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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Category Archives: Film

Morganville – SDCC trailer

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Publicity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anthony Stewart Head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, David Tennant, Executive Producer, Kickstarter campaign, Morganville Vampires, paranormal romance, Rachel Caine, Robert Picardo, Vampire, Vampires


As you should all know by now, I am a big fan of the Morganville series of novels by Rachel Caine. So much so that I became a backer for the Kickstarter campaign that aimed to produce a Webcast show of the series. I guess that makes me a producer (I am opting for the title of Chief Executive Producer in charge of giving over a small amount of cash to help make this happen). Anyway, the trailer for this series was released at San Diego Comic Con and while I was not there to see it myself, I did get sent an exclusive link to see it because of my backer involvement… so here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUtF-P6cqs

Of course they did not follow my casting picks. I guess David Tennant was not available to play Myrnin and Anthony Stewart Head was not able to play Oliver. However, looking at the trailer you can see some stellar choices made. In particular you may recognise Amber Benson of Buffy fame as Amelia and Robert Picardo (yes, THAT Robert Picardo of Voyager fame in a grey wig) as Oliver.

So it is all looking promising and reasonably close to the source material. About the only thing I have spotted so far that is possibly different is that if this series is following book 1 they are introducing Myrnin too soon but since he is awesome I cannot see an issue with that…

So, yes, in my opinion (as Chief Executive Producer in charge of giving over a small amount of cash to help make this happen) you should totally check this out when it airs… especially if you like Buffy, Vampires or Voyager.

D.A Lascelles is the author of Lurking Miscellany, Transitions (Mundania Press) and Gods of the Sea (Pulp Empires). He lives in Manchester UK. You can sometimes see him writing about Zombie porn on https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ but he mostly blogs about books, vampires, science fiction and Terry Pratchett. He is inordinately proud of the fact that one of his Pratchett articles was referenced on the French version of the author’s Wikipedia page.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DaLascelles

Twitter: @areteus

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[AW Blog chain] Devil Child

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Musings

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Childs Play, Devil Baby of Hull House, devil child, Hellboy, Ira Levin, Jane Addams, Old Wives tales, pregnancy experience, Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby, The Demon Child, The Omen, Urban Legends


So, after a long absence I am finally back on the old AW blog chain gang, picking up litter from the highways and turning it into readable blogs while men with sunglasses, police uniforms and guns watch us… it’s a hard life. but someone has to do it.

This month the Blogchaintopicomogrifier (patent pending) has beeped and churned and made flashing lights to produce the title of ‘Devil Child’ on its little tickertape printer thing*. At least I think that is what it read. That tickertape font is hard to read sometime, what with all the +++++’s in the middle of everything.

So, ‘Devil Child’. It conjures up several images. The juxtaposition of the traditional root of all evil with something that is considered to be innocent is an intriguing one that does generate a lot of interest. Films have been known to play on the perceived innocence of children. The Omen franchise, for example, bases its entire horror premise on the fact that awful things happen to people, such as sheets of glass decapitating them, quite by accident while a cute, small child smiles happily and entirely innocently several miles away with a perfect alibi. Not to mention various ‘creepy doll’ concepts such as the Childs Play series in which the doll Chucky (coincidentally voiced by the same chap who played Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings) becomes possessed of the devil and wreak murderous havoc.

One film in particular, however, really ramps up the creepy with this concept. Rosemary’s Baby. This film is the perfect example of sixties occult cinema***, filled with some very sinister satanic imagery and derives most of its horror from the psychological effects such things have on the protagonists. It is also filled with various not so subtle references to things linked to pregnancy – cravings, abdominal pains and so on – to the extent that it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the darker aspects of the pregnancy experience. You could also discuss the quite nasty rape implications inherent in the film. In a dream sequence after she faints, Rosemary is raped by the devil and this is bad enough but worse than that when she wakes up and finds she is pregnant her husband tells her that while she was unconscious he decided to have sex with her anyway because he did not want to waste the chance. That to me does not sound like the actions of a concerned husband. Or even a decent human being.

But differences between a ‘happy household’ in the 1960s and today aside, I really wanted to talk about the urban legend that allegedly inspired the book by Ira Levin which inspired Roman Polanski to make Rosemary’s Baby. The Devil Baby of Hull House.

Jane Addams

Hull House was opened by Jane Addams in 1889 as a Chicago based community to help provide social and educational opportunities for working class people. It achieved this by providing lessons in everything from academic subjects such as art and literature to domestic tasks such as sewing. They also provided free concerts, discussions on current affairs and clubs for children and adults. However, far from being known as a place of egalitarian and charitable education and social mobility, Hull house came to be known for something far more sinister. One story goes that the atheist husband of a Catholic wife refused to allow an icon of the Virgin Mary (some versions say Jesus Christ) to be hung on their wall, declaring that he would rather have the devil himself in residence. Another version, the Jewish version, claims that the husband, for want of a son, declared he would rather have the devil himself than another daughter. Whatever the husband declared, whether he cursed god or the prospect of a daughter, the wife gave birth to a creature that has been described as follows:

“The doctor stood and revealed the child cradled in his arms. A monster writhed within the scratched and bloodied arms of the terrified physician. It was larger then a one year old child, its skin like a reptile’s, both scaly and rough. Sharp horns jetted out of its head on either side and a thin, long object swayed in the air, the tip shaped like a two-pronged fork, swayed about the infants head.” (Daniel Cumerlato, founding partner of Haunted Hamilton).

And:

“No amount of denial convinced them that he was not there, for they knew exactly what he was like with his cloven hooves, his pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had, moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most shockingly profane” (Jane Addams, The Long Road of Women’s Memory, Chapter One, p3)

Jane Addams allegedly had the child locked in the attic of Hull House and made attempts at having it baptised and rumours about the child ran amok in Chicago. Addams strenuously denied the rumours, claiming (quite rightly) that there was no evidence for it other than hearsay. She did later talk at length about the incident in her book, The long Road of Woman’s Memory. Chapter one is subtitled ‘Women’s memories – Transmuting the past, as illustrated by the story of the Devil Baby’ and in it she talks about the ‘power of an Old Wives’ tale’, describing what we would now refer to as an Urban legend in the many visitors who had come to the house to see the baby, convinced that it existed. She gives a fairly involved memoir about her recollections of some of these, including a list of the phrases she had to repeat endlessly to throw off these sightseers and their bizarre counterarguments. However, it seemed as if the more she denied it, the more convinced her visitors were that she was hiding the baby somewhere in one of the many rooms of the house.

Addams makes a lot of good points in that chapter. This story is the perfect example of an Urban legend where a rumour spreads and so many are convinced of it they cannot be persuaded of the truth. The only variations noted by Addams are religious ones – she mentions there are slight differences between the Italian catholic versions of the story and the Jewish ones – so there is a lot of consistency in the legend which only adds to the veracity of it as more and more become convinced of its truth. There is also no way to tell how this story began – no real evidence of any of the variant origin stories.

So, the Devil Baby of Hull house is an example of the power of human imagination gone wild and stories like this have not only inspired films like Rosemary’s Baby, playing on the fears of potential parents over the nature of their offspring, but also such franchises as Hellboy. Can you think of any similar stories, maybe from your local area? Feel free to comment below.

*We could fit it to a proper printer and even a decent LCD screen. Frankly, we could even turn it into a smartphone app but if you are going to have something called a ‘Blogchaintopicomogrifier’ it has to have valves, and Jacobs ladders and switches and flashing lights and steam coming out of it and, yes, print any output onto a tiny slip of paper in a hard to read font that is destined to eventually be thrown at Astronauts coming home from space **

** Yeah, you see America only created NASA and the associated space program because it needed some method to dispose of all the waste tickertape that Wall Street was producing. Clearly the most environmentally friendly and efficient method was to spend billions of dollars to send men to the moon so you can then drive them through the streets of some city and throw waste paper at them. Note how there seems to be no money for a space program now that everything is ‘paperless’ and we have smartphones and LCD screens and decent printers? Coincidence? I think not…

*** And I really, really, really, hope that no one is planning a modern remake of this. They’d do something silly like use CGI and completely miss out the tension…

Now, this is a blogchain and there are rules. The rules are that you must go and look at the other articles in the chain. If you don’t, there will be dire consequences, possibly of a gynaecological nature… List of links to the other blogs is below:

Participants and posts:
ishtar’sgate – http://chickenscratchbc.blogspot.ca/ (link to post)
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to post)
BDavidHughes – http://bdavidhughes.com/
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/
articshark – http://www.drslaten.com/blog
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/
Anarchic Q – http://anarchicq.com/
meowzbark – http://www.lizzylessard.com/
MsLaylaCakes – http://www.taraquan.com/
grace elliot – http://graceelliot-author.blogspot.com/
milkweed – http://www.thistlequill.blogspot.com/

Disney and Star Wars?

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cthuhlu, Disney, Eliza Dushku, elizabeth bennet, entertainment, George Lucas, horror, Jane Austen, Joss Whedon, Megan Fox, Michael Bay, Nathan Fillion, pirates of the carribean, Pride and Prejudice, Serenity, Sigourney Weaver, Star Wars, videogames


Today, on this hallowed day that celebrates horror in all its forms, the internet is abuzz with news of a horror beyond even the worst imaginings of your average geek.

No, it is not that the stars are right for the rise of Great Cthuhlu from the vasty depths of R’lyeh. Despite what the great Mayan practical joke would have us believe about the end of the world being nigh, Cthuhlu is not likely to be rising anytime soon as he forgot to set his alarm clock before he went to bed.

Mitt Romney before his morning cup of coffee

And no, it is not the news of a new version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice directed by Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox as Elizabeth Bennet and Sigourney Weaver as a modern, lesbian take on Mr Darcy with more explosions, car chases and giant robots than any previous version of Pride and Prejudice…*

It’s not even as horrific as the possibility of a new version of Babylon 5 written by Stephenie Meyer with a new concept for Vorlons which has them as ‘sparkly’…

No, the true horror that has gripped geekdom this Halloween is the news that Disney has bought the rights to Star Wars…

People are rightly concerned. They see Disney as a twee insititution which whitewashes over stories to make them far less dark than they actually are. They also look at John Carter and consider what a mess was made of that film. They quake in fear at the possibility of an animated Star Wars with a big goofy dog instead of a wookie and jedi with large ears and squeaky voices… and the joke memes are already coming in thick and fast.

Me, I am optimistic… While Disney is indeed guilty of the crime that was John Carter, other voices on the internet have spoken up and said such things as ‘But what about Pirates of the Carribean? And what about Avengers?’ Yeah, what about them? Disney is as responsible for those two success stories as they are for John Carter and, frankly, I think two phenomenal successes totalling two excellent films and 2 sort of OKish sequels to one of them make up for one failure.

And amidst all the discussion one possibility has arisen which has got many excited. The name Joss Whedon has crawled its way out of the lamentations… Disney got him to do Avengers, are hiring him again for the sequel… what if they also attached him to the Star Wars project?

Think about that for a moment, revel in it. A new Star Wars film, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Could it get any better than that? What would such a film likely include? Well, here are my predictions…

1) A kick arse female jedi. One thing the Star Wars films have always lacked was female jedi. They exist in the universe, there are even books that include them as characters and some of the computer games also have them, but they have never really been seen on the big screen. Whedon is known for his kick arse female characters – Buffy and River Tam being his main ones – and he even managed to give Black Widow some Buffyesque moments in Avengers. I think Whedon would take this step and make the female lead a jedi instead of a constitutionally confused princess in a republic. That or make one of the bad guys a kick arse woman in black leather. Possibly played by Eliza Dushku…

2) Smugglers. One thing I always felt the prequels lacked was the presence of a smuggler style character. A Han Solo to Luke’s clean cut farm boy, a Jack Sparrow to Will’s clean cut blacksmith. The relationship between the morally dubious Han Solo and the rest of the cast in Star Wars was an integral part of the character dynamic which was lacking in the prequels and made them so flat as a result. I think Whedon would insert such a character because he knows only too well the importance of there being friction between the characters. Now, in the ideal dream world, this smuggler character might well be played by a certain Mr. Nathan Fillion, who would no doubt leap at the chance, but that may depend on whatever other projects he is working on at the time… and at this point you have to ask yourself the very important question: Exactly how tempted would Whedon be to make Star Wars VII as close to Serenity II as he possibly can without anyone noticing?

3) Story. Joss Whedon understands how stories work. He has an almost innate grasp of structure and knows how to insert tension and plot to keep a film interesting for the viewers. The prequel trilogy seemed to drag in places, Whedon would make the story jump and move.

4) One liners. Another thing Whedon is good at are pithy one liners that get geek juices flowing. His characters quip and joke and worry about ordinary day to day things – not everything is all about the plot.

I could go on, I could regale you with endless points discussing at length the things that Joss Whedon would bring to the Star Wars franchise if someone let him get his greasy hands on it. But I think you have got the point already and I am aware that many of you may well have stopped reading at point 2 above and are currently sitting there with a dreamy expression and sighing the words ‘Nathan Fillion’ over and over again and therefore lost to any further eloquent arguments. So I will end there with only a final entreaty to Disney… MAKE THIS HAPPEN! Please…

*Note to Hollywood, just in case you do want to make this film, you can buy the rights off me. I’ll do you a good deal for it. I think the world is ready for a lesbian Miss Darcy. Have your people call my people… well, maybe wait a bit so i can acquire some people then call them or maybe just call me direct. If it helps I can pretend to be my own people and go through the rigmarole of pretending to put you through various departments until you get me. i’ll even do the voices.

The GQ of Downton Abbey

28 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Musings, TV

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Clash of the Titans, Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, Father Octavian, Game of Thrones, Geek Quotient, Hugh Bonneville, Iain Glen, Jessica Brown Findlay, Maggie Smith, Misfits, Penelope Wilton, Red Dwarf, Robert Bathurst, Ser Jorah Mormont, Shaun of the Dead


This is something I think may well become a regular feature of this blog, mainly because it seems to be something I do naturally whenever I watch something on TV. The basics are simple – take a non geek TV show or film and analyse the proportion of the cast who happen to have been involved in something else with geek credentials.

I have decided to name this concept the Geek Quotient. In fact, in the tradition of Mathematicians the world over, I would propose that it be dubbed the Lascelles Geek Quotient because my ego needs feeding. You can shorten it to LGQ if you like, or even GQ but with that option you risk both being confused with a popular fashion magazine and being glowered at by my ego.

The equation is rather simple:

Divide the number of actors in the cast who have been in geeky related shows by the total number of cast members.

So, why have I chosen Downton Abbey for the debut of this exciting new concept in geek mathematics? Well, I am of the opinion that this show will likely score high based on a rather cursory glance at the cast list.

For those who don’t know, Downton Abbey is an ITV period drama set in Yorkshire in a period (currently) between the sinking of the Titanic and the advent of the 1920s. It follows the inhabitants of the eponynmous stately home, both the noble family that owns it and their many servants, as they live through such horrific historical events as the first world war and the appearance of the telephone. As is normal for such period dramas, the cast is replete with quality British actors of the type who also often get roles in sci fi and fantasy both in the UK and Hollywood. Some are even rather better known for their geek roles than their involvement in this show…

Maggie Smith as Thetis in Clash of the Titans

Now, my calculation of Downton’s GQ is 0.633 based on examining the 49 cast members listed on ImdB and determining that 31 of them have a link to some geek TV show or film. This is assuming that ‘Geek TV show or film’ is defined as something with overt supernatural or science fiction elements. Pirates of the Carribean counts, for example, whereas Hornblower (which many of the cast do have roles in too) does not. This is not a surprising result given that the cast includes Maggie Smith (with credits as far back as the original Clash of Titans films and, of course, her recent geek cred from the Harry Potter films), Iain Glen (who is notable as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones as well as Father Octavian in Doctor Who) and Penelope Wilton (excellent as Prime Minister Harriet Jones  in Doctor Who, not to mention Shaun’s mum in Shaun of the Dead) but also has

The beard makes him completely unrecognisable…

a number of people who have done one off guest appearances on various shows. For example, Jessica Brown Findlay, who plays the youngest daughter, was in one episode of Misfits and Hugh Bonneville, who plays Earl Grantham, was almost unrecognisable behind a massive beard as a pirate in a recent episode of Doctor Who. Out of all of these, many of which I spotted without recourse to the internet, one truly took me by surprise. For much of the series, I looked at the actor who played Sir Anthony Strallen (Robert Bathurst) and tried to work out where I had seen him before. Turns out he actually played the role of Todhunter in Red Dwarf as well as Prince Henry in the original series of Blackadder…

Todhunter

Sir Anthony Strallen

So, there you have it. Do you think I have the calculation of this correct? Do you know of any other films or TV shows which might beat this score? Feel free to comment below…

The Avengers UK: Crossover universes

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Musings, Wierdness

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

All the Geek, Anthony Stewart Head, Avengers Assemble, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, doctor who companions, Emma Peel, entertainment, geek culture, Gene Hunt, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, James Bond, Joss Whedon, Judi Dench, Lara Croft, Nick Fury, River Song, Sarah Jane Smith, Sherlock Holmes, Steve Moffat, The Avengers, y chromosome, You Tube Fake Trailers


This particular photo-meme caught my eye the other day. It caused in me two almost simultaneous responses:

1) OMG someone should so make that film!!! Or at least make a fake trailer for it on You Tube by splicing together lots of bits of different shows in a way that makes it look as if they are all in the same plot!!!

2) There were no women in the group they had put together…

Before I discuss 2, let me just say that I really, really, REALLY want someone to make that trailer. Because I am sad like that. Such things really do amuse me. I went squee when I found this video done in celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary. So if someone with the right skills could put together a video like that for the Avengers; United Kingdom I would be really pleased.*

Number 2… I was surprised at how much it concerned me. The fact that the purported fictional TV show was very Y chromosome heavy did make me wonder about the role of women in UK geek culture.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are strong women in UK Geekdom. What concerned me was the fact that all the examples I could think of off the top of my head were supporting characters and many of them were already involved in the franchises represented by characters in that line up. Hermione Granger, various Doctor Who companions (Sarah Jane Smith and River Song being the two that spring most readily to mind), Judi Dench’s portrayal of M in James Bond… the UK just did not seem to have a straight up Geek lead character who was female (unlike the US where there are a few, though many of them are Whedon creations like Buffy). I was so concerned I expressed my opinion on Facebook and did get a couple of suggestions for strong female characters who were not involved in the franchises already mentioned (Emma Peel being one who I had somehow forgotten…) or who were sole leads (Lara Croft) but it does seem as if UK geekdom is a little thin on the ground. Plus, my concerns were not so much with the state of the feminist credentials of UK geekdom but rather with my own inability to think of some. I mean, I can be excused not thinking of Lara Croft because I have never played the game** nor watched the films but I used to watch the Avengers (the UK TV drama) all the time as a child*** so Emma Peel should have leapt out at me…

Maybe I am overthinking this, of course. It was, after all, just a fun bit of photo-manipulation that someone did. However, I think the discussion on facebook did come up with the following concept…

 – Ditch Harry Potter and replace him with Hermione. Her competence far exceeds his and it means we can have a couple of love scenes with Ron, who can also get jealous when Bond makes a move on her somewhere in the middle of the film (she’ll rebuff him, cos she’s not an idiot, though there may be some flirting, but Ron doesn’t know that…)

 – Chuck in Emma Peel in the Black Widow role. She fits the stereotype of that part perfectly, albeit with more English poise…

“I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.”
Come on, you can so see her delivering that line as well as Samuel L Jackson did 🙂

– The team needs a Nick Fury. Someone to be all tough and shouty and manly and sarcastic at all the team members when they mess up. Which UK character suits this role best? Why, only Judi Dench’s M has the sheer brass balls to step into Samuel L Jackson’s shoes.

 – There has to be a role in this for Rupert Giles. Ok, technically Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a US show but Giles is so very British and there are few things that cannot be improved by the addition of Anthony Head. He could be the team’s librarian and be having an understated and typically British affair with M.

 – An enemy. In Avengers Assemble (or The Avengers as we still call it in the UK despite the rename…) that enemy was Loki who is devious and entertaining and malicious. There is really only one enemy that fits this mould in UK geekdom to my mind – The Master.

Of course there were other more outre suggestions for this film. Someone suggested that, since The Doctor is involved, in theory no time period is restricted. This means that we could have some other rather cool UK TV characters turning up. He suggested Richard Sharpe but we could also have Cadfael, the medieval mystery solving monk, Miss Marple and several others. Plus it might explain why Gene Hunt is there in 2012 (almost 30 years after the events of Ashes to Ashes and possibly in an alternate universe created by the minds of Sam Tyler and Alex Drake) and why Emma Peel is there (being, as she is, a character intrinsicly tied to the 1960s). In fact, in my head, this plot involves a centuries spanning plot spotted in several different time periods by different characters…

Hmmm, maybe I am overthinking this. Time to stop for now, I think. Before I start writing fan fic (and I have enough trouble finding time to write the characters I have created never mind taking on someone else’s intellectual property…)

What this does reveal is the appeal of crossover universes. Even though such things are ludicrous in concept and are likely to be done badly in fan fic and similar, they can be the cause of squee. They can also be done rather well in the right circumstances, as evidenced by the Wold Newton family created by Philip José Farmer  which ties many ficitonal characters (including Sherlock Holmes and James Bond) together into one family tree (making them all descendents of a group of people exposed to a radioactive meteorite near the North Yorkshire village of Wold Newton). There is also Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen**** which has a similar concept. In fact, in the 1969 version of this series there is a very cool cameo by a certain Mr Tom Marvolo Riddle.

So, for discussion purposes, feel free to comment to add ideas for UK genre characters you would add to our Avengers team or for plot ideas for things that the team can face. Also comment if you have any other ideas for crossovers or actual crossovers that you have seen (whether they are well done or not).

*And if you could persuade Steve Moffat to actually make it, even better… having first made sure you have sacrificed to the gods of litigation to prevent various companies suiing him for Copyright… And if Moffat does want the gig and can sort out the copyright for the franchises he doesn’t own in that selection I have some plot ideas for him… 🙂

** No, really. I have never played Tomb Raider. I don’t tend to play computer games much. It’s ok, though. I checked. I don’t need to hand in my Geek card unless I also stop roleplaying and reading, watching and writing science fiction and fantasy.

*** And this had nothing to do with Emma Peel, leather catsuits and particular hormonal imbalances that occur around the age of 11. Absolutely nothing at all. I only ever watched it for the articles.

**** The graphic novel version not the film which was sort of OK (for, as Obi Wan Kenobi would say, a given value of OK which some may translate as ‘awful’) but had nothing on the graphic novel in terms of Victorian sleaze, drugs and nastiness and made Alan Quartermain not a drug addict and Mina Harker a vampire instead of the traumatised victim of a Vampire.

The Hobbit

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aidan Turner, Being Human, Benedict Cumberbatch, Doctor Who, Film Trailer, Gandalf, Legolas, Lord of the Rings, Orlando Bloom, Peter Jackson, reviews, Roleplaying, Roleplaying games, Sauron, Sherlock, Sylvester McCoy, The Hobbit


Today it seems as if the internet has been infected with a fairly bad case of ‘Tolkienitis’ as the trailer for the Peter Jackson version of the Hobbit has hit it quite hard and is spreading all over the place. We even have a release date of the 14th of December 2012! Which is annoyingly almost a whole year away…

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here is the trailer:

I have to say that there is a special place in my heart for Tolkien. The Hobbit was the first ‘proper’ fantasy book I bought and read. In fact, I bought it with a gift voucher I got from school for ‘being good at History’ which was annoying because I wanted it for ‘being good at Biology’ but someone else got that. Luckily, I did get the Chemistry prize in a later year so my scientific credentials were confirmed (though I cannot for the life of me remember which book I bought with that…). The only reason I remember getting the Hobbit with the History voucher (because you know, my memory is terrible…) is because I still have the actual book on the shelf behind me, still with the bookplate from the voucher stuck into it.

I also, bizarrely enough, also have a copy of it in German. Despite not being able to read German all that well or ever having been to Germany. You can find some weird things when browsing charity shops in University towns and I have a love of seeing books I have read in English in foreign languages (I also have a copy of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Death: The High Cost of Living’ in French from when I visited Paris a while back).

Anyway, because of my love of the original source and the fact that Peter Jackson has proven himself worthy by doing such a great job with Lord of the Rings, I am quite looking forward to this release. Not only because it will relive a classic story but because, from the buzz I have heard in and around the internet, they are planning to add extra material to the story – padding it out to two films. Some may say this is a bad thing – tampering with a classic, daring to assume something about Tolkien’s great vision! However, I am of the other opinion. While I enjoyed the Hobbit as a child, I remember thinking about the bit where Gandalf buggers off midway through the book.* It seemed to me to be a bit of a cop out, especially when he reappears and talks about ‘fighting the Necromancer’ with his other wizard chums. I was thinking ‘What? WE missed that! I want to see Gandalf and a bunch of other wizards fighting a Necromancer!’. While Bilbo wandering around in Mirkwood and finding the Ring and tricking dragons was interesting, I still felt cheated that we never got to see Gandalf’s encounter with the being we now know was Sauron. Jackson is promising to give us that scene and a lot of extra stuff to boot.

There are other misgivings out there in fanland. News that Orlando Bloom was back to play Legolas had some up in arms. Legolas does not appear in the Hobbit! Was the cry that went up. To be honest, the cry could probably be translated as ‘we don’t like Orlando Bloom!’ because there are actually good reasons for why Legolas could be in The Hobbit. He is, after all, the son of Thranduil, the King of Mirkwood, and there is nothing to say that he is not present among the numerous, nameless elves. Ok, he didn’t *do* anything in the book but I personally have nothing against him being there and I like the idea of riffing around the concept rather than word for word repeating a story from a novel. I’d have more of a problem with John Rhys Davies playing Gloin (which could have happened, his character Gimli in LOTR was the son of Gloin and there’s a chance of a family resemblance) because that is just a tad too cheesy for my liking. Overall, I am actually quite hyped about the cast list because it has some very nice actors in there – including Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug and the Necromancer, Being Human’s Aidan Turner as Kili and Doctor Who’s Sylvester McCoy as Radaghast the Brown.

So, suffice it to say I am quite enthused by this trailer and feeling confident that this will be as good a film, if not better, than any of the Lord of the Rings films…

*The roleplayer in me, even then, put this down to the fact that Gandalf was a high level PC and Bilbo and the Dwarves were only low level and the challenges ahead were clearly for a lower level party so Gandalf had to go otherwise he would munchkin the hell out of all the spiders and wood elves and thereby remove all conflict and tension….

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