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The 1990s were full of so many news stories of postal workers, some of which were recently fired, losing it and shooting up their offices that the phrase “going postal” entered the pop culture lexicon. Ted Sallee and Jason Sikorsky’s documentary Going Postal: The Legacy Foretold shows how a group of video game developers known for games based on children’s shows like Bobby’s World and Sesame Street formed a new company Running with Scissors to create more adult games, the first of which launched a video game franchise: Postal. Although it has a lot of ground to cover, Going Postal maintains a good balance of discussing the numerous influences, both positive and negative, the Postal series has had on pop culture to date.
One of the best things about Going Postal is the wide scope of topics covered. There’s the expected material about the games being about the Postal Dude who has had about all he can take and goes on a Falling Down style satirical rampage against society as each game in the series gets increasingly more absurd. Thankfully, it’s not just the video games that are covered here. We also get some humorous anecdotes on the 2007 Uwe Boll feature film Postal, which was loosely based on the Postal 2 game; Larry Thomas, who plays Osama bin Laden in the film and is best known for playing the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, recalls loving the political humor in screenplay only to be let down with the cruder humor present in the released version.
Much time is spent on the United States Senate hearings on video game violence in the early 1990s and also a controversial real-life school shooting where the gunman was a fan of the Postal games. The mix of more serious real-world anecdotes with the lighter fare game and film development give the documentary a grounding and historical context that makes it far more than a EPK-styled puff piece.
Interview subjects range far and wide, going beyond the usual suspects (Running with Scissors founder Vince Desi, Postal movie director Uwe Boll); The Ultimate History of Video Games author Steven L. Kent and video game journalist Robert Coffey are especially notable in how they defend the Postal games’ right to exist despite not liking the games themselves. Sallee and Sikorksky show a willingness to dig a bit deeper than expected, making Going Postal unexpectedly moving at times, especially when talking to fans of the Postal franchise who feel the games have gotten them through some hard times in their life.
Running a hair above two hours, Going Postal can feel a little like information overload at times. No doubt there’s a lot of ground to cover here that either could have been fleshed out into a docuseries (the tortured outsourced development of Postal III in particular feels like it could have been fodder for a feature-length documentary or docuseries episode of its own!) or been a bit more focused, but the shaggy dog quality of the documentary has its own charms. The Postal series has always carried a lot of baggage (the original release of the first game had a level set in an elementary school!), and Going Postal doesn’t shy away from it. The whole enchilada is covered, warts and all, and Postal fans wouldn’t have it any other way.
The post Going Postal: The Legacy Foretold: Game for Anything, by Mat Bradley-Tschirgi first appeared on Battleship Pretension.
The post Going Postal: The Legacy Foretold: Game for Anything, by Mat Bradley-Tschirgi appeared first on Battleship Pretension.
