h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yet another movie that nicks a computer games plot and setting for itself.

The Rocketeer was based (in a pilot finding a rocket pack and fighting Nazis way) on an old PC game called Rocket Ranger

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in terms of its 30s style setting, zepplins as bases and comic styling, looks very much lik Crimson Sky's a microsoft flight sim that came out a couple of years ago

Hhmmmm - but I'd suggest it's more a case of Rocketeer/Crimson Skies/Rocket Ranger and Sky Captain all drawing on the same sources, like the 1930s pulp serials and magazines. The movie strike me as beinf like a very long cut-scene from a game though!

You should play Metal Gear Solid for looooong cut-scenes.

To be honest, I find the idea of Dave Stevens bothering to 'base' The Rocketeer on a rather old and unsucessful Cinemaware game a bit...ridiculous. Both appeared in 1988 and at the rate Stevens works that almost certainly means he was drawing and thinking of preliminary sketches and plots in '86-'87.

He was almost certainly referencing 'King of the Rocketmen', one of the great Republic Serials of the Forties.

But then he was also referencing, Doc Savage, The Notorious Bettie Page, Rondo Hatton and the Shadow way before it was considered cool as well.

Nearly all of that had to be jettisoned in order to make the film due to copyright, so instead we got the very 'Dave Stevens' idea of Errol Flynn being a fifth columnist and Howard Hughes as inventor of the jet pack rather then the Man Of Bronze.