Finally back with a new entry! It's been a while but I was busy with JamesCameronOnline.com with the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash. So this time we're gonna take a look at the Inquest (renamed Inquest Gamer 3 months prior to this issue) magazine from May of 1999. What is (was) Inquest magazine? It was a magazine for scifi nerds, which focused a lot on physical games and CCG (Customizable Card Games) which were booming at the time. "InQuest was a very popular and influential monthly magazine published by Wizard Entertainment from 1995 to 2007. It was considered a staple of the 1990s and early 2000s gaming culture. " according to Google
But what is it about that particular issue of that magazine that makes it fitting for the inclusion on this blog and interesting for the fans of the original Terminator films? Well, it has been briefly mentioned many years ago HERE. Yes, I decided to do some detective work, find the issue number, and track it down. So the issue contains has "TOP 50 GREATEST MOMENTS IN SCI-FI HISTORY".
I think most of us like to read those "Top" this and that lists at least out of curiosity, even if some of us don't give them too much weight. However, it's different if its just a list compiled by the editor/website/magazine staff, which some may disregard as the opinion of that particular team, than a list that's actually created from the votes of the readers and fans. There are more lists like that in recent years, where we see how thousands of fans vote for their favorites. It's basically public's opinion.
But those lists aren't new and had been done back in the 1990s. As you might have guessed, voting wasn't as easy as you would have to actually write a physical letter to vote, or, if you did happen to have an access to the internet and an email already in the late 1990s, you could do it this way too
The list made it to the May 1999 issue, and was compiled from readers' votes and polls, so it's interesting which moments were chosen by super scifi geeks back in 1999. I'm never putting too much weight in lists unless they're compiled based on readers' votes, and this one is, which makes it an interesting snapshot of the times. Not only it's the list of Greatest Scifi Moments as of 1999, but it's voted on by diehard, game boards playing scifi nerds (so the list is heavy in Star Trek and Star Wars moments as you can imagine). That makes it a very interesting one for me personally. So let's take a look at where the original Terminator Duology lands.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day has its moment at a high #16 with the reforming T-1000 at the Steel Mill. That's a very good number considering the list is made up of such classics as 2001, The Day The Earth Stood Still and the 1931 Frankenstein.
The Terminator scored even higher, almost making it into the Top 10 at #11 spot, with T-800's destruction in the hydraulic press. There are few typos in couple places in the list, and this is one of them. The entry for this SciFi moment actually has two, an omission of a word and the wrong designation of the T-800 number (called a T-100 here, a mistake made only once to my knowledge prior to this list).
(for the curious ones, #1 is taken by the twist ending of the original 1968 'Planet of the Apes')