The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - Bonus Glorious 25th Special - Definitely Not A Cult

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan-Young and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, another bonus pandemic special. We commemorate the Glorious 25th of May, give you our latest lockdown recommendations and talk about Wyrd Sisters - The Animated Series. Warning: Spoilers Lurk! Spoilers begin: 37:57Spoilers end: 45:30Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] we blathered on about:Yahoo! GeoCitiesAnd He Said to Me (Bernard Pearson’s Podcast)Where Should We Begin by Esther PerelAngel on TopFake Doctors, Real FriendsThe Blanks - Hey Ya! (Ted's Band from Scrubs)This American Life - Get a Spine!Chocolat | Joanne HarrisMy Family and Other Animals, By Gerald DurrellBook 1: The House of Shattered Wings - Aliette de BodardMillenniums Rule Series – Trudi CanavanSchitt's Creek (TV Series 2015–2020) - IMDbThe Moment The Simpsons Ruined Homer SimpsonNational Theatre LiveShakespeare’s GlobeEmilia - The Guilty Feminist Avatar: The Last Airbender (TV Series 2005–2008) - IMDbGlorious Revolution - Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki (HERE BE SPOILERS)Wyrd Sisters (TV Mini-Series 1997) - IMDbHowl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones - GoodreadsHowl's Moving Castle (2004) - IMDbDragon Age - WikipediaChekhov's Gun - TV TropesLa Belle Dame sans Merci: A BalladMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.comP.s. Reach out if you need to chat about sobriety in quarantine or whatever @francibambiIf you want recipes and cooking advice/tutorials then ask @joannahagan

just like metaphorically smack me with a rolled up newspaper if I start going off on a tangent. Tell me about the fan casting thread on Facebook because you sent me the link and I did not follow it because I thought it might make me cross. Oh no it's just like it happens it's not just Discworld Facebook groups is any nerdy Facebook group the Rivers of London one does it? Yeah I've gotten off about that before. The more general ones do it where people start going oh I think this person should play this and like the odd thread about it I don't mind but there was a recent spate of it in one of the Terry Pratchett Facebook groups of like every day there were eight or nine posts of someone saying I think this actor should play this character and it makes me

irrationally angry like I know I can just scroll past it but it drives me mad because it's like the only topic of discussion and it's really boring. And it's a separate thread for each one. Yeah and then half of them devolve into weirdly racist or yeah it gets oddly racist or like some people get really weird on the threads and they're like oh I think it should be this and please please please don't ruin it and it's like no one who's making this can see what you're saying. And yeah so but I like this Pratchett group because they're quite good at noticing when things like this happen and go off topic so one of the evidence was like right okay we don't need 20,000 fan casting threads we will do one thread per character per day so like today it's Vines and

then you can all on this thread talk about who you think should play Vines and tomorrow it's granny weatherworks or whatever and it got it devolved into bitching and people being like well I think that we should just have the threads and shouldn't be restricted what we post and if you don't like it scroll past stop complaining and it's like if it's literally the only content of the group then I can't just scroll past I'm going to have to like leave the group and well if you want discussions on something else start discussions on something else which yes fine but if it gets swallowed up in 20,000 fucking fan casting threads then I think a lot of it is the problem with the Facebook format so when you look at like old

fashioned forums so geo cities kind of thing there would be a space for that so there would be I kind of what what would they call even their rooms or sub forums or whatever yeah yeah there would there be sections and there'd be like a fan casting section or a pinned thread or yeah I noticed this because Amanda Palmer recently like relaunched an old school style forum for people who like support her on Patreon and like the Dresden Dolls and like her music because her fan community was so much on like Facebook and Twitter and she wanted to get away from them I used to love building those I wonder if I get a really motivated spate of procrastination I might make a prep check one and we can have it for literally shall make you fret

that was really cool I used to fucking love those I used to I really I used to adore those forums and I've never built them but I used to love being in them like so many so many fandom ones and like I was on the old AOL message boards a lot and that evolved into like being on online forums I remember the first podcast I ever listened to back when podcasting was very new there was a huge forum for that and it was like a massive fan community and I spent hours on the and the crybaby emo kids forum and the crybaby emo kids podcast if I was on the forum and active and posting there before I ever listened to the podcast because it was like a cool forum to hang out with other emo kids no one can say emo kids took themselves seriously I must say it was it

it was a music podcast it was about new like emo music and it was actually really good and I became like quite close to people I spoke to on that and I don't think I'm still in touch with any of them not in touch with a lot of people from my early days of making friends on the internet but yeah Facebook is a really shitty space for discussion which exacerbates these things so it's not I'm not even really that annoyed at the people I am annoyed at the way it becomes like the entirety of a Facebook group yeah but also God finds out he's talking about other than fancasting none of us are going to have a say I don't like the arguments that always happens which is oh if you don't like it scroll and buy or whatever because my response to that is always there are a lot of

forums with no rules about this stuff there are a lot of practice for a lot of practice Facebook groups you can go on and just post whatever and be part of that do you need do you need to be able to do it in every single one and why yeah like it's and the same goes and I probably shouldn't even say this but with the GNU stuff like the GNU stuff oh yeah no I there are like specific groups for them and I get it you know when you're grieving you do want to share it believe me I get that I know grief very well I'm very good at it you are I have a badge no I don't and if an entire Facebook group just becomes people posting their grief and people responding to their grief it's not a Terry Pratchett group it's a grief group yeah and that's fine those spaces do and should exist

and again the more casual groups are just communities for people who like Terry Pratchett and I think they've seen more appropriate there whereas the Terry Pratchett group is to talk about Terry Pratchett stuff yeah there is a difference between a Facebook group that is for people who like something to hang around with like-minded people and yeah a group that is for discussion of a thing and like I like all of these groups I'm in a bunch of them and then there's nice people and there are really interesting discussions both about Pratchett and about other stuff yeah but I don't know that's difficult I've been listening to finally I have burned a person's podcast and I listened to the whole of the first one with Rob Wilkins last night

and I'm a little bit into a second one that he did during quarantine with his wife it's Isabel yeah and the first one did you you did listen to that didn't you I did but it feels like a really long time ago it was it was Christmas it was a Hogsworth special but it oh I was gorgeous to listen to and it makes me incredibly jealous I'm not gonna lie or envious rather but I just never would never and even if he hadn't died tragically young like obviously I would have never fucking spent time having dinner with him or whatever like like those guys but it does make me jealous it does make me a bit sad that I never like befriended Terry Pratchett I know what you mean yeah but hearing about his work process and especially Rob telling the story of when

they had to go through unseen academicals and like edit the whole thing after they decided they needed an event that wouldn't fit into the time structure and so they had to go through the entire thing and like they worked for eight hours straight without even getting up or toilet breaker whatever and Rob gave himself a migraine and it turned out that Terry probably could have gone on for another six hours or whatever but at this point he was quite a long way into a degenerative brain disease and yet he was standing there behind Rob scrolling back and forth through this entire manuscript in his head and and Rob was like yeah like I don't use this widely but he was a genius yeah I love I love the more I hear about Pratchett it almost the opposite of most

people I idolize treatment the more I hear about him the more I feel like he was is a worthy hero to have yeah I most people you sort of heroish to you and then you know more about them or you become closer to them in some way and it yeah becomes very disillusioning yeah and that's something like but it's entirely in mine all your heads and like that's something you need to get over it's like oh people aren't perfect like you have to very much come to terms with the fact that your heroes are human beings and inherently flawed but yeah with Terry Pratchett I'm just more and more and all the more and especially doing the books the way we're doing them and breaking them down and seeing like how much has gone in to make that because before when I've

read them it's just like I've read a funny book and enjoyed it yeah yeah and I feel like inherently unworthy to discuss a lot of it like when we find the really clever bits and I'm like god are they good oh I need a better vocabulary like I read a lot about writing I'm very meta with writing and I still do not know the words to use for how Pratchett does this stuff like I'm a proper nerd about comedy and you know studying it so much I take all of the fun and joy out of it and I still can't quite articulate why things are so funny like yesterday why is the word porridge funny there's something about something about something about the duke exiting the room and just hype it's sultan my porridge that had me barely laughing and I don't know why I'm going to

make a coffee then do you want to make a podcast yes let's make a podcast Hello and welcome to the true shall make you frat the podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one us time in chronological order I'm Joanna Hagen Young and I'm Francine Carroll and this is another special bonus pandemic slash glorious 25th of May edition uh just a heads up that I will sound like crap today because I potentially have had a deadly plague this week so uh totally functioning yeah that's also why we didn't do any of our social media crap um I apologize for the lack of headcanon I tried but my brain was like thinking through treacle uh note on spoilers for this episode

normally we are a spoiler light podcast and try and avoid talking about events future bookstall because it's the 25th of May there will be more spoilers than usual we'll try and group them all mostly into one space and throw a timecode in there for you we will still avoid any and all discussion of the shepherd's crown until we get there though yes so you can come on the journey with us still keep your ears pricked because my problem is I listen to podcasts that say that and then kind of zone out while they're warning me and zone back in halfway through a spoiler so cool so before we get into podcasty podcasty we're doing this because it is the glorious 25th of May which an important day for some uh but also we want to do a bonus episode and there is a

weird sisters animated series so we're mostly going to be talking about that today yeah I didn't realise until you said you couldn't find the edges of the episodes that it had been an episodic thing which now makes more sense with the flashbacks yeah it's six episodes but the version on youtube so I am I will say I normally work really hard to make sure I pay for like any media I consume like I will buy a dvd or download it in a on a streaming service or whatever I could not find a way to buy the weird sisters animated series so we watched it on youtube we can probably find like at least one of the contributors and I'm sure someone will have a patreon we'll find a way yeah I feel bad but the full version uh so I'll somehow deal with that by not linking to the full version

on youtube in the show notes but just letting you all know it exists if you want to go ahead and watch yeah yeah it's not hard to find uh but yeah the version we watched cut the like episode end and beginning bits so it was quite hard to figure out where one episode ended and another began so uh but before we we do the weird sister stuff um yeah you suggested that we give some recommendations which I like the idea of yes we have been stuck in lockdown for a while and listening to and reading and watching lots of stuff to get us through it so I thought each of us could recommend a few things that are getting us through lockdown do you want to start francing yeah I wasn't sure of the rules um do we mean

things that we recommend for people to get through lockdown or things that we have consumed ourselves during lockdown that we also recommend to others uh bit of column a bit of column b okay good that's what I got I wasn't I'm not being super strict on it because I just had the idea like two days ago cool okay so yeah if we do podcasts to start with the one I discovered during lockdown rather than caught up with that catalog or anything was where should we begin by ester para oh starring ester para and she is a relationship therapist the couple therapist and she has had a podcast for a few seasons anyway where she does one-off conversations with these couples they haven't been regular clients for anything um which are insanely

insightful and understanding and calm and beautiful throughout no matter who the couple is but during this quarantine period she's done an especially interesting series of couples in lockdown oh cool I know who ester para is because uh one of the other podcasts I listened to the host about like both massive therapy nerds so they reference her quite a lot therapy nerds which one's that uh angel on top which is the sister podcast to buffering well then I wasn't gonna mention it um but there are two episodes I'll just link to the podcast I think but there are two episodes I particularly recommend to start with because they're almost polar opposite and there's one which is a couple in New York and they're both awful people and it's

the only time I've heard ester para like actually kind of have a go at people and even so she does it in a very calm Belgian way um and then the most recent one I listened to which is a couple who are in lockdown in I think Nigeria um who are both incredibly nice empathetic admirable people in a shitty situation which has caused their relationship to degrade a bit um and just the contrast between those two and the way that ester para dealt with both of them and just lessons I feel I learned from both of them were very good and it fills in some time which is nice yes that is very much the point my podcast recommendation is a lot less highbrow I have been listening to fake doctors real friends which is the scrubs rewatch podcast that Zach

Braff and Donald Faizon are making oh that's definitely a way to do this it's so good it's amazing these like each episode of scrubs is like 20 minutes and then each episode of the podcast is like an hour long there's so much to talk about between them and it's it's really like I listen to I really like recap podcast that's why we have one um oh yeah sure that's that yeah but listening to one where it's the people who were on the show talking about it is so sweet because they've got so much insight but also this is all so long ago for them like yeah I completely forgot this episode existed I forgot doing that um and they obviously because they worked on the show amazing guests so they've already had like Bill Patterson Peterson who created the whole thing oh really

Sarah Chalk who played Elliot Judy Reyes who played Carla um John C McGinley who was Dr Cox so I have I'm not quite caught up to it so I haven't caught up to the point where Sam Lloyd passed away which is yeah it's going to be really sad have I cried about that on this podcast yet I don't think we have I am very I am gutted Sam Lloyd is Ted by the way listening yeah Ted the lawyer from scrubs uh and he was a really good comedy actor and a really good singer yeah like the the acapella group he's in in scrubs was his actual acapella group really oh yeah yeah anyway yeah and where's the best place to watch scrubs right now by the way uh in the UK the only streaming thing I found on is 4oD okay that's fine I like

in the US I'm pretty sure it's streaming on Hulu cool so yeah so I'm still catching up on it but it is really lovely like you can tell they actually have got this lovely friendship it's nice to hear all the back stories about how the show was actually made and them reminiscing together and it's just lovely so it's Zach Braf and Donald Pheasant who played Tech okay good yeah yeah good oh yeah yeah they also they get like a guest to jump on the zoom call and ask them a question every episode and there was just a the last one I listened to was a really lovely one where a woman her husband was a massive fan of the show so she did it as a surprise for him she was like oh can you just come help me with this commuter thing and then the people were there and the guy liked

proper freaked out it was so sweet but also I'm really enjoying watching scrubs again scrubs was one of the first tv comedy series I got really into so yeah I was same for me it was one of the first ones I got really into that I didn't get into because like other people in my house were also watching it yeah exactly it was one like I chose to watch I think we're both exactly the right age for that I like the idea of listening to the podcast as well with it yeah the podcast is like a nice thing it doesn't have the teenage hysteria but it's nice that they all look back on it so fondly and have such nice reminiscences I didn't realize like the whole thing was actually filmed in an abandoned hospital and like yeah yeah

they had this abandoned hospital they worked in like the writers room was in there as well they ended up building sets like the bar and stuff into this building as well is that the least creepy thing that's ever happened in an abandoned hospital yeah it's really lovely it's interesting like from a making tv point of view they talk about like the colour palettes they use and that is interesting because I was watching Early House the other month whenever I started to rewatch a house and the colour palettes changing over the series was something even I noticed yeah they talk a lot about how like hospital shows are normally very very clean cut and saturated

and they intentionally let this hospital look a bit like dingy and it made it feel a lot more realistic even as the comedy was really heightened and there were things like sound effects and fantasies yeah because they did that one episode which like went into a sitcom fantasy didn't they where they did saturate everything yeah which is such a good episode it's got the guy who oh god I can't remember the actor's name but he was in the first season of Buffy and then I feel like House went the other way and desaturated everything to kind of mafia drama level so what's their chemistry like off camera are they so much chemistry about yeah oh good yeah like it's weak they're recording on zoom because

like quarantine they're making it now um but you can tell like they have a genuine friendship and they've got all these in jokes with each other and like they keep having to go back and tell like oh sorry when we say that what we mean is this one time where he did this thing to this guy and it's sweet how much do you think we'd have to pay for Donald Glover and what's his chops to do with Troy and Abed do a recap yeah I would pay a lot of money for Donald Glover and Danny Pudie to do a podcast together it took me a second as well although I did I really I rewatched all of community the earlier this year or later last year I don't remember it's when I really had that really bad heckle um because I remember like lying on the sofa really ill like I was too ill to watch

community so I dozed three four hours at Bob's Burgers uh who will to watch community not too ill to watch Bob's Burgers that's a it was a very fun one I get what you mean but it's quite like there's a scale there that we should work out yeah um and community is like I love the show so much especially the early seasons and everyone's like oh yeah season four is bags it's the gas leak season it's like it season four isn't that bad it's not as good as the first three the season two and three are amazing season one is quite cool for setting it up and the original paintball episode and then it never really recovers well then Harmon left for that season four wasn't it that was there yeah and that's why that gets referred to as the gas

leak season it was really bad I don't think it was that bad I think it had a couple of very good episodes but it it doesn't it was such a change I think that it felt bad because it was a change from something that had been so good yeah and then there were the like dynamic shifts as well because three of the original group left over the last couple of years yeah um it yeah it just got weird like it was fine but it wasn't as good as I remember and I kind of almost wish it had ended like a tiny bit earlier yes I didn't watch the last season until a long time after I watched the rest because I thought I'd finished it um yeah you couldn't get the last season yes that's right and it appeared on Amazon or something quite recently yeah or maybe even

forwarded but yeah um I'd still say it's because it's on UK Netflix now I'd still say it's worth watching um especially the first three seasons it is a very good clever funny show and it was a huge cultural moment at its time weirdly um this came up in another podcast I was listening to I think it was This American Life um they had a segment on Apologies and Dan Harmon's apology to the woman he was super inappropriate to on the writing team yeah um as an example of like literally the best apology to come out of the Me Too movement and like her reaction to it and how much she loved it and like it took quite a lot of prompting to get in there and his really frank speaking about it afterwards and everything and that made me because I went through a slightly rational

rollercoaster because I hadn't even known that had happened and Dan Harmon as we talked about earlier Dan Harmon one of my writing heroes and I was like oh no disillusionment and then coming back out as a flawed but still in my eyes wholly acceptable human being okay cool right yeah it was a people grow people change it was a very good apology anyway uh we've we've gone on so what have you been reading in lockdown what would you recommend to read right yeah so I had two things and one that I've read during lockdown and one that I just recommend for people who want something lovely during lockdown um the thing I've read during lockdown was uh Chocolat by Joanne Harris finally got out of it and oh god it's so good I don't I don't want to go on about it too much because I

feel like it's something you should just read go into and read without knowing much about it because I did um but it is it is full of very very well-defined characters in a pretty short book and it's the most interesting case of slow but incredibly tense narrative I want to know like how many edits she went through and everything to get it that perfect because the the lead up to the climax was incredibly stressful to read like anxiety inducing and yet at the same time beautiful and calm and moments of utterly gorgeous prose and yeah just I really recommend it's masterful it is incredibly good writing and it made me want chocolate a lot and the other thing I'd just recommend I read this for the first time a very

long time ago um is My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell and of course um or if possible even the Corfu trilogy but Gerald Durrell is the was the founder of Jersey Zoo which is like one of my favorite places in the world because I grew up in Jersey yeah yes you have um and Gerald Durrell is one of my heroes and I love him very much but he wrote some books about his time in Corfu when he was a child which is an extremely eccentric family and it is a mix of really funny anecdotes from that time and really interesting insights into ecology and zoology and stuff like that um and a kind of beautiful sense of nostalgia throughout some of it is very purple prose but again like shantaram it fits and so there's a um the villa was small and square

standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink face determination it shatters had been feeded by the sun to a delicate creamy green cracked and bubbled in places the garden surrounded by tall pusher hedges had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns marked with smooth white stones roses dropped pearls that seemed as big and smooth as saucers flame red moon white glossy and unwrinkled marigolds like broods of shaggy stunts stood watching their parents progress through the sky and like there's several more paragraphs just talking about flowers like this and this from like a 10 year old boy who was there at the time and like that's peaceful and and then yes hilarious anecdotes so what's your recommendation so i just finished reading this

the house of shattered wings by aliette de bordard which i got in a like christmas book exchange in the buffering facebook group uh from abbey hi because i think she listens to this hi abbey um she sent me a couple of books but i've only just got around to them because of the giant to read pile and it's uh it's such a cool concept it's kind of paris that's been destroyed by these mage wars and there are fallen angels and whatever happened to morning star and there's a murder there's mysterious murders and colonialism and like it's an incredibly well realized world it's it's beautifully written it's a really well realized world but it's also because i've been reading it while i've been ill one where i finished it and when i know that was very good

and i also know i need to go back and reread it when my brain works better and take more of it in yeah but i really enjoyed that um and then i'm rereading trudy canovans millennium's rule trilogy well it's not a trilogy it's four books uh the four because the fourth book just came out so i reread the other three in preparation and now i have the fourth book sat waiting for me which i'm really excited about she is one of my favorite fantasy authors um and i think she doesn't get a lot of credit because her books are quite simple it's not the right word word but they're not quite as high brown intense as say maybe like the robin hobb ones sure her first trilogy is sort of border line young adult and gets like sold in both sections and waterstones if that makes sense

is that the the magic school one yeah yeah see i remember really enjoying that but i don't remember it very much because i've read it so long ago so i do need to reread that it was really good but quite simple but then she really built on the world and did like a prequel set 500 years before which gives a lot of context and then she did like a whole sequel trilogy set like 50 years after i think there's a lot to be said for accessible fantasy books like i don't know why the trend is so very impenetrable yeah and then this series millennium's rule you can like see how much she's grown as a writer and especially a world builder so she's managed to write this amazing story uh there's like two kind of main characters that focuses on it goes back and forth between

intersections um but there's like multiple worlds and there's thousands and thousands of them and there's a certain level of sorcery that means you can travel from world to world yeah so these people both start off really isolated with absolutely no idea of this and then uh the story massively spreads out to encompass like worlds and thousand-year-old sorceries and things sure um and it's just really really cleverly done because it's sort of she's gone like right i've created a universe where this can happen and then i've created a magic system that works like this and then i've looked really deeply at the ramifications and how like warring factions have to strategize considering that's the case oh that sounds fun it's really fun i'm really enjoy i've really enjoyed rereading

them i'm really excited to read the last one anything you've been watching that you recommend francing the final season of shits creek is my recommendation which has been out on netflix because i just love shits creek so much it's such a good show the characters are so unrelatable but relatable at the same time and yeah the fashion is gorgeous and it's just so fucking funny the actors and the writing that is all perfect it's so good it's such a good show kathryn ahara is incredible my only only complaint about the show is the what's his fucking name the mayor uh roland roland thank you i keep wanting to say ronald my only complaint is he is done too well and that's a certain type of character like in friday night dinner the neighbor um and jim

thank you and in this where the the character designed to be cringy works too well on me and i find it very hard to watch although in the last season they kind of mitigated that to the point where i could happily watch him yeah that was i thought that was really interesting because i had a bit of a rancy the other day i was saying like the problem uh you sent me an interesting video on homo simpsons character development in simpsons i was saying this problem if a show gets dragged out for too long the characters often become parodies themselves and roland especially could have easily become such a parody of the original character and they didn't they managed to keep it very soft at the edges they almost reigned it in as they went along which is incredible and the same

with all of them actually all of them could have gone that way moira was moira was ridiculously over the top from the beginning but she didn't get more so really um no they managed to perfectly keep that balance like it's such good writing from yeah david and um elixir the same like they didn't become bland plot pushes but they didn't like devolve into accentuated versions and so what's your tv thing recommend me some tv so loving all the stuff national that are live are putting like recorded broad broadcasts of some of their plays on youtube and so other globe um national that are live this week i haven't watched yet but it's street carname desire with julian anderson and venessa kirby so i'm very very very ready to watch this

and i'm hyped uh and next week it's going to yeah next week it's going to be chorea the next week or the week after actually it's chorea lanus with tom hiddleston which i saw in cinema twice and it's incredible it's so good um the globe stuff has been really good i really enjoyed two noble kinsmen and they've got a vision of beth coming up but i wanted to highlight that one because the globe have just pointed out that they have literally no government funding and pretty much no income right now and they are dangerously close to closing permanently if they can't get some income if you want to watch the youtube things and there are like donation options if you want to donate half what you pay for a grounding ticket which is

two pound fifty they are great about championing new writing they stage new stuff a lot they put on amelia morgan loyds malcom's play about amelia basano who was like the woman that probably wore shakesmiths dark lady and inspired a bunch of his staff and his was also the first ever female published poet huh oh amazing badass uh in fact amelia basano she's fascinating the play amelia was completely incredible uh i saw it at the globe you saw that at the globe didn't you i remember you telling me that yeah it was ridiculously good there's this amazing burn the fucking house down feminist rant speech at the end that claire perkins who played the character um has just been out of like a video of her doing it so i'll link to that in the show

notes because it's ridiculously good i don't know jay feminist rants don't really seem like us no i know uh it's something new it's something new i'm trying um also i'm really loving i kind of like the patriarchy fuck that fucking patriarchy yeah speaking of the patriarchy i've been really enjoying watching all the panel shows and stuff that are now being recorded on zoom especially like have i got news for you in the mesh report of both like the way they've remote recorded them has been great i actually didn't watch last week so i got news for you i think i was having a small this was like during my build up to my small breakdown i think i just like i don't want to know what's happening in the world i don't care no um so i'm gonna catch up on that tonight yeah

that's fun oh and also um i'm massively late to this bandwagon but i've got very into avatar the last airbender which my partner and i were kind of watching together and then had stopped and now everyone's talking about it because it's just come back onto american netflix so we're we're on the final season now and i kind of rate it off as a silly kid show that i didn't mind being on in the background it's not quite anime but it is a cartoon okay so it has nothing to do with avatar the film nothing to do with avatar okay although there is like a crappy live action film adaptation of the tv series that we don't talk about because whitewashing considering i know nothing clearly about avatar last airbender what is it it's it's a kid's cartoon but like i

wrote it off as just that it's not it's really well written and like fucking dark and deep in places it's about like there are these different tribes of people who can manipulate different elements there's like fire and so there's like a fire nation an earth nation and there are water tribes in those like air nomads and those are the four things um and there's the idea is that like every generation there is this avatar who can work with all four elements and their job is to maintain balance but um one the avatar got like frozen in ice and there wasn't one for 100 years and the fire nation attacked and went all colonial and took out all the air nomads and then tried to take over the rest of everything and so the show centers around this avatar that's been like frozen in ice for 100 years

and him trying to he's like the last of the air nomads because the rest of them got wiped out by the fire nation and he's trying to travel around and learn all the different elemental things and stop the fire nation and fuck them up and there's a chemical level fire nation wiping out air no bad seems like a bad idea because they very much need air yeah i mean they don't actually stop the elements from existing okay no they just get rid of the people who live in those tribes or whatever and just saying collaboration seems like it could be mutually beneficial in that case yeah well the fire nation are colonialistic ads yeah and there's like a whole story with this one guy and he gets he's like starts as a bad guy but gets this whole redemption arc is this a spoiler

i mean yes and no the show came out a very long time ago so okay cool i'm just like i don't care just in case i need you to cut it out there was a character no there's a character that gets a redemption arc and it's very cool it's just it's a surprisingly good show and i didn't realize i didn't give it that credit when i sort of had it on in the background so i'm really sad i didn't watch it as a kid that sounds like the kind of thing i would have yeah i'm sad i didn't get into it as a kid i'm gonna i'll still watch it now yeah we're on like the last two episodes so once i've watched them i'm gonna go back to the beginning and watch again like and pay attention now i know it's good it's also very funny and very sweet i think kids shows and young adult books and stuff

get a lot of stick but when they are well done and do include difficult topics and dark bits they are amongst some of the best content because it's you know it's made for children who don't already have this little list of things they will or won't watch and yeah will or won't read and yeah i don't know stuff definitely there's a lot of stuff i would have not read and would be worse off for it if i had a thing against young adult literature for instance yeah i will still read like new young adult stuff now and i will go back and reread it's a genre that's full of shit let's be honest but but there's also there's a good so every other young adult's not really a genre even it's like a no it's not but it seems to be a category but everyone thinks of the same book

when they think of like bad young adult in this fangbanger everyone thinks yeah which like again some fangbangers young adults are not which actually like no i'm gonna stand up for teenage me's tastes briefly because i was genuinely excited by the news last week or the week before that Stephanie Meyer is finally releasing the version of the first Twilight book from Edward's perspective because i was really into the Twilight books when i was a teenager because i was the age for them and i rewatched the films recently they're honestly not that bad like don't get me wrong i'm not holding these up as a pinnacle of good writing or good filmmaking they're still very white they're still a weird metaphor for no sex before marriage but they're actually

not bad they're pretty good they're enjoyable films they're enjoyable books and i think they got shat on a lot because they were liked so much by teenage girls i've never read or watched any of it so i literally cannot comment on my quality yeah that's fine the only thing i say is i've never really liked the idea and it's in a lot of books it's not just Stephanie Meyer of like hundred-odd-year-old vampires going after naive teenage girls it's like oh yeah no this thing like that it's very problematic to me see you're so buffy and angel that's because you look like a teenager doesn't mean there's not a huge power imbalance even before you add the immortality in yeah yeah no i'm i'm with you there i just feel like she should have been allowed to grow

as a person before going into that whole weird world but i guess that wouldn't make such an interesting narrative yeah no i know i'm very with you there in theory but like i know i know that's not what makes it interesting my point is my point is that i think the book a lot of this stuff is unfairly shat on because it's popular with teenage girls and if things are liked by teenage girls they're not taken seriously ignoring my twilight rant should we talk about why it was important we did put a bonus episode out on the 25th of May so this has become like an important date for terry pratchett fans i want to put out it's also a big date for hitchhiker's fans it is towel day is it is that a shared date we have okay we have a shared date with uh with hitchhikers

so make sure you've got a towel i will wash mine in celebration beautiful oh i need to put my towels um anyway but it's uh it's an important date from the book night watch which so this is the hereby spoilers section yes this is spoilers stop listening at this point if you haven't read night watch hereby dragons hereby spoilers uh so yes the 25th of May is the very important date in night watch it is the anniversary of the glorious revolution of treacle mine road the people's republic of treacle mine road it's a you know i i had a little bit of rant earlier about not liking some bits of online fandom culture but the 25th is a very nice thing for online fandom culture people share pictures in lilac they've seen around and it's nice because it's also hitting a certain

point in the year where lilac is blooming yeah there's um there's kind of an echo from the book to real life so in the book people who have to ask about why they're wearing the lilac shouldn't be wearing it like you want you want that you don't know it's fine it's you know no offense but it's not something you're a part of which is almost how it is in the project community although i feel like a lot of us use it as an excuse if people ask like oh you don't well here's a book you might enjoy it's a great way it's another way in which we convert people not that this is a cult no not a cult at all definitely when's the next ritual sacrifice by the way because it's getting really hard in lockdown yeah i know it's just not it's not hygienic to be ritually sacrificing

at the moment okay i might like have a little cheeky summon of belgium rothlay to do okay cool yeah let's do some like metaphorical ritual sacrifice by it's sort of a nice we're all in it together because we were there and we wear the lilac and uh in my case i'll also get out the egg that says truth and freedom and the detail that says truth and freedom and yeah one day the tattoo that will say that that i will get when i can afford a new tattoo it's interesting because well i think there's a couple of reasons why the 25th became so important first is that it is a date that is mentioned in the book as a remembrance day which is you know the only one of them and it's very like dates that will coincide with a round world date are even mentioned in the books yeah that's

it they didn't call it groon or whatever yeah and also because night watch is a lot of people's favorite book for some very good reasons it's it is one of the best ones and i think it's because it's one where he really really strikes that amazing balance of comedy and very deep and emotional and serious and really looking at people and what they do and don't do and political injustice yeah and he harnesses vimes which is a lot of people's favorite character he harnesses his anger in a very like like like we like he was describing granny the weather works his anger with the dam and the valve yeah the way vimes uses his anger there and and the the really key thing about vimes's character which is that he will choose what he feels is best for the many over himself

and like in night watch to the point where he pretty much looks at i'm not going to make it back to my own time and back to my wife who in my timeline is giving birth to my kid because i want to try and make things better for people here in the past instead yeah and it's almost not even it's almost not even a choice he can make it's almost like rinsing for this conscience the conscience tells him what he's going to do it's like yeah it's not really like it's tragic but this is the way it's going to happen but i am not my my personality does not allow me to selfishly leave these people to die yeah and i for me it's it's been a big thinker every time i reread it because of its it's questioning of the let's be honest the young people and the liberal kind

of attitude about come the revolution which we love to joke about and and the patronizing way that a lot of us can talk about the people or and the kind of honestly the it's good for me to have a reminder of the futility of it all sometimes in the nicest way possible it is we both between the first time either of us would have read that book and now we've both changed a lot in how we are politically i think we've both gone through very intensely come the revolution and this is what the people want to understanding that there's a lot more cult of the individual and maybe becoming somewhat dissolutioned with it i've kind of swung yeah since i first read it i was very politically unaware and uninterested when i first read it and then i swung one way

and then the other and you know let's fuck i'm nearly 29 but that's not gonna in 10 years i'll be completely different again yeah i feel less that the book has been valuable every time i've read it in every stage of this it's always been a really good book for giving some perspective yeah and like at a time where i'm a bit disengaged it's nice to remember what hope sometimes feels like and at times where i'm very active it's good to humble myself with the fact that really revolutions won't change all that much well they're called revolutions they always come around again exactly and also it's just aside from the kind of messages and it's an eminently quotable book but it's just got a lot of character building in that we see young veterinary and we see young

vines and we get to see the origins of these characters and i fucking love an origin story me oh i love an origin story and a flashback we get knobs's origin story yeah which is just a sweet like his almost comic relief but at the same time you see how unfortunate he was and you understand a lot more of what he becomes now yeah and yeah and there are some scenes in it that you sit and read kind of mouth open as the horror descends over you and there are some scenes which are just hilarious and i think it also has a really good while we're in the spoiler section the moments towards the end of the book where people are falling in this revolution uh parallels really well to jingo where the vines' disorganiser has gone down the wrong

leg of the time the time so as he's ended up in clatch his disorganiser is in a very different timeline where everyone fucking dies in a riot in angkmoorporg yeah and that's yeah that's the same those the two scenes i think of where i just read them with my mouth open and like oh my god oh my god every time i think that's some of the most heartbreaking like in a good way writing the terry patch it's ever done yeah definitely and it makes the book so good it makes it one that we care about and one that we like to reminisce about because it deals with with loss in such a way so yeah i think i feel like that's all the 25th chat we can do for now but we also have some recap content so this is uh with zisters the animated series which came out in 1997 it was made by

cause grave hall productions um it's weirdly difficult to actually get a hold of so we watched it on youtube but out of deference to officially being anti piracy we're not going to link to that in the show notes yeah i'll have another quick go to see if i can find anywhere proper to do it and somewhere we can give someone money because we are we try our best not to pirate things being you know people who get paid for our creative work yeah yeah we like to pay for the media we consume because they also did soul music the same year which is also really hard to get hold of we tried to buy on dvd and we ended up with a german version so cool cool any german speakers want a dvd of the anime and song music give me a shout my devonian husband confirms

which is sound like they're from devon yeah so the fool is scouts because it's lez denis right who is scouts yes uh he also voiced young tom john not adult tom john but we go too deep into the casting actually sorry i know that was my fault but what did you think overall um i genuinely thought it was really good like it's not a perfect adaptation because there's no such thing apart from maybe good omen's yeah maybe even that's the perfect is he gonna get i think yeah but it was fun i i i like animation but i also very rarely sit and watch a cartoon or something and i think i've got lots of thoughts about animation and things missing a trick by not being animated i liked it a lot more than color of magic and like fantastic yes yes that is my

initial proclamation is way better than that ship um i mean there's less than 10 years in it making wise uh color of magic was 2005 this is 97 yeah i think maybe animating this kind of thing was seen as old fashioned by then but i i think mr trick is the right way of putting it because animating especially with the budget they put into color of magic they could have had a gorgeous animated i've yeah i've like 2d animation has really fallen out of fashion especially in the last 15 20 years and i i have a huge soft soft spot for it like obviously because i grew up on disney cartoons and before that like vintage looney tunes and tom and jerry which i'm still a huge fan of and we'll go back and watch old bits of on youtube i really love some kinds of anime and

i've been told that there's quite a lot of anime i should watch because the animation is so beautiful even i'm not that into anime because i i think i was unlucky with some of the stuff i saw which was just weird little girl sexualization when it wasn't meant to be and like no that will put you off but there is lots of good i grew up being really into anime yeah uh we less so now but still big fan of some stuff and still like big fan of all the studio ghibli what's it's yes that's what i've been told to watch yeah oh you should watch house moving castle have you read house moving castle i loved it very much yeah uh shall i not look at it as an adaptation i feel i i think i've heard that it's very very different it is different but it is a really

really gorgeous film to just sit and watch okay it is beautiful the voice acting is all really fun i need to reread the book i haven't read it in forever but it is one of my favorite animated films okay i'll start with that one then that sounds good yeah but yeah i i think i've said on this podcast before that i think really the only or certainly the best way to do fantasy is by animation because the point of it is that you can't have it in real life yeah and the stylization that you can do with animation i feel is yeah everyone focuses on hyper realistic and especially like since Pixar came onto the scene and like no i really like stylized flat 2d stuff absolutely and not just kid stuff but you know like anime isn't just kids thing by any stretch of the imagination

and i think western animation is sometimes struggled to catch up like this isn't aimed at kids this is as grown up as the story in the book it's which is kids can watch it but yeah i think we've seen a slight uptick in cartoons for adults and i would like to see that taken further so in the same way that video games used to be very much for kids and now almost more for adults in the like the best selling game markets apart from nintendo um i'd say like so things like bob's burgers is a cartoon and that's not exactly family friendly all the way through yeah um and then but yeah it's as family friendly as say modern family or yeah but it's but you can do more and it can be more ridiculous because it's a sitcom uh like bojack horseman is the super extrema thank you yeah that's what i was

trying to think of yeah which is exciting tuka and bercy which is another show by rafael oh i can yeah i really really loved it although the yeah the first couple of episodes are a bit it's too fast moving for me i think i watched it on a bad day i'll try again when i'm not knackered i loved it and i was really gutted to watch all of it and then find out netflix cancelled it after one season and adult swim yesterday announced that they picked it up and there's going to be another season oh good i'm so happy it's a it's a really good show i like the people who worked on it so i'm happy for them even if i don't like it personally yeah i think it's very well written they're very well written women but yeah the animation aimed at adults has become much more

of a thing especially in recent stuff and feature length animation yeah that's the next thing i'm hoping for yeah and especially adaptation stuff like this and i like live action adaptations you know i didn't dislike kind of magic as much as you did and the other live out live action adaptations that you haven't seen yet we'll talk about when we get to them yeah i've heard i'm feeling more optimistic about some of them because i've heard more about them so um hogfather i'm quite looking forward to you hogfather is really fun um and i'm going postal you were the one who told me going postal's really good so yeah going postal is really good but it's not like it's not a straight adaptation it they change stuff but it's done very well and it's got uh temson gregg as sakuras of

crypt lock which and i do love her very much oh god i love temson gregg yeah anyway so yeah but overall yeah enjoyed it uh little nostalgia for kind of low budget late 90s 2d animation yeah like yeah that that lord of the rings thing just sticks out in my memory is being something i hugely enjoyed and i'm very disappointed it never got finished it never got finished yeah what was the other thing it reminded me of uh around the same time although it had a better budget and i'd say a slightly better quality uh warship down that remind yeah all the the bits with the i've written that down even the bits with the animals um with a very warship down to me it was interesting how much they jumped from style to style there's definitely a few

crossover mixes especially like i think location and character they play with style a lot yeah the especially the like granny streams about the nature but like the strange embossed style that you saw for the animals was also in the demon and um anything kind of dreamy was that very very different style yeah there's some beautiful painted backgrounds and then fun like the animation they used for the time jump i really liked uh anything kind of magical they did some very fun stuff with yeah i really liked all of the backdrops and the geography and i think lanka the the the setting what i called it the setting yeah in this context i thought that was all very well done the set was yeah was very lovely and how i imagined it basically yeah i think the castle i thought looked

really cool the castle that called the colors worked it had the right color color palettes it could have been done a bit brighter and more technicolor yeah but it doesn't really work for misty hills yeah that would have made it feel more silly and more aimed at kids so i'm glad that it wasn't what should we talk about characters and and casting and things first then yes cool oh i'm sorry i've skipped right you've written a lovely lovely episode plan i've just skipped ahead three paragraphs it's fine we'll jump back and forward and back and forward and it'll be the other one who's going to edit i think yeah to be honest sorry listeners i'm not editing this much that's fine is bonus bonus content look we're still recording bonus content despite the fact i have literally

got the plague yeah so it was hard looking up some of this and characters and who's played what but uh granny was Annette Crosby who has done lots of things um i did not like copy out the whole iamdb page because life is short but i like i really like how they drew granny i think they had the perfect severity and the nose and the contrast between her and nanny was really good i liked that yeah um i think i think this is like a time thing probably like the era i think i would have liked her to be more detailed slightly just because granny in my head is such a character that seeing her in very simple 2d was a bit jarring yeah i know i like the level of detail that was there for all the characters like i like really simple line work okay yeah

subjective but yeah yeah what did you think of the voice acting for her i did it was my least favorite of the three witches i think it could have been more stern and severe i think that's it i once i got used to the fact they all had very strong debenture accents um i would have liked all three of them to have lower voices and i think that's possibly just my personal preference of what i can stand to listen to for a long time yeah but especially granny i always imagined having a very deep voice yeah granny i always imagined as very deep and you know she's a woman of few words and i think everything was just a bit too light and too quick yeah yeah uh it which was less jarring here than it would have been like the granny we get to know in later books

yes that's like this voice still kind of worked with weird sister's granny and it would have worked with an equal rights granny it wouldn't work for like a lords and ladies granny yeah it's possibly because we are giving this character all the weight we know she has later yeah and like she obviously has this weight by the time the animated series is made because it's like not 10 years after the book came out but you know it's a good few years um magra and nanny so magrat was jane horrocks bubbles as you told me bubbles from abab and the nanny nanny was june wittfield who is uh eddie's mum in abab see with magrat i didn't mind the fact she has a high voice like that's her speaking voice but it sounds a bit um but i didn't like the weird

giggles and noises she made along with it like yeah it they seemed to try and make her into a little girl they did make her a bit silly and girly i i liked her character design yeah i also like the fact that you see her changing outfit a couple of times because quite often in an animated thing like to save on budget and during time someone will be like every other character was in the same outfit for the entire thing yeah which makes sense for granny and nanny but yeah but i like the fact that magrat they do show her in like a few different dresses and with different occult jewellery and the eyeshadow changes color i love the one she was wearing in the field yes i liked that one yeah yeah but yeah no weirdly giggly yeah that just the the silly noises i didn't

which i think is it was it was cartoony and like this is a cartoon they definitely made a cartoony i thought nanny was perfect especially the uh even when you in a scene where she doesn't drink from the hip flask we still see that she's got keeping the hip flask in her boobs yeah yeah which was just a really nice little detail yeah i imagine this is literally just the ease of expression and things but she was not as wrinkly old apple as i imagine but i think that would be quite hard to draw in that style and not yeah if you're going to just use like a bunch of really clear lines then you can't go into like details of wrinkle and stuff i think there was enough there that you get the impression like the cheeks with a yeah felma i really like the extra lines on his face yes if

you know yes they made him like structured yeah like so his face was almost entirely made up of like really harsh rectangles it was really really good but i wonder what the discussion was that led to that i think it's something to do with like making his face look more chaotic the guy who voiced him i did look up because it sounded weirdly familiar yeah i couldn't see much else he's done like he mostly does animation so he was in water ship down he voiced all of the vehicles in the original bob the builder and he was the mayor of townsville in the power puff girls which made me laugh yeah i used to love the power puff girls so much i never really watched it so he sounded very familiar to me but i've not really heard him in anything so he's just got a very good villain

voice i think yeah the duchess alana brunn who among other things has also been in an episode of ab fab she played patsy's mum oh okay well i liked her a lot anyway i thought that was really good i started off really disliking how they've made her look because they'd put her in really masculine craving and that always feels a bit punch liney like her she's not feminine enough to be a real woman uh but the more i thought about it a she had a bit of mrs trunchable like a red-headed mrs trunchable which i like yeah um it's not mrs trunchable mrs trunchable um but also like the more lucy the more i look like hunting or riding gear like yeah she was wearing job pairs yeah and actually that really works because that character would wear job pairs and be a horsey person like

and say you have quite regularly whipping the servants yeah i've never really seen seen that trope theme in where you put them in masculine clothing for not being feminine well it's it's sort of the um villainous woman gets less of the femininity or feminine femininity is a joke like trunchable is a good example where like the good woman is very feminine and soft and sweet and miss honey and then the bad woman is very masculine and it always feels like you're building to an unfair punch line about transness in there somewhere it's probably just me being very sensitive about gender which i don't know why that would be oh no i was just going to say like if anything i notice usually that villainous women are almost like over feminized because feminine attributes

are kind of reviled in a subconscious way yeah i think sometimes it's sometimes one it's sometimes the other yeah uh i said i went from disliking it for a minute in this to actually really liking it and it working for the character the fool les denis fine not that he's not big now but like i imagine this was sort of the height of people knowing who les denis was whereas now it's like oh yeah that's like that dude from the nineties yeah um i mean he was fine i did it was a bit weird to have scouseness but yeah i did like uh the fool's outfit because i always pictured him as lots of pointy horns with bells on and the fact that it sort of drooped the entire time was quite entertaining yeah the fact that they did animate him so that he capered as he moved until he stopped

capering i thought he was a well-done character um i think maybe i just don't like les denis's voice that much yeah that's fair i think that's probably it um do you know he married Amanda Holden i just tried to look up his face in the nineties uh no i did not know that i'm not fucking pumping about yeah right uh so tom les denis also voiced young tom john yeah the high-pitched squeaky bit and then andy hockley voiced adult tom john andy hockley who also voiced in e selen in the version of soul music that they did the same year they did this what did you think of tom john it i had this as a point later on actually but i'll talk about it here um the magic of tom john being able to kind of deliver these magic speeches that will calm a fighting pub is something that doesn't

translate to screen even as an animated thing no i feel like what they tried to do was ham it up so like i'm showing he's a good actor by showing the stereotypical good acting voice which actually is not the good acting voice and getting just a good voice actor to do it well would have been better yeah i don't think any hockley's a bad voice actor but i think no but i think he had it up for it yeah the direction of doing it is like a very rp actor yeah that works for vittola it doesn't really work for tom john because yeah you lose the magic of those speeches yeah he sounds like he sounds like an amdram actor yeah he sounds like an actor actor he's meant to be the best actor ever so you don't sound like that um but yeah i yeah i didn't really care for the voice acting

for tom john um i'm possibly being a bit fussy yeah i didn't dislike it but i don't think the way they did it is how it should have been done yeah yeah yeah it didn't detract from it for me but i think it could have been an addition that it didn't have i also found it weird him being dark head just because i never pitched him as dark head yeah i always thought of him as a blonde not like not like a white blonde video you know what i mean like a dark a strawberry blonde almost yeah yeah the kind of prince you always get in movies vittola like i if there was to ever be a live action of this like and i know we've talked about fan casting but could you imagine brian blaster doing a character like that yeah i think that should be the the correct one

i think brian blaster might be a bit old now yeah vittola was weird actually like obviously things get cut for time and you can't put everything from the book in but it felt like he was really reduced he wasn't he was smaller and he wasn't as big and charismatic as i'd imagine and his wife kind of isn't really present they kind of reduced him to a plot point instead of a character i think yeah but the whole bit where he and his wife like sympathetically took on tom john because they hadn't had a kid of their own or the kid had died or something um and yeah that that bit and then like the bits later on which we'll talk about where they changed the the how the disc was built i i don't know yeah they just kind of took away his character almost yeah which i get like things

do get cut for time and it was one of the less essential things and could be cut to a certain extent or simplified which it is um well which also gets pronounced howl but points yeah i like to uh short shower Shakespeare and i like the fact that they styled it to look like Shakespeare yeah because a lot of the Shakespeareanness of this kind of got cut because weirdly considering like Shakespeare was a playwright it actually wouldn't have translated to the screen very well and it makes sense that it's cut in favor of like a sensible story yeah it worked so well in text i think because you can see on the page how it changes whereas if they just start speaking weirdly it would have been odd yeah there's still odd little lines in there and also um near the end

where they're doing the play at lancocastle and tom john is playing the evil king so they've gotten kind of on a crutch with a gammy leg and it's like a kind of richard third thing that works quite well yeah because that's like a physical reference the best casting in the whole thing and the best casting of any disc world ever is christivally voicing death yeah yeah just perfect so perfect i agree and i think if pratchett's death has ever brought screen again they should just use a one of those ai's that can make voice recordings make sense say new things now it is uh hogfather isn't christivally i don't think uh going post to liz either and the guy who does it is very good all right well we'll see but we'll see when we get there it's not quite as

perfect because christivally just had the voice of a coffin lid slamming christivally had a voice god he had a voice oh christivally and he was like a spy and he was a spy and a metal christmas album god he was cool my favorite my favorite story about christivally is uh pete jackson telling him to react to certain way to being stabbed in lord of the rings and him just looking peter jackson in the eye and going that's not how someone sounds when they get stabbed and peter jackson just feeling all right okay do what you want christivally in the hammer horror dracula yeah he doesn't have any lines does he and that's because he refused to say the lines because they were so shit he was the fucking best he was one of mine and jack's very few shared heroes

and then yeah uh dead king variants jimmy hibbet good job nice voice yep pretty good well then jimmy hibbet it is a compliment that i don't have much to say about you yes you fit in mind in the adaptation very well okay so lost in translation is your subheadings uh so just things that didn't go well from book to screen things that i couldn't translate well from book to screen okay uh we don't get people's internal monologues yeah which uh the points where i thought it really lost something was the juke just seemed straight up crazy because we don't get like in the one of the first the first thing you meet him where the dutch is going on and on and then he's like oh we need to cut down the trees in the book you're getting this whole internal monologue about how much he hates this

fucking forest he's staring at and you lose that so he just kind of seemed straight up crazy like we don't get to see the crazy develop because we don't get to see everything he's thinking about yeah so you say that couldn't go from book to screen but i feel like considering its cartoon things like narration and internal monologue could have been used in a way they weren't yeah uh it got lost in translation but it wouldn't have had to have been maybe that's a better way to say yeah too much narration gets very it does but internal monologues could have been used in this particular type of cartoon like that corny as fuck in films like live action but i think it could have worked well here i think magrat's character suffers for it she seems a lot simpler

because you don't see her like you get her you get a line of her saying i think a bread knife is a girl's best friend no a woman's and but you don't see the whole internal choice of the bread knife over the sacrificial bone handled what's it yeah but you could have even i feel like you could have shown that i feel like you could have shown that like the hand hovering over both or i think magrat was a little bit left as a 2d silly girl like in voice and how she was shown yeah and i think a lot of that is because you don't have her internal monologue in the book like if you took her on face value in the book without seeing everything that goes on in her head she'd be a silly girl because she's telling a guy she needs to wash her hair she's dropping off yeah and you don't get a

lot more unless you know what's going on in her head yeah and like the display of power she shows with the door and stuff kind of seemed a bit incongruous because of that yeah and threatening the guard yes because yeah you you miss out on some character growth there yeah are you also we also means we don't get to see the whole thought processes that lead up to the wishes for tom john so like in the book you get magrat really thinking about the fact that she's quite lonely and that's where she says she should make friends easily in nanny august yeah and granny has like a whole thing about let him be who he thinks he is and where she gets to that that we don't really get in the animated version yes yeah that would have been i think very difficult to show yeah because that

was several internal on logs building up to that wasn't it yeah so yeah it definitely losing the internal on logs lost something in translation this is massive bug pair of mine not just in this fit in adaptations in general is characters needing to be stupid for some exposition where in the book this would be provided by a fit note and the example in this is granny says something about a vermin and then magrat asks what a vermin is so the joke could be in about it being related to the lemming and only jokes over small things but magrat would fucking know what one is she lives in the same area she lives near the same forest like now what i love is how they did this in good omens which was providing footnotes via narrator yeah and i know that's difficult to do

well and i understand why they didn't because it is very easy to do badly but now i've seen it and like well why doesn't everybody have this exact fantastic voice actress i think with the most annoying examples of her experience recently is uh i was replaying the dragon age games uh and that these games have like quite a lot of lore um so there is a whole section of the game and it's a very very big key plot stuff that involves knowing a lot of the like elven lore and religion which means the game needs to provide all that information in a very expositional way but because in these games you create a character and then in your head you quite often create more backstory for the character than even the game provides um you deal with things in a certain way so anything

where i am playing an elf character who would know all of this stuff but the game forces me to be like oh who is that thing so it can be explained so the game can give me this information and like them has to have been a better way to have done it yeah i feel like just dissolving into an explanation would have been fine by some kind of narrator figure i mean the the character in question who ends up giving you most of this information or the characters are both arrogant dickheads who would just talk over you despite you knowing stuff you don't need to make a character stupid to provide exposition yeah and it's very specifically they're making a character stupid so something can be explained to the audience yeah that really bugs me because it's lazy yeah

and especially for something like this where it was the sake of getting an extra joke in yeah made it more annoying because it's like you you almost make Magra the butt of the joke by having to make her stupid just so you can make a funny joke about a rodent yeah i agree because yeah so that's that's a bug bear um some stuff that doesn't make it to screen so it wouldn't work in animation you can't do the uncountable standing stone no not without like a little cutaway skit almost yeah yeah so that that got lost which is a shame and yeah and i already talked about the fact that the whole magic of tom john declaiming doesn't really work which yeah should we talk things that didn't work before we talk about the stuff that does work so we can

end up with a positive that's a good idea yeah um i didn't like what the fuck was with this cryo pray stuff and like chrysophy yeah sorry i don't know why they did that like they they cut good bits elsewhere for time reasons and then added this weird sub mafia plot where it's like vator is in genuine danger yeah vator is in genuine danger tomorrow and they're losing all their profits from this now and he was in danger in the book but it was a i can kind of see the logic of trying to simplify the narrative into a much sharper peril near the end of the series film whatever there's already the problem i don't think they need to add this extra no i think it could have worked to add this extra and take other things away to streamline but it didn't it just became

an extra thing that didn't need to be there yeah yeah but also if you think about the fact that the target audience possibly hadn't read the book and would be coming across this on telly yeah and again they just made vator look like nothing for no like and tom john saying how could it be so stupid i know happens in the book but that's in the context of the the disc was tom john's idea and yeah his idea and like this and this whereas this is just vator being a stupid old man you know i didn't like it i can kind of see what they were trying to do but it didn't work yeah i agreed um anything else check off's dog it's not check off the duchess has a dog uh you see her feeding bits of food and stuff to the dog there's no reason for it to be there the duchess

doesn't have a dog in the book she's not the sort of person who would have a dog in the book it is a bit of a character shifty change she and i thought when the dog was there i was like right okay so they're going to do something with the dog she's going to set it on someone or it's going to turn on her at the end like yeah like the whole check off's gun thing if you're going to have a gun on the stage in the first act you need to use it in the second act yes uh it was just a pointless dog and it and i kept waiting for something to happen with it because it was a change from the book and it was a clear visual change and it never did and it was just like why bother giving the duchess a dog anyway let's go on to the positives i've already talked a bit about the fact that i really really

love animation and that it has many benefits to doing it like this i think most of the visuals are spot on i think the character design is great we already talked about the gorgeous backgrounds yeah um i like the fact that there was like a variance in animation style from scene to scene and like even in the same scene i like i like the different art styles altogether it seemed correctly chaotic for a disqual look yeah the sinister woodland animals especially in the duchess's last scene when the forest kind of eats her were amazing did you see spot sinister bambi i did yeah i went back that was one scary looking deer yeah the i thought they looked pretty sinister like standing outside of granny's house as well like yeah the way the way the wolf was drawn i

thought was really good because wolves are often just drawn like big dogs and it wasn't it was drawn with like wolf proportions it was very long and yeah yeah almond eyes yeah yeah um and the fact that there's also like it allows for some horror and gore that you wouldn't get in a live action one where anything truly scary or perilous in color magic and light fantastic kind of come came out yeah uh in a casting you can keep more instant like you see blood on the dagger and blood pooling around a dead body you have this kind of terrifying thing of the duchess getting eaten by the forest yeah i think i think i agree with this decision that they did take out a lot of the body horror with the the hand thing yeah no i'm glad that wasn't that because that was creepy and in the

book and it was really effective in the book but i don't want to see that on screen no and it didn't need to be you know they had the reference to him sort of rubbing his hand and stuff but i'm glad that it wasn't more intense than that but that's what i mean you can do you can do get away with more horror and to a certain extent body horror and gore in like a 2d animated thing because it's so stylized and unrealistic yeah um whereas like if this was live action you there would not be a pool of blood you wouldn't see blood on a dagger not unless you made it a lot darker than this really calls for yeah yeah it's not really a dark story it just has some dark moments in it yeah yeah yeah i agree i think and i think i just think this is why animation suits the discworld

so much better than just the mood of it which is a light-hearted thing with with some dark moments which describes a lot of discworld books it's just so much better suited to animation i would really genuinely love to see like a studio ghibli style animation of a discworld book i think like it would the i really like the tales of tales of the earth sea adaptation that studio ghibli did although some people don't like it and it's not it's not super accurate to the actually living style i haven't read it either yeah but it's a really lovely thing to watch and i think some of the discworld stuff like if you watch when you get around to watching house moving castle without netflix by the way uh i think yeah all of studio ghibli's come onto

netflix in the last few kiki's delivery service as well because obviously i started modelling myself on that we need to get a big red bow oh that's what i'll get people massive red bow yeah amazing i love it there's also one little detail i noticed that was really cool which is magra's fingers going point at the end pointy at the end like witch's claws when she's pointing at someone's chest and threatening them yeah i did like that that was um that was a really nice nicely exaggerated stylized yeah without going stupid and overboard with it yeah so that was cool that worked we already talked about the fact we like the accents accents were very good i do really like the witch's devonshire accents yeah i think that's a that was a good choice i just because this

is like a remote rural area i probably wish that almost everyone had deeper voices and i almost always wish that in everything including my own voice i just love i just really like deep voices yeah there's there's a reason we like christofilly yeah yes if everyone could just be christofilly please that would be fun yeah that would be lovely thanks um nanny's house was so perfect i think his backgrounds go yeah but someone put some love into that someone who loved nanny as much as you do they did but especially the fact that she's got the little dancing hula lamp yeah what was that there's a there's a joke in the book about you know she wants to use a lamp that someone's brought her back from foreign parts yeah but it's i think in a book and in a cartoon you can get away with

these kind of anachronistic things like this is obviously meant to be kind of medieval especially if you look at the costumes but if you look at nanny's house it is like a very camp kitch 70s northern woman's bungalow yeah yeah with a dancing hula lamp and the the whole way it's decorated and the sofa and if that was done as a live action thing people would point it that doesn't work there's a wrong time period compared to that but in the cartoon you get away with it because of course that's what nanny's house looks like and that's how i'd imagined it even though yeah the book's set in medieval kind of aesthetic that is how nanny's house is it just is even if it's never said it is yeah it's almost identical to my northern grandmother's living room

fucking ornaments everywhere except with more colour she didn't allow too much colour because that was too working class i've got a lot of aspirational class politics in the UK here speaking of geordies i do slightly dislike that the one geordie accent in this is the big racist barbarian dude well this guy's kind of breaking out of a trope so geordies are always used as kind of very agreeable almost simple like i know but just big racist northern earth didn't need that would you have preferred he was from leeds yes that would have been much harder heartly pool i mean they hang monkeys that's enough of your very specific regional prejudices

it's not regional prejudices they hang monkeys in heartly pool is a thing let's start about guernsey the better i'm sure you're all lovely do you think we have any listeners in guernsey not anymore remember like the one thing we were going to do was not insult the listeners oh fuck yeah so sorry any heartly pool listeners but like guys stop hanging monkeys what the fuck and then a little bit of random pandering to fans what's it called fan service which references from the rest of this world that you spotted yeah there was a little dibbler cameo there is a hot dog seller saying i'll cut me in

throat which was a nice way to reference the hot dog seller bit from the book but also nod to this disco character that that then exists yeah and then yeah you also see someone in the drum who has a duck on their head and that is all we shall say about that yeah but yeah just little moments like that are always nice without being like an entire thing full of fan service just having a couple of bits for people who know the difficult to go yeah i spotted that smug smug smug exactly i really like a little bit of fan service yeah yeah it can go overboard quite easily yeah no it can get like cringy cringy there was a moment in the final like Avengers infinity war film the first viewing in the cinema i just thought oh cool and then i

actually thought about it i was like oh no that was total fan service where like all the female characters kind of gather in one thing and they're like go we're behind you and it was like but if you went ah cool when you saw it in the cinema was it not successful it was a nice little thing but looking back on it like it made no sense for battle plans or anything and it was like so fan servicey that it feels like that performative capitalist feminism that's actually a bit cringy i'd much rather there was just lots of good diverse female representation across the films but oh speaking of that i'm not going to go into it because we don't need to get angry right now but shout out to the worst thing about that i've ever seen the mis monopoly games look it up

yourselves if you want to get angry listeners oh what the fuck yes that's so bad especially the fact that the game acknowledges that the original monopoly game was invented by a woman to show capitalism is bad and hasbro literally fucking took the idea of her and made it more capitalist yeah it wasn't even hasbro that did it at the time was it was some dude stole the idea and painted it yeah yeah as a whole yeah let's not go into it because i just you know as we mentioned that i should mention something that made us very angry this month one thing that made us very angry and i just feel like we haven't purple posted it enough on this episode yeah no i haven't been that feminist i'll uh yeah the other thing that made us angry this month of course

was the picture of somebody who'd turned that like desk set up into a beach simulation and had a desk chair on sand yeah no what the fuck oh okay no well's fantasy film moments that really worked on in the adaptation um his little like marx fantasy oh yeah sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah i thought that was really good um it was very they managed to make the references heavy-handed without being it was a yeah it was a fun visual call to the so they actually did the marx moment and they did the laurel and hardy moment and i think that was the only way to put it in really they'd have either had to leave it out or do yeah and i and i like that they did it because it's fun to watch and it they properly do the visual and then the ones that don't have a specific

visual like the handbag thing he does like the tone of voice yes yeah a handbag something that worked which wouldn't have worked if this was live action was the whole idea of the tom john and the fool being identical or like yeah similar looking if you've done it live action you would have like had to have the same actor played both parts or at least very very similar looking actors or if i had to get actual brothers yeah yeah um and then that plot point would have been given away by it whereas because it's animated you can draw them so when they are put side to side and you're told to look for it yes they're identical i think that's why they gave tom john makeup for most of it isn't it like yeah but also like you can have characters that do have really similar faces and

animated thing because that's just the animation style yeah so it's like oh yeah fine fine and then you put them together like oh no that was on purpose it's not just the animation style and it works but yeah it wouldn't work live action because it would reveal the plot point too early yeah no i agree i enjoyed that that was well done they changed it just enough that i kind of hadn't noticed what they'd done till the reveal so yeah even though i knew the story well yeah i was looking at it because i was wondering how they do that in the story because it they can't leave it as ambiguous as the book leaves it no no no and i think it's i think it's left nicely yeah um the bit that you said uh while we were texting about it was you weren't sure how you felt about like the forest

eating the duchess but it was well done like how do you mean you don't know how you feel about that well because in the book her endings a lot more her ending is a lot more ambiguous do you think so yeah i think the book implies she almost could have survived oh see to me it was very much no like you don't get swallowed up by that many animals and not die i i think the book left more ambiguity than the film did okay not massively and yes she obviously did die and you never see her turn up again or i suppose um and obviously the forest did eat her up but it was just so blatant here and i don't think it needed to be fair enough yeah it could have just been a fade yeah i would have seen the animals looking at her sternly in the forest starting to move and

cut it there rather than seeing her actually you know as much as it was really well done and it was a good horror moment um because you've just seen that she can't be destroyed by granny's technology she can't you know it needed a cauldron to the back of her head she can't be locked up so to go right but she's going to get eaten by a forest i think is less interesting than going actually if anyone could face down a bunch of sinister forests and a bunch of wooden creatures it probably is this villainous woman yeah okay no i see what you mean even though i didn't think it was that ambiguous in the book it also seemed a bit odd to me to almost end on a horror point yeah that too even though obviously they did have seen afterwards but yeah yeah but i like a

shiny happy ending yeah because i am i'm that sort of person i am a tartar child yep i want everything to end nicely happily unambiguously and in the case of a long running sitcom with a montage that shows everyone happy in five years yeah yeah so overall thoughts it's nice to remember the 25th of may yep happy glorious 25th or happy glorious 25th happy plague i take it there are no obscure references because it was not a thing yeah no i didn't even think to look out for well actually tiny obscure reference thing i did or i was hoping it was an obscure reference it wasn't which is that nanny refers to the fool's mother as a bell dam which i don't think was said in the book and i wanted to look up the actual origin of bell dam and whether it came

from the poem the bell dam sounds classy or not and it doesn't it was a way to refer to an old woman or a particularly beautiful woman before that poem was written okay okay uh it's got its origins in old english still nice word thing yeah i want to bring that back start calling people a bell dam a bit more yeah but i think most people now associate it with choraline yeah yeah probably same all right well we've been here for over three hours Joanna so you should probably play us out so i can go to tesco and then drop you a copy of pyramids through your left box um thank you for listening to the true show mickey fret we are going to take a week off and we will be back on the eighth of june with the first part of our discussion of pyramids the seventh disc world novel in the

meantime you can follow us on instagram at the true show mickey fret on twitter at me key fret pod facebook at the true show mickey fret you can email us your thoughts queries castles and snacks the true show mickey fret pod at gmail.com please write and review us wherever you at your podcast because it helps other people find us and give us five stars because that makes us feel happy that makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside and until next time dear listener don't let us detain you my ravens tangled up in my headphones bless you