For the better part of the last 40 years, Roderick George Toombs was known to the world as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, the bombastic, loudmouth, straight shooting, dastardly, wrestler, and movie star. Nicknamed the Hot Rod, Piper was at times as big a star as Hulk Hogan, and is beloved by cult movie watchers for his turn in John Carpenter’s sci-fi classic They Live. The WWE hall-of-famer died in his sleep at his Hollywood home on Thursday from cardiac arrest, and was found on Friday.

I don’t know if John Carpenter, one of my favorite directors of all time, will ever again make a movie as good as the genre classics he used to blast out back in the golden days before old school directors like him would be forced to slog away in the salt mines of direct-to-video filmmaking. But during that wonderful near-two decade period when he was without equal in the ranks of America’s finest and most prolific directors, Carpenter made many classics that would endear him forever to fans of science-fiction, horror, and action cinema, and his 1988 film They Live was possibly the last truly great feature he would ever sit behind the camera on.

Held over the weekend in Dallas, TX and co-sponsored by Rue Morgue Magazine, the horror convention Texas Frightmare Weekend hosted a panel discussion with the three stars of They Live – former WWF (now WWE) superstar Roddy Piper, Keith David (who also co-starred in another Carpenter classic – 1982’s The Thing), and 1980’s genre mainstay Meg Foster (Blind Fury, Welcome to Arrow Beach). Rue Morgue’s managing editor Dave Alexander moderated the hour-long panel.

You can watch a 16-minute compilation of highlights from the spirited discussion here below.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
Blu-ray | DVD | Video On Demand
Directed by: Chris Berkeley, Lauren Montgomery, Jay Oliva
Written by: Eddie Berganza, Alan Burnett, Todd Casey, Dave Gibbons, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Geoff Johns, Peter J. Tomasi
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Jason Isaacs, Elisabeth Moss, Kelly Hu, Arnold Vosloo, Grey DeLisle, Steve Blum, Henry Rollins, Roddy Piper
DC Entertainment/Warner Bros.
Release Date: June 8, 2011

DC’s animation department has done a terrific job with all of their animated features showcasing some of the biggest names in DC’s library, and the next film in this legacy is the anthology style film, Green Lantern: Emerald Knights. When I popped this into my Blu-ray player, honestly, I wasn’t sure to expect. I’ve been a fan, overall, of the DC animated films and their adaptation of All-Star Superman was almost perfect, it captured the heart and story of the comic while also making things cohesive for the animated medium. All-Star Superman is probably my favorite of the films, but I had an emotional tie to that story, and while I’ve loved the majority of these animated titles, I can’t say the same about Green Lantern: First Flight, the least favorite out of all the features.