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A big pachyderm, a snake dude and a lengthy digression about representation and realism!

Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.    

Comments

Anonymous

In 'The Two Towers', Tolkien suggests the Oliphaunt might be a bit more than just an elephant; "Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes, but the Mûmak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty." That said, there's probably a limit to how many species of pachyderm a game system needs.

Thomas McGrenery

Fascinating to hear the "recreate the effect" ideas in Kingdom of Heaven and The Tudors. One I know of is Deadwood. The producers explained once (I forget where) that in historical Deadwood people were flinging around words like "nincompoop" that in the 19th century were real fight-starting, children-cover-your-ears words. For a TV audience, that was never going to sound like much, so they set F-words to max in the scripts. As an aside, that Lair of the White Worm movie with Hugh Grant (and Gina McKee!). It's.... quite a thing, isn't it.

monsterman

I don't know that it was explicitly the case in The Tudors, I'm just inferring, but I believe I read an interview with Ridley Scott where he said the thing about Kingdom of Heaven. And yeah, Deadwood is another great example. I've heard the same thing about Band of Brothers, actually -- the guy who says "I f-ed up" in the show when he gets shot in the butt claims that in real life he said "I goofed up" but they changed it so it wouldn't sound silly to a modern audience. And yeah: I saw Lair of the White Worm for the first time as part of the reception at an academic conference; the Petrie museum used to have (maybe still has, for all I know) movie nights where they show films with archaeological themes. I was not expecting what I got.

monsterman

OK, so the D&D Oliphaunt sounds like a pretty good Tolkien oliphaunt in that case -- more or less the same, but bigger and more dangerous.