schultz (born November 24, 1947 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American stage, television and film actor who uses the stage name Dwight Schultz. ... Spiner during his time as a member of the Next Generation cast. ... Michael Anthony Thomas Charles Hall (born April 14, 1968), known professionally as Anthony Michael Hall, is an American actor, producer and director who achieved stardom in several successful teen-oriented films of the 1980s. ...

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.

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.

Roseanne was an American sitcom which aired on ABC from 1988 to 1997, starring the stand-up comedian Roseanne. ... Wings was an American sitcom that ran on NBC from April 19, 1990 to May 14, 1997. ... Leonard Simon Nimoy (born March 26, 1931) is an American actor, film director, poet, musician and photographer. ... Star Trek is an American science fiction franchise. ... I Am Spock is the second autobiography written by Leonard Nimoy. ...

External links

• Deadly Games at the Internet Movie Database