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Slipspace wrote:

MarkNorfolk wrote:
I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.

I sort of get the worry about a comedy GoT look but I think Ankh-Morpork is such a richly detailed city that's a character in its own right it seems a little odd to change it so much. And if the production designers can't make Ankh-Morpork look unique and interesting without it coming off as a parody of something else that would be a big red flag for me if I was financing the production.

Understood. But we've all got different 'head canon' images of what it looks like. Me, (due to my age I expect) found it easy to imagine as a Terry Gilliam-esque crap-hole of a fantasy city. But it's developed since the early days, and so far I've seen nothing too incongruous, apart from the fan - but hey, maybe it's powered by a pixie.

MarkNorfolk wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

MarkNorfolk wrote:
I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.

I sort of get the worry about a comedy GoT look but I think Ankh-Morpork is such a richly detailed city that's a character in its own right it seems a little odd to change it so much. And if the production designers can't make Ankh-Morpork look unique and interesting without it coming off as a parody of something else that would be a big red flag for me if I was financing the production.

Understood. But we've all got different 'head canon' images of what it looks like. Me, (due to my age I expect) found it easy to imagine as a Terry Gilliam-esque crap-hole of a fantasy city. But it's developed since the early days, and so far I've seen nothing too incongruous, apart from the fan - but hey, maybe it's powered by a pixie.

Honestly that's a level of subtle detail that I'm not coming to even hope to expect from this series.
I mean it might be and that would be awesome because its very Discworld, but they don't really seem to have a grasp on the heart and soul of Discworld as it is.

Slipspace wrote:
My worry right now in Cheery's case is that the producers seem to be parading the non-binary part of the character very heavily and I have little confidence they're going to be playing that off in any more than token fashion. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.

If anything, they appear to be getting it backwards - dwarfs are all non-binary in the Discworld. You don't have male-looking and female-looking (binary) dwarfs, you just have dwarfs that all look short and beardy under all the chainmail. Cheery / Cheri is different because she wants to be binary and demonstrate that she is female.

Crispy78 wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
My worry right now in Cheery's case is that the producers seem to be parading the non-binary part of the character very heavily and I have little confidence they're going to be playing that off in any more than token fashion. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.

If anything, they appear to be getting it backwards - dwarfs are all non-binary in the Discworld. You don't have male-looking and female-looking (binary) dwarfs, you just have dwarfs that all look short and beardy under all the chainmail. Cheery / Cheri is different because she wants to be binary and demonstrate that she is female.

Yep. And the footnotes in the book end up explaining that they often end up with gay marriage as well. Nobody involved knows what they're getting until after the marriage ceremony, and its taboo (or at least incredibly impolite) to ask.
I think it would have been more representative (and less tokenism) to have left the situation in the books intact, as you have an entire culture that's functionally non-binary and nondiscriminatory by default and not an 'exception to the norm.'
With the setup they're using for the show, they're just going with the standard 'ostracized for not being 'normal.''

Honestly I suspect that they didn't even read the source material when designing much of the set and characters and actors. I mean if they can't even get her as a dwarf right what hope is there for the rest?!

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I suspect that they didn't even read the source material when designing much of the set and characters and actors. I mean if they can't even get her as a dwarf right what hope is there for the rest?!

Pretty much sums up the thinks I've been having, hopefully the fanbase will just politely ignore it rather than get all frothy on the twit-gakkers and me-toobs

and whilst I have cheerled for it before if you can find the Neil Gaiman story “The Goldfish Pond and Other Stories” its a cracking (and I suspect a smidge autobiographical) short story on how the Hollywood and tellyland causes one thing to become another, which appears to be the case here

I'll be honest, from what I've read and seen so far this seems to be less "inspired by" rather it seems to be a wholly different world that has had the Discworld slapped on top of it to try and borrow some credibility.

I may watch it, but it's not Pratchett.

That's my imptession too. If you can't do your own stories, just slap a well-respected name on it and sell it that way.
Hard pass for me.

Yeah that explanation of how Dwarves in Pratchett were already non binary was exactly my problem with it. The change is actually lazier, and dumbs down the idea. Changes just for the sake of laziness are bad changes. Same with modernising the costumes and stuff - that is just a way to be lazier with sets and so on. Fine in a low cost theatre production, not interested in it in a TV adaptation. I can just read the books again, my imagination works fine.

Is anyone surprised this is going to be gak? I mean BBC America has an amazing track record of turning great tv programmes into a steaming pile of gak pretty much ever single time and that's with there own shows.

Well, we don't know what it's going to be like. We've just seen some pics and we've gone "oh, Cheery doesn't look like a traditional dwarf" and "where's Nobbs" and "Ramkin's a bit thin".

I'm reminded of the preview pics of Dredd. Opinion was very scathing of the low tech images and what looked like an unimpressive Lawmaster. But the story and the actors turned into a darn good movie.

Me - I'm going to watch it. At least at the start. It's a TV show so that's how it should be judged.

Absolutely.

I’m totally open to the show being great. But I still can’t get over that if they can’t get the look and atmosphere right, what else have they got wrong?

Regardless of how good it is, it’s unlikely to register as Discworld for me, I’m afraid.

I take your point, but so far there's not a lot that looks right (I will grant that Vimes looks OK so far) and a *lot* that seems to just fundamentally misunderstand the original setting, characters and stories.

I'll watch it and give it a chance, but I won't be going in excited and enthusiastic.

Low expectations may save this. We may be following the master plan.

Not read the books but watched the TV shows over the years, including the Cosgrove animations from the 90s. Even at their lowest point, Terry Prachett's stories and characters always shines through where they start with seemingly unrelated threads and weave into an epic conclusion that most modern blockbusters can only hope to achieve.

As shoe-string as it was, I liked the finale of Soul Music...

"TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS??? TWOOOOO THOUSAND DOLLARS???"

"Shhhhhh...this is bandit country."

"YOU'RE TELLING ME!!!"

...not sure about The Watch save for Marama Corlett who played Rina in the Sinbad series a while back. She was quite good in that one, and apparently been in a few big films since. I suppose like Hog Father and Colour of Magic I'll watch an episode before judging - which is the case for most shows.

Honestly the old cartoons might have had pretty flat voice actors, but they were beautifully faithful to the original material. The "film" adaptations are a bit hit and miss with me. I think they generally hit it with a decent script and faithfulness toward the original material, though they can sometimes get that "made on a shoestring budget" feel which I think doesn't do justice to Discworld where most of my imaginings are of a bustling lively world full of life and characters from dwarves to trolls and all inbetween.

I’ll at least wait for some moving pictures (see what I did there) before judging this. Feels like judging a song from the lyrics alone otherwise.

(Still... a picatinny/weaver rail on a fantasy crossbow???)

It doesn’t look like what I think Ankh-Morpork looks like,but that doesn’t matter. I quite like the look they’ve gone for here, and if it means they can portray something that looks good on a TV budget, so much the better. The dodgy rubber golems in Sky’s Going Postal were a rather huge flaw in that series, for me. Better do leave them out or change them to something you can do convincingly.

As for dwarven gender politics, it’s a little different to what’s been said here, IMO. When Guards! Guards! First looked at dwarf society, there was apparently gender-equality (but not “non-binary”, as I understand it - they were all definitely men or women), but as Feet of Clay went on to look at, only one gender was socially acceptable. Everyone had to be, or pretend to be, a man. Cherry’s development in Feet of Clay and the subsequent change in dwarf society was that she said she wanted the option to be a man or not.

While Pterry used Abrahamic fundamentalism (obviously Islam, but I wouldn’t want to rule out Christian fundamentalists either), the treatment of native children in Australia and Canada (and suppression of the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic languages in the UK) seems like a better target for the analogy. But I should probably not take that any further, at risk of red text.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and as l’espirit de l’escalier, I don’t see the problem with spray paint graffiti. Simply take an imp, make it hold a mouthful of paint, point it at the wall and squeeze.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
It doesn’t look like what I think Ankh-Morpork looks like,but that doesn’t matter. I quite like the look they’ve gone for here, and if it means they can portray something that looks good on a TV budget, so much the better. The dodgy rubber golems in Sky’s Going Postal were a rather huge flaw in that series, for me. Better do leave them out or change them to something you can do convincingly.

As for dwarven gender politics, it’s a little different to what’s been said here, IMO. When Guards! Guards! First looked at dwarf society, there was apparently gender-equality (but not “non-binary”, as I understand it - they were all definitely men or women), but as Feet of Clay went on to look at, only one gender was socially acceptable. Everyone had to be, or pretend to be, a man. Cherry’s development in Feet of Clay and the subsequent change in dwarf society was that she said she wanted the option to be a man or not.

You're honestly misremembering. She wanted to be publicly recognizable as a woman, specifically. Which included makeup and more feminine chain mail. (She was still a dwarf, after all).

It wasn't non-binary simply because that term wasn't in Pratchett's lexicon, but the passage on 'awkward courtships' make it clear that no dwarf ever knew what any other dwarf was (in terms of gender)

From Discworld Monthly on Facebook, first image of Detritus (who actually looks like a troll!):

So Detritus is the only one that actually looks anything like a character from the books. He's also far superior to the BBC/Sky attempts at a Diskworld troll.

The rest - I honestly cannot tell who is who! I also think it looks even more 1950-70s. I'm ready for saxophone music

Detritus did take me a second to recognise, after the atempts by Sky. This looks a much better attempt at a Troll.

But, is Cheery nearly as tall as Carrot?

More anti-Stoutist propaganda, Lady Sybil is the wrong shape

Oh. Is the axe murderess supposed to be Sybil?


Looking at it more, the way they're going to treat crossbows as guns is very, very annoying.
If they're like that a lot, the string is going to stretch and the bolts are going to slip.
Though that over-the-shoulder posturing does explain the short hair on what is presumably Angua. When it was longer, it kept getting caught in the crossbow mechanisms.

Yeah, that's meant to be Sybil.

If the girl with the short pink hair is Angua, well, I suppose she could be worse. Vimes is alright, suitably grizzled I guess. Assume the chap on the far right is Carrot. He looks nicely clean-cut, but Carrot was supposed to be massively toned and muscular - his nickname Carrot referred to the shape of his body.

Detritus is mediocre, it's like they heard 'made out of rock' but never saw any of Josh Kirby's illustrations.

Cheery and Sybil are just plain wrong. And it still just doesn't look like Discworld. I think I'm going to find it very hard to not feel like it's just ripping Discworld off.

Voss wrote:
Oh. Is the axe murderess supposed to be Sybil?

And here I was thinking she was Angua. At least she'd have a reason to be armed like that!

But yeah this is clearly a total and utter rip-off/inspired by. As I've said before someone wanted to do "fantasy 1950-70s cops in America" and didn't get the budget so they slapped Discworld on it and tried again and got it.

I'm sure it could be pretty darn good and fun, but it just will never be true proper Discworld. In fact the more you look at it the more you realise its not even trying.

In case anyone hasn't been following this closely:

The Pratchett estate have distanced themselves from this - "Inspired by characters created by Terry Pratchett" rather than an adaptation", and are doing their own thing under the Narrativia banner.

The Showrunner/Creator of BBC America's The Watch has said it's a "queer-ing up" of Discworld, whatever that means...


While I'm interested in the idea of a steampunk CSI series, I'm really not sure about this.

 Overread wrote:

Voss wrote:
Oh. Is the axe murderess supposed to be Sybil?

And here I was thinking she was Angua. At least she'd have a reason to be armed like that!

Apparently she's now a vigilante.

Is queering up the new woke ? Of course in my day that was politeness and basic humanity...

I think this might be yet another case of them 'merika folks not quite getting it or just trying to CW up everything as if something doesnt fit the checklist hammer it till it does

Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us

Depends, we still got the first Golden Compass movie and Scyfi-Channel managed to do Earthsea with only one character who wasn't white.

I think the thing is if you've not been "in TV/Movies/Hollywood" before then there are a LOT of pitfalls and traps whereby the creator can end up out of control and where executives, studies, bean counters, personal projects and such can all get in the way and hack up an original work into something that doesn't even resemble it. Sometimes it also happens because a project starts with person A working for studio 1 and eventually ends up with person E working for Studio 10. So a lot of the changes, whilst they add up to a big shift in the end, are all small adjustments one by one that cut away. I think its a case of "baptism of fire" until you come out the other end a bit wiser, a bit more understanding of what the media machine both wants and also how it works. Even so it might take several runs to get anywhere.

Isnt the first rule of geekdom 'we dont talk about that Earthsea travesty' because a) was gak b) ruined any chance of any further attempt