Bonus Disc - [Final Page]

After leaving Mr. Scott, I went back to studio Nintendo had set up and got to interview some of the title characters themselves, the Metroids. Most of the troupe had disbanded but two of them had gotten married and agreed to do the interview. Jan [Metroid #5] and Randy [Metroid #8] Leveret did me the honor.

SCU: Thanks for coming down and doing the interview. I understand it's quite the trip.

Randy: Riding coach was murder but it's not like we have anything else to do.

Jan: The hardest part was just getting the money together to buy some tickets.

SCU: So things haven't been going well for you lately?

Randy: You just summed up the story of our lives, brother.

Jan: Our fates were sealed after Metroid II. That was when we committed ourselves to the role of a Metroid by coming back for a second time. After Super Metroid we were beyond typecast. People saw us and just couldn't think of anything else.

Randy: I auditioned for the Phantom of the Opera and got laughed off the stage by the talent directors before I even started. Jan had a similar experience with The King and I. By this point about the only jobs outside of Nintendo we can get is filling in the background of Animal Planet documentaries on marine life. We can't even make the Discovery Channel. And TLC? Forget about it.

Jan: Randy and I have tried to keep active and we've never stopped auditioning, hoping that big break will come and we can break out of this image we've been seen as for more than fifteen years. Some of the gang just accepted it and moved on. Barney got a job managing a Subway, Tony opened his own photography studio, but a lot of us weren't so lucky.

Randy: They found Collin dead on the floor of his apartment back in '97, overdose. Jacklyn got addicted to crack and the last we heard of her she was turning tricks for twenty-five dollars to anybody or anything with money. Of course Neil never did lose the weight he put on to play the title character and as clogged as his nuclei clusters were, it's amazing he stayed alive as long as he did. Poor Bill just snapped and took a gun up to a water tower. It took hours to get him down from there, but luckily he only wounded a few people.

Jan: And that didn't help the rest of us get work.

Randy: No, it certainly didn't.

Jan: From about 1995-2001 things were real rough for us. Virtually no money and no real acting jobs. We told ourselves back in 1994 that that was it; we'd never come back to the series just to be one trick ponies again, but, well, Nintendo contacted us and showed us the money for their next project.

Randy: The money didn't have to be good, it was money.

Jan: A lot of the others were the same. Everyone that could be found came back, though some of them got fired because they no longer fit the part.

Randy: Our acting in Fusion was uninspired, I'll be the first to admit that.

Jan: After playing the same role three times before, we kind of just went through the motions on that one.

Randy: It didn't matter. By this time we're just included because the fans demand it. We get forced into the plot at the last minute and then all of the troupe comes floating in as fast as they can. Most of them blow it all just as soon as they get it.

Jan: When we even get asked to come. The majority of Metroids who appeared Prime were just CGI. Sadly I bet most people didn't even notice we weren't really there most of the time. Just another excuse for Nintendo to screw us over.

SCU: I suppose in light of that, what do you think is the legacy of Super Metroid?

Randy: Ruin. It ruined us. It destroyed all possibilities of any of us having a chance at a real career. Now we're dependant on them to pump out games as quickly as possible.

Jan: We were young when we signed those first contracts. You would have thought we could have gotten some kind of royalties over the years or something, but Nintendo told us that there was no reason to bring lawyers into it. We were trusting and naive.

Randy: So here we are, out of jobs and down on our luck.

SCU: I don't think I've ever heard of actors getting royalties, but why didn't you ever just get real jobs like everyone else?

Jan: Despite the recent progress of the 97% Movement, it's still a vertebrate's world out there.

SCU: 97% Movement?

Randy: You three percenters coined the terms "vertebrate" and "invertebrate"; dividing the world into "normal" and "abnormal" without giving any thought to the actual majority. Ninety-seven percent of the species are so-called "invertebrates" yet we have a history of being discriminated against stretching back over a billion years.

Jan: These days I have trouble finding a bathroom that supports my waste-disposal needs, much less a job. Once you people developed backbones you thought you were at top of the food chain.

SCU: Mm-hmm. But you mentioned several of your colleagues who had gone on to great success.

Randy: I'd hardly call managing a Subway "great success," but he was just a token hire to make the company's minority statistics look better anyway. And Tony's probably running drugs out of his photography business, using it for cover.

Jan: That's what I heard.

SCU: Okay... Yeah... Well, thank you once again for coming out here. I'd shake with you but I don't know exactly what to-

Randy: Grab the lower part of the hydrotic, that dangly thing behind the tooth.

SCU: Oh, okay. Thank you Jan for-

Jan: What are you doing!? He said the dangly one, not the droopy one!

Randy: Whoa, buddy. Just wait one second, now. I don't know where you got your manners, but where we come from you don't touch a lady there and not expect to get an ass kicking.

The situation deteriorated from there. While entertaining, I was by no means sad to wrap up that interview. Randy was restrained by Nintendo's security staff and apparently there's been some talk of Jan trying to file a sexual harassment suit against me, though it looks unlikely for the time being. Besides the asexual nature of... whatever it is Jan and Randy are, the precedent for invertebrates being acknowledged in court without a proper documentation is quite poor. The ICLU is challenging this, but I doubt it will go anywhere.

Well, that's the end of your free preview. I won't bother to plug the game anymore but my site is a different story. Check out www.samus.co.uk for updates on the release and all your Metroid needs. After all, we're soooo in teh Varia.