The band Traffic has probably been getting its heaviest web traffic ever this past week, thanks to the use of a 50-year-old song, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” that plays briefly but inescapably in the first 10 minutes of the superhero epic. It’s the most prominent of the handful of pop songs that show up during the three-hour running time, at least before an even older oldie, from 1945, brings up the end credits.
And boomers who are well familiar with the Traffic tune as an FM staple for the last half-century may not be that much less initially puzzled by its appearance than millennials: Why isSteve Winwood warbling aboard the starship Benatar?
(Warning: Our answers include mild thematic spoilers, for the hundred or so arthouse partisans and shut-ins who haven’t seen the film.)
Of all the movies you might walk out of saying, “Man, music supervisor Dave Jordan really earned his salary on that one,” “Endgame” does not rank high. Like other “Avengers” movies, it doesn’t interrupt Alan Silvestri’s score for much else, usually throwing in pop only during a few key “Guardians of the Galaxy” crossover moments are happening, referencing the all-but-constant stream of ‘60s and ‘70s songs that figure into that universe as actual story points. So it’s inevitable that even more fanman and fanwoman scrutiny goes toward what few picks there are from Jordan (presumably) in a film like this one that doesn’t much sweat to the oldies. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” is a resonant enough pick that maybe he merits his paycheck after all.
The obvious tonal explanation: Traffic’s observation that (to quote the Eagles) most of us are sad is apropos, coming on the heels of an introductory scene that reminds us half of civilization went ashes-to-ashes at the end of the previous movie, a mass disappearance overseen by the malevolent rapturer Thanos (Josh Brolin). The literal explanation, clear to anyone who’s a little bit up on the Marvel universe: Glum Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) are playing flick football and awaiting certain death in deep space aboard the Benatar, where the Microsoft Zune belonging to absent Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) would have to be their source of tuneage.
(As “Guardians” viewers will recall, Quill/Star-Lord had his mother’s precious Walkman full of vintage songs smashed to bits in “2,” but quickly inherited from the late Yondu an equally dated and emotionally fraught piece of music hardware, the playlist of which will figure into “Guardians of the Galaxy 3,” James Gunn has promised.)
That leaves only the symbolic question to consider: Who’s Mr. Fantasy, in the Marvel, not Dave Mason, universe? Well, he’s Iron Man, of course — who in this sequel merits a more somber theme than either Black Sabbath or AC/DC could provide. “Endgame” may be an ensemble piece, but by the end of it he’s achieved something close to Main Character status. Tony Stark is the class clown whose melancholia creeps up only sarcastically and around the edges — the troupe’s go-to entertainer as well as constant savior, who maybe can’t juggle being both the wisecracking kid and genius-father-knows-best figure forever. “Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy,” sings Winwood, maybe referring — 50 years ahead of time — to Stark’s role as joker. “You are the one who can make us all laugh, but doing that you break out in tears.” Is Tony still an emotionally warped guy, despite all the domestication he’s been through since first appearing as a playboy billionaire in 2008? “Please don’t be sad — if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn’t have known you all these years.” Maybe the filmmakers are trying to tell us that Tony is still so messed up, even Pepper Potts couldn’t reasonably say, “I will fix you.”
The needle is up almost as quickly as it was dropped: three hours doesn’t mean there’s time to fetishize a record (or MP3) collection. There are a couple of choices that don’t require a lot of overthinking— Steppenwolf’s “Hey Lawdy Mama” gives Stan Lee a chance to go out on a sleazebag cameo, and the Rolling Stones’ “Doom and Gloom,” from a few hits collections back, finally gets some sync love during a time-travel prep scene.
The most fun pick, though, is the Kinks’ “Supersonic Rocket Ship,” which doesn’t just push the obvious button in accompanying the scene where Rocket Raccoon and the Hulk travel to re-recruit Thor, but does actually describe the spirit of inclusiveness the “Guardians” franchise is meant to embody: “On my supersonic rocket ship, nobody has to be hip,” Ray Davies promised in the swingin’ jet age of 1967. “Nobody’s gonna travel second class / There’ll be equality / And no suppression of minorities / Well alright.”
The artists who gets the most audio time in “Endgame,” though? Harry James (and his orchestra) and Kitty Kallen, who get a reprise of Jule Styne’s and Sammy Cahn’s end-of-WW-II-celebrating “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” reprised from a “Captain America” movie for a twist on bringing the boys back home. It doesn’t seem like Steve Rogers’ taste, necessarily, but it’d be nice to think he took advantage of his time-travel sojourn to take in a Traffic show.
It’s the bittersweetly cheerful bookend to that bummer-iffic opening. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” resonates in part because it was one of the early songs to make the Summer of Love feel like winter was coming. That it can serve a similar, lightly ominous purpose in a comic book franchise laden with heartache in 2019 is an interesting addition to the zeitgeist in a year when we’re trying to decide whether resuscitating Woodstock is a good idea or not. Tony Stark, hippie jester in billionaire-industrialist-superhero’s clothing, we hardly knew ye.
Looking for a great new Minecraft 1.14 seed to try? Here are a few of our favorites
Minecraft’s much-anticipated Village and Pillage update (1.14) released this week, and what better way to get into the spirit of the new content than with some brand new seeds. With Village and Pillage just releasing, we’re sure to see a ton of new 1.14 seeds cropping up in the upcoming weeks and months. For now, we’ve put together a list of seven cool Java seeds to use in the latest Minecraft version 1.14. Enjoy!
Best Minecraft 1.14 Seeds: 7 New Java Seeds To Try
Minecraft 1.14 Seed – 10101010MICROSOFT
Double Village Seed – 10101010
Coordinates – x: -500 z: 263
This is a beautiful new 1.14 seed has two villages right by spawn. This is the more cool looking one. The seed includes a castle with a drawbridge. The terrain is beautiful and varied and both villages are within eyesight of an iceberg. More photos of the seed can be found, here.
Taiga Seed – 1456770887
Minecraft 1.14 Seed – 1456770887MICROSOFT
If you’re looking for a seed that will spawn you inside a Taiga village, this one is quite good. The seed includes a mineshaft at coordinates x: 163, y: 33, z: 245 and a zombie village at coordinates x: -816, y: -192.
This seed spawns you near a village to the northeast. Exploring this seed, you’ll find things like a desert well, pyramid and a ship with a couple of chests.
Stronghold Seed – 6338394802327870500
MInecraft 1.14 Seed – 6338394802327870500
REDDIT
Stronghold Coordinates – x:1432, y: 952
This seed is a Taiga spawn. There is a ravine to cross and players can find a stronghold and a mineshaft here.
Frozen Polar Biome Seed – 2646137890119988483
Minecraft 1.14 Seed – 2646137890119988483REDDIT
Coordinates- x: -1637, y: 63, z: 1416
If you’re looking for a frozen wonderland, complete with polar bears, this is your seed!
Large Mountain Seed – 8229589436093457009
Minecraft 1.14 Seed – 8229589436093457009REDDIT
Coordinates – x: 329 z: 267
If you love a detailed terrain, you won’t be able to resist this large mountain seed. You can check out additional images, here. https://imgur.com/a/9p3mqPp
Multiple Biomes Seed -7358942493423380506
Minecraft 1.14 Seed -7358942493423380506REDDIT
Coordinates – x: -175, y: 90, z: -245
This seed is perfect for the biome explorer. It includes a swamp, plains, savanna, and desert all right near the spawn point.
Gaming news these days often revolves around Fortnite, PUBG, and the other battle royale clones that have sprung up because of those two. That was a prestige once enjoyed by Minecraft, which helped bring about other voxel-based survival and building games. It may no longer have the spotlight but Minecraft’s latest update has just started to roll out to prove that it still has what it takes to be popular and profitable, without the shooting mayhem that seems to be the fad these days.
As the name not so subtly points out, this update is all about the new villages that have popped in plains, deserts, and other biomes. These aren’t just simple villagers, though, as each has their jobs and lives, denoted by the clothes they wear. They can even sleep on beds because why wouldn’t they.
No peaceful in-game village would be complete, however, without someone messing things up. Thankfully, these pillagers are not the sharpest knives in the drawer but you’ll still want to equip yourself with the new crossbow and shield items.
Non-humanoid mobs have also been given an update, making them behave more realistically in the process. Pandas can roll and foxes can leap. And Ravagers can headbutt anything in their path, including you. A bit unfair that illagers can ride on them.ADVERTISING
Village and Pillage is such a big update to the Minecraft world and, thankfully, it’s available on all supported platforms. That means both Bedrock (Xbox One, Windows 10 Edition, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch) and old-school Java editions will get the update, though exact arrival times may vary.
Here’s an odd change to Minecraft on Switch. Apparently the game has had its save cloud data backup option removed. The feature was in there recently, but has now been yanked without any explanation. We’ll keep tabs on the situation to see if an explanation is given, or if the feature returns.
Earlier this year, we supported charity: water, an incredible organisation that’s on a mission to bring clean water to every person on the planet. You can read about the $10,000 donation we made here. But that’s enough.
Wait a minute, no it isn’t! 663 million people currently lack access to clean water (that’s almost 1 in 10 people), which makes the great work of charity: water absolutely essential. They want to bring clean water to as many people as possible, and we want to help them more.
So we teamed up with the excellent content creators Jigarbov Productions. They’ve crafted together a fantastic new map and skin pack, The Travelling Trader. Go to the Minecraft Marketplace on Xbox One, Windows 10 Edition, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch and you can download it for free! Shall we watch a trailer of this terrific new Minecraft adventure? Let’s!
“But hang on,” I hear you cry. “Does this mean I get a free llama skin? Also, what does this have to do with charity: water?” Well, to answer both your questions, you actually get two llama skins, and as soon as The Travelling Trader has been downloaded from the Minecraft Marketplace 100,000 times, we’ll make a new donation to charity: water of $90,000. That’ll bring us to $100,000 donated, which means ten water projects supported by Minecraft!
Charity: water estimates that the number of people impacted by a $100,000 donation is over 3,300. So all you have to do is download a great map and skin pack, and you’ll help us help a fantastic cause! Every time we call on you to do something like this, you always smash the target in an incredibly short amount of time, and once you’ve downloaded the map 100,000 times, we’ll share the great news on Twitter!
Head to the Minecraft Marketplace now and thank you for helping us help charity: water!
I didn’t think one of the biggest stories of the year for TweakTown would be something covering Minecraft with ‘ray tracing’ style effects with the SEUS Renewed mod that uses path tracing that provides ray tracing-like effects. First we had screenshots and small videos, but now there’s a detailed video of Minecraft with the ray tracing-style effects and it looks awesome. The shader pack provides beautifully realistic lighting, shadow and reflection effects to shiny surfaces, light shafts, and more. The demo video from Digital Foundry was run on an Intel Core i9-7900X, 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Even with this horsepower running Minecraft with the path tracing effects at 1080p was still struggling to hit 60FPS. The team at Digital Foundry do an amazing job at showing off the different effects that path tracing brings to Minecraft, with one of the best uses seeing light hitting a wall, and then shining light again behind it causing different shadows to be cast. This can’t be done with pre-baked lighting, and is only achievable with path tracing or real-time ray tracing effects. It makes for a beautiful experience in something like Minecraft, which has otherwise basic graphics. This makes Minecraft the perfect playground for developers to play around with path tracing to see what real-time ray tracing would be like in a world where you can literally build it from building blocks right in front of you with real-time adjustments to the lighting. If you want to check more out on SEUS Remastered for Minecraft, download the mod, or support the developer – check out the Patreon page.
