Poll of the Day > Valley of The Geeks

(+) Yeah! (+)

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Jokes on you, they DID take a stab at it. A movie came out for it a few years back that was apparently so god-awful that it was out of theaters in like, a week.

This makes me a sad panda. Those books deserve better, the writing was quite good. Probably better than Weiss and Hickman fare at the very least, and the Dark is Rising prophecy poem is pretty much burned into my memory as hard as the inscription on the One Ring to Rule Them All...

Hell I can remember harassing the librarians of my hometown library for almost a year to track down the last 2 books of the series, and the local Waldenbooks couldn't even find them until I managed to track down the ISBN numbers for them which was no easy task for an 11 year old in a Pre-Google world.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

The popularity of the Kindle, and e-readers in general is very high with adults and voracious readers in general but in this day and age, how many tweens and teens are rolling around with the equivalent value of a quality used car in books on their various devices?

I was just more surprised that a decent e-book version, or even a "master collection" edition in hardcopy form hadn't been attempted, considering its popularity at the time.

I've actually been really bad at using my Kindle. I've had it for like, 4 years or so and pretty sure I've only read one book from it. This is partly because book count the last few years has been woeful, and there's still a bunch of hardcopies I want to get through. I also know a good amount of bibliophiles that flatly refuse to own a Kindle, because they just like the way books feel and owning them so much. Which I can appreciate, but the size and weight they occupy is simply too much for me.
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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Metalsonic66 posted...

I never liked the TV show, but I was a big fan of the books back when I was a pre-teen. Always kinda wanted to go back and read the whole series since I never finished it

Same. I was trying to find them one-book/Kindle,since while there's like 60+ books total, they aren't very long, and I figured someone would have made a "complete: edition or something by now.

Strangely, either they basically don't exist in e-book format, or they do, but are comically overpriced (I can't remember which), making getting them in a legit manor is impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Thankfully, there are plenty of...non-legit options of in the internet for this type of stuff.

Those kinds of books never seem to get anthologies because of how much money can be made by not turning them into an anthology.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

While we're on YA...was anybody into (or does anybody even remember) The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper?

I'm kind of surprised with the popularity of series' like Harry Potter that no studio seems to have taken a stab at it. The writing is good for YA and it is a bit darker in tone than the usual also-rans in that general wheelhouse.

I think my brother read some of those, because he might have bitched about the movie that came out for it at some point.
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Entity13 posted...

Not even those books did it for me back then. I liked the premise, but it wasn't for me.

The Animorph books didn't exist until I was already in college (and the show obvious came even later than that). I have zero nostalgia for or interest in them as a concept.

It's sort of like the Goosebumps books. For a large portion of the Internet community, those are like a core part of childhood experience. For me, they came out after I already had a driver's license, and I was already reading stuff by Dean Koontz and Stephen King. By the time the first Goosebumps book had come out, I'd already read The Dark Half, Needful Things, and The Stand.

It's part of why, to this day, if someone mentions RL Stine, I don't immediately think Goosebumps as much as I think the CYOA books he wrote in the 80s:

http://gamebooks.org/Person/644/Show
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

While we're on YA...was anybody into (or does anybody even remember) The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper?

I'm kind of surprised with the popularity of series' like Harry Potter that no studio seems to have taken a stab at it.

I'm kind of surprised with the popularity of series' like Harry Potter that no studio seems to have taken a stab at it.

I'm kind of surprised with the popularity of series' like Harry Potter that no studio seems to have taken a stab at it.

I'M KIND OF SURPRISED WITH THE POPULARITY OF SERIES' LIKE HARRY POTTER THAT NO STUDIO SEEMS TO HAVE TAKEN A STAB AT IT.

About 12 years ago, there was a psychic shockwave that rippled across the entire world. Animals howled in terror, crops withered and died, children were born with cold, dead, soulless eyes. Suicide rates around the world rose to unprecedented levels. In Europe, a Gypsy fortuneteller was startled to discover that all of the cards in her Tarot deck had somehow turned into identical copies of The Fallen Tower, and the statue of Jesus in Brazil wept blood. Also, there was a rumor that a man in India ate his own head, though this was sadly unsubstantiated.

That was the echoing, thunderous result of the seething boiling rage I felt when I saw "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising" in the movie theater. The scream of primal rage torn from my soul battered the very walls of reality itself, and shattered the thin strands of causality that bind the universe together. In the future, when arcane scholars attempt to trace the root causes of the Fall of Man, they will eventually pinpoint that precise moment as the point when humanity forfeited its right to exist, and set itself upon the unavoidable path towards its inevitable Doom.

I got in for free, and I still nearly left the theater three times to demand my money back. It is the reason why, to this day, I categorically refuse to see any movie Alexander Ludwig appears in (and to this point, I've missed absolutely nothing of value thereby).

If we lived in a just and fair universe, literally everyone connected to the writing side of that movie would have developed aggressively malignant tumors by now, that consumed them from the inside out, turning them into shambling husks that know nothing but torment, and weep salty black tears. The fact that there have never been news stories acknowledging this to have occurred is how I know for absolute fact that no kind and loving God could possibly exist.

I didn't like it, is what I'm saying here.

But yes, the movie exists. It was made by the same people who made the Narnia movies (and was actually their attempt to start up a new franchise in the wake of losing the rights to make future Narnia movies), who are unfortunately still in business, and not bankrupt and destitute as they deserve to be for their crimes against humanity.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

the Dark is Rising prophecy poem is pretty much burned into my memory as hard as the inscription on the One Ring to Rule Them All...

While I know this is relatively meaningless on the Internet, the following is more impressive if you believe me when I say I typed it entirely from memory, without online or offline reference of any kind:

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track.
Wood, Bronze, Iron; Water, Fire, Stone
Five will return, and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, Bronze carried long,
Wood from the burning, Stone out of song,
Fire from the candle-ring, Water from the thaw,
The Six Signs the circle, and the Grail gone before.

Fire on the mountain shall find the Harp of Gold,
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old.
Power from the Green Witch deep beneath the sea,
And all shall find the Light at last, Silver on the Tree.



I am, shall we say, somewhat invested in these books.

(The second poem is a little harder, though, because the first part doesn't really rhyme. I can do that one too, though.)

It's part of what made the fecal abortion so repugnant to me when I saw it. It wasn't merely bad, if was offensively bad. I feel like wars have been fought over lesser insults. To this day, I might classify it as the worst film the human race has ever produced - and that's saying something, because we've managed to shit out quite a number of hot turds over the last century or so.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I didn't finish the series and honestly don't remember much of it. For whatever reason, I guess I was never that "into" it.

It was one of the series that, when Harry Potter first started hitting big, literate people were like "Oh yeah, The Dark is Rising is that series that JK Rowling stole a bunch of her ideas from." Unfortunately, because it's older and a bit more obscure, and because Harry Potter tripped over its dick into global fame, now annoying Harry Potter fans just accuse everything else of stealing ideas from Harry Potter - even stuff like The Dark is Rising or the Unseen University in Discworld that existed years (if not decades) before JK Rowling wrote a single line.

It will probably have less of an impact on an adult reading it for the first time in 2019 than it would on a 12-year old reading it in the mid-1980s, but it's got a similar "young boy discovers he's secretly been a wizard and the fate of the world is going to be in his hands" vibe, along with a "there's been a magical war being fought behind the scenes for all of human history, and humans have been kept ignorant of the details, but now crazy shit is about to go down and a handful of kids are pretty much going to determine the future of the entire world" sort of premise.

The books sort of alternate between protagonists - the first book has three relatively normal kid protagonists and sort of skirts the line on just how much actual supernatural shit is really going on, but the second book switches to the boy wizard archetype character and the series as a whole leaps off a cliff directly into "Oh, ALL of the supernatural shit is going on."

There's also heavy references to Arthurian myth, and the whole thing is very, very British (Cornwall and Wales are the setting of two books each, and the other book is set around the outskirts of London). Which may or may not make the book harder or easier for you to get into. As might the fact that the point-of-view characters are mostly British kids growing up in the 1960s/1970s. It might be harder to relate to them now, or it might not.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Those books deserve better, the writing was quite good. Probably better than Weiss and Hickman fare

Definitely better, and I say that as someone who really likes The Death Gate Cycle.

Though I admittedly never really got into the Dragonlance books as much as some people.

I rank all of my sci-fi/fantasy books on my shelves in what I consider to be order of quality - the best series up top, slowing getting progressively less great as you go downward. Keeping in mind I've probably got about 30 years worth of books on those shelves (as I literally NEVER throw books away, I never sold any of my college textbooks back, and have maybe lost or irreparably damaged maybe a half-dozen tops over the entire span of my life - so I've still got books from when I was 10), the Dark is Rising books are on the second shelf down. Basically the only stuff ahead of them is Roger Zelazny and Stephen Donaldson, who I pretty regularly cite as my favorite fantasy writers ever.

Granted, there's always the caveat of "the books are great for young adult fiction", but I easily consider them better than Harry Potter ever was (though that means less because I've always disliked Harry Potter and seen Rowling as a bit of a hack), and on par with a lot of adult fiction as well.

I'd probably recommend them to pretty much anyone, if not for the fear that they might feel a bit too un-contemporary now, with the added fear that people who grew up with Harry Potter will get a bit of the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" or "Tolkien is so cliche" dynamic where they don't feel as fresh because you're familiar with books that came after and copied them.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Hell I can remember harassing the librarians of my hometown library for almost a year to track down the last 2 books of the series, and the local Waldenbooks couldn't even find them until I managed to track down the ISBN numbers for them which was no easy task for an 11 year old in a Pre-Google world.

I bought all mine as a set when my school had the Scholastic book fair come through. The same way I got my Narnia boxed set. And the Bunnicula books.

Oh, and Still More Tales for the Midnight Hour books.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

To be fair though, we were and are by our own admission, nerds. Had the Kindle been an option when we were adolescents, we certainly would have owned them and loaded them up with books like seasoned frequent fliers.

Hard to say, honestly. A lot of it depends on personal availability.

Like, I started reading because my dad had books around the house (he had a boxed set of LotR, Clash of the Titans and Dragonslayer novelizations, and a set of "abridged classics" including the Fall of the House of Usher, which set me down the path of my eventual love of Poe). So I read what was available, and what was accessible at the library, and in turn that's what helped build my love of books. To this day, I generally refuse to read anything (book related) on tablet at all (unless there's no other choice) because I feel like the tactile experience is as important as the words. Which stems from the experience I had reading those books as a kid.

So it isn't just whether or not tablets exist that is a factor, but how exposed to them you are. My parents were older when they raised me, and likely wouldn't have had a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet even if they'd been ubiquitous 20 years earlier than they actually were. So I wouldn't have grown up with them in the house, I would still have started reading paper books, and I'd still probably be a bit more biased towards them.

It's the generations of kids now - who are basically watching YouTube on tablets before they can even read at all - who are going to question why anyone would ever want to read a book made out of paper and ink when you can just download everything to your tablet. Of course, by the time they grow up we'll probably have direct neural interlink technology or something, where you download books straight into your brain.

Then again, those shits are assholes anyway. They're the reason why game developers are eventually going to stop making physical copies for people like me and make everything online-only account-locked digital exclusive with microtransactions and flossing. Damned kids.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the Bunnicula books.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scared-Silly/James-Howe/Bunnicula-and-Friends/9780689857515 I think that's the only one I had. I have no books anymore. They all got ruined and had to be thrown away.
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Revelation34 posted...

http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scared-Silly/James-Howe/Bunnicula-and-Friends/9780689857515 I think that's the only one I had. I have no books anymore. They all got ruined and had to be thrown away.

I had the first three (Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, and The Celery Stalks at Midnight - the last one of which was what drew me to the books in the first place, the punny title caught my attention), and then I eventually got the fourth (Nighty Nightmare). After that I sort of aged out of the demographic so I never bought or read any others. That sort of fell between '80-'87 or so.

My understanding is that they went on to churn out another dozen or so stories, but I know absolutely nothing about them. I barely remember anything about the originals, as it's been pretty much forever since I read them.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

The Animorph books didn't exist until I was already in college (and the show obvious came even later than that). I have zero nostalgia for or interest in them as a concept.

I can't say that I've ever really let my age get in the way of stuff that interests me.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's sort of like the Goosebumps books. For a large portion of the Internet community, those are like a core part of childhood experience. For me, they came out after I already had a driver's license, and I was already reading stuff by Dean Koontz and Stephen King. By the time the first Goosebumps book had come out, I'd already read The Dark Half, Needful Things, and The Stand.

Honestly, if you're too old for Goosebumps, you're also too old for Koontz =p

And, to the best of my knowledge, I had read King prior to Stine... or, at least, some of his novels prior to Goosebumps.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's part of why, to this day, if someone mentions RL Stine, I don't immediately think Goosebumps as much as I think the CYOA books he wrote in the 80s:

I think I first became aware of him with Fear Street. While I had apparently read at least some of his CYOAs, I hadn't associated his name as being anything significant at that point -- he was just another author in the series.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It was one of the series that, when Harry Potter first started hitting big, literate people were like "Oh yeah, The Dark is Rising is that series that JK Rowling stole a bunch of her ideas from." Unfortunately, because it's older and a bit more obscure, and because Harry Potter tripped over its dick into global fame, now annoying Harry Potter fans just accuse everything else of stealing ideas from Harry Potter - even stuff like The Dark is Rising or the Unseen University in Discworld that existed years (if not decades) before JK Rowling wrote a single line.

Yeah, well, I'm sure all of them just ripped off Tolkien somehow!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I rank all of my sci-fi/fantasy books on my shelves in what I consider to be order of quality - the best series up top, slowing getting progressively less great as you go downward. Keeping in mind I've probably got about 30 years worth of books on those shelves (as I literally NEVER throw books away, I never sold any of my college textbooks back, and have maybe lost or irreparably damaged maybe a half-dozen tops over the entire span of my life - so I've still got books from when I was 10)

We could probably start a hoarders club. Honestly, a good chunk of the books that have left my possession -- other than as gifts or something that became a gift by virtue of being lent but not returned -- have been by things like natural disaster (Hurricane Andrew, for instance), losses during moving, irreparable damage, etc. Granted, there's a lot of stuff I just pick up that I probably *should* expunge from my collection but... idk, I have a hard time getting rid of things.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I had the first three (Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, and The Celery Stalks at Midnight - the last one of which was what drew me to the books in the first place, the punny title caught my attention), and then I eventually got the fourth (Nighty Nightmare). After that I sort of aged out of the demographic so I never bought or read any others. That sort of fell between '80-'87 or so.

My understanding is that they went on to churn out another dozen or so stories, but I know absolutely nothing about them. I barely remember anything about the originals, as it's been pretty much forever since I read them.

I only remember that book because it had to do with Halloween. I was always the person who liked candy but enjoyed the "spookiness" of Halloween itself far more.
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Well PO, I resisted the whole Kindle thing for years for many of the reasons you do, and I do miss the physical sensation of feeling how deep you are in a thick book, but after having to seriously downsize my footprint after my last move, I finally broke down and went digital. The Paperwhite is pretty good. I can't read on my phone or tablet because of the constant barrage of notifications, so I appreciate the Kindle as a purpose built device.

Plus, in this day and age it avoids a lot of awkward conversations when reading based on cover art...though I'll never understand why people see you reading in public and think you're preformatively reading in search of conversation instead of there to actually read.

As to the whole Dark is Rising having not aged terribly well, people still read Clarke, Asimov, PKD, and Gibson and many of their works have aged poorly as well. Doesn't make them bad books.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I bought all mine as a set when my school had the Scholastic book fair come through. The same way I got my Narnia boxed set. And the Bunnicula books.

Oh, and Still More Tales for the Midnight Hour books.

Those would be *some* of the originals I lost, although I've rebought at least one of the Midnight Hour books and then maybe 15 years ago I bought a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark compendium before the art change to replace the one I either lost (or possibly didn't own).

There are quite a few other children's horror anthology series I desperately want to track down, which I either glanced through at bookshops or borrowed from libraries over the years. My google abilities have failed to ID some of the names. Oh, plus some sci-fi horror athologies that I'm not sure were for adults or children (one of those should be easier to find, come to think of it -- one story involved a rehab program for speeders where inmates could speed as much as they like as part of government tests although the tests were dangerous and the fellow inmates tried to kill each other off; and another story involved some tv show that was broadcast and convinced people to hate a kid because he was like the show's character). In general, a great many youth and adult stories are virtually indistinguishable, excluding when they're written for very young children.

The other problem with anthologies is that it's hard to remember which story is in which anthology and many similar-themed stories blend together.
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I admit that I did not read, and have not read, the Dark Is Rising books. At that point in my life, my interest was Lloyd Alexander. (I skipped Animorphs entirely because I was already too old to be the target audience when those were released.) Shortly after that, though, I got into Weis and Hickman, but I agree: Death Gate above Dragonlance (... and -- unpopular opinion -- . A recent attempt at rereading Dragons of Autumn Twilight was ... less than productive. I kept seeing the die rolls in the writing, if that makes any sense. :-P

This is not to say that I disdain all young adult books (barring Harry Potter, which I enjoy, though I would have written parts of it differently), but most of them are not for me. I used to dip into them to see what my kids were reading, but it still feels weird to have it exist as a category.

I use my Kindle for books I cannot get in other formats. E-books are ... different. They read like fanfic, and are formatted and structured like fanfic, even if the material in them is (theoretically) original. For book books, I still go all physical, and I doubt that hoard is going to disappear any time soon.
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I'm not sure I could see myself ever really using an e-reader because I don't assign value to the digital format for books and the free options have kinda sucked. I have an Amazon Fire 7 which I had bought thinking I'd use it for video (which I kinda have) and books (which hasn't worked out), but mostly as another device for Pokemon Go (which *really* didn't work out -- I assume most of the issues resulted from the fact it's not actually supported)
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Sounds like The Color Out of Space movie with Nic Cage is getting good reviews.

http://collider.com/color-out-of-space-review/

Don't know if I mentioned it, but I've been trying to write a TV script/treaties for fun called "Arkham Horror" (based off of the board games set in the Lovecraft universe) that's kinda a unique story-line mish-mashed with other Lovecraftian elements, all in the same world. Maybe if I actually get it done and in a good space I'll attempt to pitch it, but that's WAY off down the road.

It feels like there's enough cult interest and whatnot that a major studio will take a crack at making a Lovecraft series. Like, if HBO or Netflix put actual money and effort behind it and made it an episodic. His style of horror is tricky and subtle for film purposes, but I feel like it can be done. I feel like Haunting of Hill House did subtle horror is a correct way.
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*looks up*

I forgot a whole part of a sentence up there. Infuriating. What I meant to say was that I liked Star of the Guardians more than Death Gate. (And Darksword wasn't bad, either, really, even if Simkin's existence made no sense.)
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I_Abibde posted...

*looks up*

I forgot a whole part of a sentence up there. Infuriating. What I meant to say was that I liked Star of the Guardians more than Death Gate. (And Darksword wasn't bad, either, really, even if Simkin's existence made no sense.)

It helps to think of Simkin as a particularly insane Faerie or Leprechaun who happens to also be the avatar form of all magic in that world. The book for converting D&D campaigns to Thimhallin's realm explains Simkin a lot better than the actual trilogy did. He's basically Q from Star Trek.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qjybyni28" data-time="
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The Wave Master posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qjybyni28" data-time="

Pfbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbt.
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Random new character added to the motorcycle chase?

The most important thing to take away from that trailer is that crossdressing Cloud is totally happening!
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Metalsonic66 posted...

Random new character added to the motorcycle chase?

The most important thing to take away from that trailer is that crossdressing Cloud is totally happening!

And in glorious HD >_>
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The Wave Master posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qjybyni28" data-time="

Why is FF dialogue and VA ALWAYS so cringey and stilted?
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idk, isn't that broadly true of jrpgs?
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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Why is FF dialogue and VA ALWAYS so cringey and stilted?

BECAUSE JAPAN.
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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Why is FF dialogue and VA ALWAYS so cringey and stilted?

*shrugs*

Your mileage may vary. It doesn't bother me, though I'm pretty spoiled by Persona 5 and the most recent Fire Emblem games when it comes to English dubbing (... and Jessie from FF7R is Futaba from Persona 5).
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Gods, I am so close and yet so far from being financially free and in a decent place again. If 125 times as many people had bought my first self-published book by now, I'd be waiting on that money from Amazon so I can do away with my numerous expenses and have the freedom to read, write, or game while I am not at work.

Grr
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Entity13 posted...

If 125 times as many people had bought my first self-published book by now

That leaves the door open for literally any number of sales you did make and now I'm super-curious XD

One of the perks about being digitally published is that you can always have more sales down the road and the success of your book isn't necessarily tied into an initial publishing run or dependent on having another publishing run. And you now have a product that you can continually market and potentially build other things upon.
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Yeah that's about 19-20 paid copies so far, and then however much I'll be getting from the few thousand pages "normalized" by Unlimited.
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Entity13 posted...

Yeah that's about 19-20 paid copies so far, and then however much I'll be getting from the few thousand pages "normalized" by Unlimited.

*hat tip*

One of those is me. I did my part. :-)
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Much appreciated. I am hoping my next publication finishes soon and attracts a larger audience, but this is a start at least. =)
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I_Abibde posted...

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Why is FF dialogue and VA ALWAYS so cringey and stilted?

*shrugs*

Your mileage may vary. It doesn't bother me, though I'm pretty spoiled by Persona 5 and the most recent Fire Emblem games when it comes to English dubbing (... and Jessie from FF7R is Futaba from Persona 5).

I feel JRPGs especially have gotten quote good in their translations and VA choices and whatnot for a while now. But FF games always seem.like they are still stuff in 2004 in this regard

The VA work.in the recent FA was really good, but it's a shame the character models could be so lifeless in a lot.of the scenes.
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They already had a handful of good voice actors involved with the FFVII characters before. George Newbern, Crispin Freeman, Steve Blum, Liam O'Brien, Wally Wingert. They definitely miscast a couple (for example, casting Hollywood actors instead of voice actors for Tifa and Aerith), but it is strange for them to throw everyone out and start from scratch
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The only thing that would save the VA is Barret being voiced by Mr. T.

Korruptor posted...

The only thing that would save the VA is Barret being voiced by Mr. T.

I could see Lance Reddick or Terry Crews as Barrett.

Though after a quick GIS, Mr T doesn't look like he's aged much at all, all things considered.
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Metalsonic66 posted...

Aerith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8VPOP7huew" data-time="&start=106
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That was a good episode
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Metalsonic66 posted...

That was a good episode

It helps that it was based on a famous comic book of exceeding quality. Written by Alan Moore before he fully completed his journey into madness.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Metalsonic66 posted...

That was a good episode

It helps that it was based on a famous comic book of exceeding quality. Written by Alan Moore before he fully completed his journey into madness.

"For the Man who Has Everything"
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Yas.
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Speaking of George Newbern though lol
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Metalsonic66 posted...

Speaking of George Newbern though lol

I liked Tim Daly better.
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They both did a good job. As did Nolan North.
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Metalsonic66 posted...

They both did a good job. As did Nolan North.

Yeah they both did.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Metalsonic66 posted...

That was a good episode

It helps that it was based on a famous comic book of exceeding quality. Written by Alan Moore before he fully completed his journey into madness.

This so fucking hard. Granted, the JL/U in general did a much better job in terms of translating content than a lot of other DC & Marvel cartoons (without even getting into added issues like DC's need to work everything into their animated film continuity now)
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The DCAU was mostly good, pity that DC couldn't do the same in its cinematic universe like Marvel did.

Ewan McGregorKorruptor posted...

The DCAU was mostly good, pity that DC couldn't do the same in its cinematic universe like Marvel did.

The main difference is, the DCAU and the MCU were mostly being run by people who were actually comic fans. Whereas the people who run the WB and who make the DC movies are pretty much ashamed of what they're doing, and in some cases self-admittedly hate the very comics they're adapting.

All the way back to Tim Burton (who boasted that he'd never read a comic in his life) up to Zack Snyder (who has pretty much openly admitted to either hating or not even remotely understanding any comic character he's ever mentioned in an interview), it's pretty clear that no one in Warner Brothers actually likes comic books. Which shows in the majority of their movies.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Korruptor posted...

The DCAU was mostly good, pity that DC couldn't do the same in its cinematic universe like Marvel did.

The main difference is, the DCAU and the MCU were mostly being run by people who were actually comic fans. Whereas the people who run the WB and who make the DC movies are pretty much ashamed of what they're doing, and in some cases self-admittedly hate the very comics they're adapting.

All the way back to Tim Burton (who boasted that he'd never read a comic in his life) up to Zack Snyder (who has pretty much openly admitted to either hating or not even remotely understanding any comic character he's ever mentioned in an interview), it's pretty clear that no one in Warner Brothers actually likes comic books. Which shows in the majority of their movies.

You say that, but Burton's first two Batman films turned (the latter two he only produced, but I will say that B&R is fantastic in its own way) out great and, Zack Snyder's *other* work aside, I'd easily put Watchmen over ANYTHING in the MCU.

And, notwithstanding, comic fan doesn't always mean quality.
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Aaantlion posted...

You say that, but Burton's first two Batman films turned out great

I'd strongly disagree, but that's mostly because I've seen Batman Returns.

But my statement there wasn't that his movies were terrible (though I'd be willing to argue that as well), but that he straight up gloated that he'd never read a comic. Which is what prompted this exchange:

Burton: "Anybody that knows me knows I do not read comic books"

Smith: "Which, to me, explains fucking Batman."

Though I suspect what Smith was really thinking about was the clusterfuck that was Burton's Superman attempt (which actually involved Kevin Smith). But since that never came out and no one else ever got to see it, it didn't make as effective a "gotcha".

But either way, he's still the earliest example of a DC/WB director kind of showing open disdain for the very medium they're attempting to adapt.



Aaantlion posted...

(the latter two he only produced, but I will say that B&R is fantastic in its own way)

Yes, but "its own way" is "This is such a phenomenal clusterfuck of terrible movie that it comes out the other side and becomes an awesome unintentional comedy". Which isn't the best look unless your master plan is to kill one of your most lucrative franchises completely dead for nearly a decade.

And let's be honest, if Nolan's film hadn't been... well, Nolan's film, it probably would have stayed dead. It would have been less Batman Begins and more Superman Returns.



Aaantlion posted...

Zack Snyder's *other* work aside, I'd easily put Watchmen over ANYTHING in the MCU.

Most fans of the Watchmen comic would disagree with you. As would most people who had no investment in the comic at all and were tricked into the movie by trailers that basically told them it was going to be a movie like X-Men, because the studio had zero faith anyone would ever want to watch the actual movie.

Hell, for that matter, I actually liked Watchmen (the movie), and I'd still disagree with you. It was a pretty flawed movie in a lot of ways, and a lot of that goes back to the source material itself. I'd be hard-pressed to rank it over anything in the MCU, other than maybe Thor: The Dark World. Or The Incredible Hulk.

But let's be honest, Zack Snyder hating and misunderstanding comics and the only comic movie he's ever made that was worth anything at all being the one based on the comic that existed solely to kind of shit on comics and which ushered in one of the worst periods of comic history may not be unconnected concepts.

Snyder's pretty much the living avatar of 90s grimderp.

And again, he's the recent example of a director who is overly contemptuous of both the medium and the fans of the medium, which suggests he may not be the best person to be adapting the medium.



Aaantlion posted...

And, notwithstanding, comic fan doesn't always mean quality.

It doesn't. But adaptations between different media are tricksy things to pull off successfully in the best of cases, and almost only ever work when someone who actually loves and understands the source material makes a good-faith effort to try and translate what made it work into a new medium. Peter Jackson and LotR is a good example here.

People who hate the source tend to fail to understand it, and thus only adapt superficial elements while changing important elements, or otherwise cynically exploit the brand rather than making any real effort to translate it well.
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