Slashdot Mirror
Dungeons & Dragons Movie
Nimey writes "IGN has an
interview about the Dungeons & Dragons movie, due out later this year." Damn. I was hoping they'd take a storyline from the animated D&D show from the eighties. I'll see it anyway.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
News of this has been around for a while. And even back then, the status of it was "everything has been filmed, we're now in post production". I guess that's necessary for some of the things they talk about, like 70+ red and gold dragons. But I remeber how ridiculously lame dragonheart and godzilla were. It's like half the movie was pure CG and it was absolute crap! But the pictures they have of the live action shots look really good! And the fact that the producer was so into making this movie for himself and for the loyal d&d fans out there instead of designing a movie for a focus group. I'm impressed with everything I've read about this movie so far, though.
Do we all get to take our d20's and d4's to the cinema and get to roll our own endings?
"Get a Life? Where do I FTP one from?"
I wonder how important the CGI is in that movie. It's easy to see how the producers could deem necessary to have half the movie made out of cheesy CGI of huge dragons and magic... But I do not think that it is necessary at all for the movie to look good. Unfortunately, from what that article says, they have sold their souls to cheesy, low budget CGI (anybody saw B5: Crusade ? Doesn't cheap CGI just want to make you puke ?).
Probably some of you have seen the anime Record of Lodoss War, which is the closest thing to a D&D movie (even though it's animated). Making a live action version of that would require some CGI, but by carefully selecting the scenes, you don't need that much of it to make it look great. And then there is the anime Heroic Legend of Arslan. You would need so little CGI to make a live action version of that one.
I think that a D&D type movie could be done with only a few minutes of CGI. After all, D&D is all about the story, not the special effects. The roleplaying has never needed any special effects, and never will. Then, why must a movie be full of them ? Have we come to a point where a movie needs to be full of cheesy effect in order to be successful ?
Why do movie producers seem to sell their soul to the effects firms more and more often these days. I hate that. When you have a perfectly good movie with a lot of effects shot that add absolutely nothing to the story.
If they only have 30 million of funding, wouldn't they have been better off spending that on magnificent battle scenes. Ah well. I guess my stupid rant isn't even making sense anymore. Most unfortunate.
I wonder how that movie will turn out. And I also wonder how the Final Fantasy movie will turn out. Has a full length feature movie featuring human lead characters entirely in CGI ever been attempted ? From what we saw in toy story 2, they still don't master the animation of humans. And that was Pixar, who had a ton of budget. The FF movie might very well look like shit... Still, I'd like to see that one... 100% CGI might be a style of movie that takes off. Perhaps it'll replace traditional animation... hopefully it won't inherit the "animation is for kiddies" stigma that Disney has unfortunately propagated. Will it win over people over 25... Or they'll just shun it as being cheesy animation, for kiddies... eh. Time will tell.
The '80s cartoon, while it had potential, was incredibly lame in a lot of ways. Its plot was Yet Another Gilligan's Island Retread, it bore only an orthagonal resemblance to the game, because it had to be sanitized of all those "nasty nonChristian elements" like, say, clerics...and by giving each character a "magic gadget," it seriously detracted from believing in the characters' own innate skills. To say nothing of breaking the fourth wall by having the characters interact with a "Dungeonmaster". (Hey, guys! Free clue...the Dungeonmaster is the one who's controlling everything! Of course he could send you home if he wanted...)
This movie, on the other hand, is one of the things I've been looking forward to for the longest time...there's been so little good D&Dish stuff available.
(By the way, for any who like the same sort of fantasy as D&D in books, look into Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, and P.C. Hodgell's Godstalk and Dark of the Moon.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
A PG rating? But of course. There is an excellent reason for it, and the reason is merchandising. Most of this post is a capsule history of AD&D over the last ten years, to illustrate my final point, so if you just want to skip to the end, scroll down to The Present.
Simply stated, T$R has a long, illustrious history of circling the proverbial bowl. When one of its founders (Gary Gygax) was divorced, his ex-wife (known in some circles as "The Bitch") won a controlling share of the company. Almost immediately, the entire product line was retooled into AD&D Second Edition: gone were the piles of rulebooks that had accrued over years of rules amendments and neat ideas; gone were the (very) occasional pieces of naughty artwork; and gone was everything that could be perceived as "evil" or "controversial" (the Assassin class, demons, and devils, to name a few). Granted, some of the things that were removed were unbalancing (the Cavalier and Barbarian classes, for example). Second Edition was supposed to be a fresh start, a distillation of the best of First Edition and (major selling point) compatible with the original rules. Of course, things broke down quickly.
The 2ndEd product line started off fairly well, with monster packs, books detailing new rules for the four basic character types, and retoolings of older game worlds that had presumably become stale. This wasn't making enough money. Sourcebooks of dubious worth were published, new settings of interest only to very particular types of players were introduced, and campaign settings suffered terrible Dubious Cataclysms That Changed Everything (TM) in order to invalidate old sourcebooks and campaign sets. The bean-counters and lawyers took over, uttering threats (and sometimes making good on them) to buy or sue anyone who so much as looked at them strangely (including anyone who published home-grown rules or campaign information on the Web). The Ty-D-Bol Man beckoned. Luckily for them, Wizards of the Coast scooped them up before it was too late.
During the takeover, WOTC played up their historical connections with AD&D, T$R, etc., proclaiming that their name was originally from an AD&D campaign that the company's founders were involved in. That tidbit was apparently supposed to convince gamers of two things: one, that WOTC was on "their side"; and, two, that since they were gamers once, too, the WOTC brass had innate knowledge of how to make T$R the titan it used to be. This was, of course, bulls**t. WOTC bought T$R because of their excellent distribution network, their pre-existing product lines, and because they were desperately seeking a safety net for when Magic: The Gathering finally lost its popularity: WOTC's homegrown RPG, Everway, died a quick death, and M:tG has always been in danger of losing its popularity in the same sort of shocking surge that it became popular with in the first place. WOTC then discovered one of T$R's biggest problems: its writers were old-school AD&D players, and naturally had a difficult time relating to the current generation of Vampire: the Masquerade players. Worse, M:tG's popularity was beginning to hurt: each new expansion strangled sales of WOTC's other products, leaving them in increasing amounts of debt. The Pokemon card game was just as dangerous to them as Magic, for the same reasons. One flurry of bad product and Magic: The RPG rumours later, Hasbro took over.
Hasbro was nervous. Sales of traditional toys were down, in favour of multimedia and interactive games. Their rival, Mattel, was making inroads into the interactive entertainment market, leaving them in the dust. In response, Hasbro purchased MicroProse. Having their own computer game company was all well and good, and Hasbro Interactive produced a lot of simple, mass-market computer games and crossover products (like the execrable Star Wars Monopoly). The only problem was, they didn't have any "traditional" computer game licenses. Enter WOTC, stage left, wearing a "buy me!" sign.
Hasbro's buyout was beneficial for both companies (or their execs, at least). The owners of WOTC made a killing, and were no longer waking from nightmares of being crushed by unsold boxes of Magic cards. Hasbro was especially happy: They gained a monopoly on domestic Pokemon merchandise, a half-decent novel publishing arm (TSR Books), and control of the AD&D computer game license (to go with their own computer game production house; it is highly unlikely that Hasbro will license another company to produce AD&D computer games after the current batch have finished production). Then, the fun began.
WOTC recently announced the production of a third edition of AD&D (now referred to as D&D, since the original "Basic" D&D was no longer in print). This edition was intended to appeal to the current generation of gamers, and was disturbing both in that the game mechanics had been altered enough that an expensive "conversion book" had become necessary to bring Second Edition characters into line with the new rules, and that WOTC decided to publish the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide in such volume that they could sell them at a cut rate. From this, one could be led to believe that WOTC has a lot riding on the success of Third Edition D&D. One would be correct.
The Present:
The D&D movie is rated PG because WOTC desperately wants young people to see the movie, and then buy the (relatively) cheap 3rd Edition core rulebooks shortly thereafter (I would be willing to wager that they will be available for sale at kiosks in most large theater lobbies, along with "What is D&D?" programmes). The movie is both a test of the feasibility of (gods forbid) more D&D movies, and a massive advertisement for 3rd Edition. They are going to such an outrageous length to promote the 3rd Edition rules because if they aren't massively popular to begin with, D&D will probably go out of print (and incidentally, a lot of writers will be canned). This is hardly a surprise: the product line has been tanking for years, and Hasbro could care less about keeping it around for the sake of "tradition". Hasbro already has what it wants out of WOTC: Pokemon; a perennially strong computer game license; and a group of captive RPG writers to pen the next Star Wars RPG.
Five tons of flax.
I don't know much about the language
imbedded in dvds for menus, jumpscenes,
white rabbits - but it seems you could
make a nonlinear title like you are suggesting.
Even if there is no rand() function, there
may well be some kludge that provides random
enoughness.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan