Well, I asked a fairly straightforward question in GQ and had it hijacked all over the place, so, instead of trying to hijack it in another direction, I’ll just start a new thread here.
In this thread, Spectre of Pithecanthropus noted that American high school and college sports teams are shying away from calling themselves “The Warriors”, even though that term isn’t specific to any particular race or ethnic group. It seems that, historically, teams called “The Warriors” have almost always been associated with depictions of Native Americans and are thus suspect.
But imagine a team known as “The Warriors” that didn’t take their inspiration from Native Americans. What if their name came from Walter Hill’s The Warriors?
That would rock.
Imagine the team uniforms! :eek:
Imagine the cheerleaders! :eek: :eek:
Imagine the halftime show! :eek: :eek: :eek:
Imagine the PA announcer when the team first comes onto the court: “Warriors, come out and play-eee-aaay!” :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
As far as I’m concerned, that would make “The Warriors” the coolest team nickname in America.
BTW, I just watched the movie a couple of weeks ago (my SO had never seen it)… what the hell was up with that mime gang? I wish the Warriors had kicked their asses too.
Maybe they wanted you to challenge them to a fight cause they knew you would and then they would proceed to beat the hell out of you.
Of course, you could not report them to anyone, even your other gang members
“Hey Mungo, you look like Cream of Shit. What happened?”
“I got beat up by a pack of mimes”
“Oh thats too bad. Here, wear this dress and go make me some money you assbeef”
I dunno, personally I thought “The Warriors” (like practically everything else Walter Hill ever did) was MST3K material. Just laughably bad.
Of course, my judgment may be clouded by the fact that I was a parkign lot attendant at Rockaway beach in the lates 1970s, and I remember how every stupid 15 year old white boy who’d just had his first beer would click the bottles together and chant “Waaaariiioooooooors… come out and play-ayyyyyyy,” as if he were the first kid who ever thought of doing that.
A remarkably dumb movie that might have been good for a few cheap laughs, except that Walter Hill has NO sense of humor! Worse yet, Hill clearly thought he was a cutting-edge director who was showing us what the gang underworld is REALLY like. But his supposedly “gritty realism” was pathetically cheesey and phony. Also rather cowardly. There is NO SUCH THING as an interracial street gang! There are black gangs, Mexican gangs, Chinese gangs, Italian gangs, Russian gangs, et al., but no equal opportunity gangs!).
Personally, I can’t really argue with this assessment, but honestly, isn’t that cheesy self-importance what makes The Warriors the perfect high school mascot?
I was at Marquette University when they annouced they were changing the name from Warriors to something else, and several friends of mine and I did propose just what chukhung suggested.
The most success we had, however, was getting a bunch of freshman to run around yelling “Warriors, come out and playeeeaayyyy”, which was apparently insufficent to convince the adminstration of the worthiness of our idea.
A lot of other people proposed similar but more practial things. Like making the mascot a Viking warrior, or some other minor change like that. The most reasonable one was to change it back to the Hilltoppers, which used to be the old mascot before they used Warriors. Instead they rammed the blandly generic “Golden Eagles” down our throats. It was a sad, sad day.
I like to think that in some alternate reality, we were victorious and the Marquette Warriors take to the court wearing ripped acid-washed denim vests and gloves with the fingers cut off.
I think the Warriors were a mixed gang to increase audience identification, and represent a sort of conformity to general heroic ideals, rather than to group identity.
I don’t think Walter Hill was trying to portray gritty realism. In fact, I think he was trying to make the story fantastic. The screenplay is based on The Anabasis, about a company of Greek mercenaries who went to Persia to help a usurper overthrow the emperor (although neither were named Cyrus), and had to fight their way home.