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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2374 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 7, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Inspired by the CW talk about Rings of Power and Wheel of Time. Imagine you were an executive at Amazon Studios. Bezos just handed you two sets of One Billion Dollars, and the mission to make him two flagship, media empire founding fantasy shows. One is to be sexy and adult, the other is to be fun for the whole family.

Which two IPs would you want to go with?

I think you could make an amazing adult series out of Malazan or the Black company, but the writing wouldn't be easy. The former is crazy complicated. The Lies of Lock Lamore could work too.

For kids ... I like someone else's idea of an animated series in the Harry Potter world. I haven't read them for a long time, but Dragonriders of Pern, Xanth, and the Riftwar saga seem good. A more modern source would be The Ranger's Apprentice series.

Apparently Percy Jackson was good, but very poorly done as a movie, so that would be an option too.

For Adult, I'm gonna go in a different direction and say Tolkien's "The Tale of Turin Turambar." Tolkien had a lot more range than he gets credit for, and Turin Turambar would let you use the Tolkien name to tell a story that's a lot closer in tone to his Germanic inspiration than LOTR proper. Turin is a grim-and-gritty antihero who lives and dies by the sword; perfectly in keeping with modern prestige drama norms.

For family friendly: Lord of Light. Obscure sci-fantasy novel from the 60s, loved it when I read it in my early twenties.

Blood and tits: The Last Sovereign. It's an obscure RPG Maker game with surprisingly great writing and worldbuilding.

Family fun: The Aristocrats. Fairy tales of the world. Local settings, local directors, local actors. Super diverse by definition, no appropriation.

Adults: You know what? I go mythological. Maybe Greek, maybe Norse, maybe Gilgamesh, maybe the Ramayana. Or perhaps Journey to the West, to appeal to the Chinese market. Is there a good myth cross-over IP? And don't say Fate/Stay Night.

Family: It's got to be Pern. That or Redwall. Broad appeal across demographics, plenty of action and memorable characters... yeah.

For adults i would honestly just go with the Wheel of time. It has all the components such a show needs, with a well realised and visually varied world, politics, magic system, girl power, diversity (except in the very initial main vast), violence and sex (even if this mostly occurs off screen in the books). One concern is the length of the series but I think things can be substantially condensed and all the problems with the current show seems like unforced errors to me.

For children i would do a very high quality animated version of Harry potter. Regardless of what some Twitter people think this is still the world's largest single property for children's entertainment and it is honestly better suited for animation in the first place. One could of course argue that so is the wheel of time but I feel like that might impede broad appeal to an an adult audience.

Does it have to be strictly fantasy? A perverse part of me would want to call up an anime studio and have them partner up to make a BattleTech anime. That could be a legit anime phenom, and Amazon would likely have the power to push through legal challenges (or at least pay Harmony Gold to fuck off, should they sniff blood in the water).

For the kid-friendly one...well, some of those Scholastic-type book series are probably not yet snapped up, right? Maybe that one with the "Dracula Doesn't Drink Lemonade" book, or whatever it was.

For the kid-friendly one, anime has some history of kid-friendly but not braindead anime like Dennou Coil. Surely something of that sort is replicable in the west?

It's not easy to think of an IP that's buyable that has nearly as much pull as lord of the rings. Almost everything famous is owned by someone that doesn't want to sell it. Amazon already acquired MGM for 8.5 billion dollars (the James Bond owners), so there's that.

And Netflix is in the same boat as Amazon with regards to "Oh shit we don't own enough IP, what can we buy/license" so they're going to be bidding against each other.

The only big one I can think of that isn't already outright owned by someone who is making full use of it and therefore probably won't license it is Godzilla.

Smaller ones:

Popeye

Starship Troopers (the novel)

Robocop (which Amazon now owns through the MGM deal)

I think an adaptation of Stand Still Stay Silent or Bad Machinery would be cool. Two webcomics.

I try to care about artistic merit and not intellectual property/license/brand. But I do think some Nintendo movies would be cool. Nintendo's probably already got their course plotted out with Illumination though. There's probably some other videogames from other corporations that might be worth licensing.

I don't care that it's not fantasy, I've always believed that Animorphs would be a hit if they played it completely straight as a R rated war story aimed at the YA/tumblr audience. Maybe age everyone up to college if the child soldier thing is too violent for TV.

Also, Dark Tower needs to be done right.

Conan for the adult show.

For the family show, I'd do a different folk or fantasy story each episode. Have Jeff Bezos come out and introduce the story and culture and then take the effort to get the cultural details right in the episode. Make it both a heartwarming, high quality series and an image burnishing vehicle for Bezos.

Every people has stories, tell them well, and feature the people whose stories you are telling in those episodes, and you'll have a diverse show without forcing diversity.

So kinda like that old series about mythology with the puppet co-host? I don't remember the name of it, I wanna say it was a Jim Henson show, but I'm not 100% sure.

Yeah combined withWalts intros to the Disney's Sunday night movie.

Adult: I would love to see the Prince of Nothing series brought to a live screen GoT style. I'd also take Conan the Barbarian, as pulp fiction, swords-and-sandals, and that old gritty action aesthetic are some of my favorite things.

Kids: I'd adapt the old Diadem teen fiction series into something like Sliders. Take our trio of world-hopping, magic-leaning teenagers and show them bouncing between new worlds and universes as they battle the forces of evil. Sliders was one of the best premises for episodic content ever, and it should reappear in some form. But I don't want to just bring back Sliders, so I'm sneaking it in as a new thing.

Sliders always strikes me as a great premise that was largely wasted in execution. Seriously, reboot that instead of the 18th Batman movie.

Wow, and here I thought we had nothing in common! The Second Apocalypse is one of my favorite series. Kellhus on the silver screen would be a sight to behold if done well.

A well-done Kellhus would be truly wonderful, yes. He's a very difficult character, and a very strange point-of-view 'protagonist', but it'd be incredibly engrossing.

Sexy and adult: Conan the Barbarian. Show the climb from reaver to king, in a picturesque, episodic tale. The 1982 movie is great, but making it a TV series lets you add a sense of progression, call-backs and brick jokes.

Family fun: Might be done to death but I would just do King Arthur again. Keep the basic structure of random boy turns out to be good king, add all kinds of fantasy adventure. Or maybe make your own live action, western Isekai, bringing the genre to a mainstream western audience.

Sexy and adult: John Ringo's "Ghost" series. Full over the top 80's action movie stylings. Yes, this isn't exactly "fantasy", but it sure as hell is a fantasy.

Family Fun: Hand-animated adaptation of Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series.

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