I really tried hard to want to like this and from its inception, it sounded right up my street. The original pitch was CSI Ankh-Morpork. GREAT sign me up.
However, what we ended up with was something made by someone that had merely glanced at a Discworld novel through a bookstore window on a drunken night out.
There is an old story Terry Pratchett used to tell, back when Discworld was just taking off. He had a meeting with Warner Brothers who were interested in Mort (A boy who becomes Death's apprentice and destroys the fabric of reality ) He went out for a meeting and sat there while two execs schmoozed him until they got down to the nitty-gritty and they turned to him and said: " We absolutely love Mort ... but can we lose the Death angle?" Terry politely decline and left the meeting. This is what has happened here. Hollywood execs have seen the shape of something that popular and think " we could make a mint off this " and then out the very core of what made something special and vomit up what is left over our screens
I really need to rewind a little here and take a step back so I can explain why I could only stomach to watch 6 minutes and 24 seconds.
Back in about 97 ish, as most things do in my life, it started around 2 in the morning unable to sleep, just clicking through the channels hoping to find something at least barely entertaining and then I reached channel 4. There was a cartoon on, which at the time beat Open University programs on BBC 2. Turned out, it was the Cosgrove Hall ( Count Duckula for those who remember ) adaptation of Soul Music and the next night they showed the adaption of Wyrd Sisters (interestingly Christopher Lee voices death). Well, I was hooked and wanted more, but being from a small town in the middle of nowhere... well I kind of forgot about it for a while. It was probably a couple of months later when I bought a Playstation magazine and what was on the demo disc? Discworld 2: Missing presumed (or Mortality bytes in the US ) I played the demo to death over and over again until I finally got the game ... which I played to death as well - Well not quite true, it seemed the Laser on my PS1 was a little weak would just crap out when loading particular scenes (I believe it was the AM futures Wearhouse and the sewer below the "clickies" theatre) but when I got my PS1 I played it to death and laughed. Then I made a mistake. By this point, I knew it was a book series and decided to start reading them. The mistake was trying to read it from the start. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. While these two books are the very start of the Discworld and the introduction of Rincewind and Twoflower as well as other famous characters like the Librarian, The late and great Terry Pratchett himself didn't recommend starting here and those two books weren't for me. And so I moved on and kind of forgot about Discworld for a couple of years.
Then Boom! Discworld Noir was released, played it loved it, and part of me wanted to try Discworld again, but again, things kind of petered out and then my parents bought me the Death Trilogy (Mort, Soul Music and Reaperman). I read them over and over again. My original copy is still at my mum's missing the spine it has been read that many times over the years. I fell in love with Pratchett's style of writing. I fell in love with the world he had created, a world where time, fate and even luck were as big a characters as the main characters themselves, From Witches and Wizards to Guards and Conmen every one had their moment to shine. And so my obsession with Pratchett began. From the books to bookmarks, plushes, pins, jigsaws, t-towels, tote bags even a limited signed copy of Discworld Massif print that takes pride of place on my wall above my tv and consoles. Discworld means a lot to me. Over the years I have gotten to know its inhabitants like I would know a next-door neighbour or a workmate. I've read the books countless times over and over and over again. I've replaced several books more than once ...
Discworld when you read it on the surface is are silly fantasy novels that give you a cheap laugh but look beyond the surface and you see a mirror of our own world. But rather than dealing with them heavy handly by forcing a situation, Sir Terry Pratchett managed to weave what he wanted to get across into the story naturally dealing with issues of sexuality, gender issues, race (altho race directly isn't addressed in the way you think) and classism. The Watch wanted everything from the off and wanted the best of both worlds, they wanted something new but also to draw from the mind of Terry and draw in the fans. But with the choices, they have made they have failed spectacularly.
Let's take a look at Cheery Littlebottom, they are a Dwarf. I use they here for a reason because Dwarfs are Dwarfs on the Discworld they don't (at least when Cheery was introduced in Feet of Clay) distinguish between the sexes. Of course, there are male Dwarfs and female Dwarfs but both look indistinguishable from each other(which can lead to some unexpected results on wedding night* haha), all of them have beards, leather armour, metal helmets and of course axes. Cheery has a whole arc from feet of clay running the way through to Raising Steam where she (yes intentional) is breaking away from the Dwarfen norms of hiding her femininity and starting with her, other dwarfs soon followed until even Rhys Rhysson, the low king of the dwarfs came out as female. It's the arc of one person finding out and being exactly who she wants to be, even in the face of the Deep Down Dwarfs (Very old fashioned Conservative dwarfs who don't want times to change, who want nothing to do with the far off city Ankh-Morpork and never come above the surface). I could probably sit here for hours discussing Discworld politics and the reflections from our world to the Disc. This is what Terry wanted. He wanted us to talk about the issues and not hide in the past like the deep-down dwarfs. This isn't about her gender, it's about her having the courage to come out and not confronting the norms of society, which I think is a message a lot of people can identify with within 2021.
After I wrote the above paragraph I went back and gave it another chance. I watched an extra 15 minutes and it kept getting worse.
The Watch is an absolute flaming bag of dog shit alight on my doorstep. Before we get to Cheery, spend a little while going on about other things that don't make sense contextually. There is electricity. They have electric light bulbs. Although Ankh-Morpork was edging towards electricity by the end of the series, there wasn't any sort of electrical system - I can maybe explain this away - In guards, guards!? (first watch novel) Sam Vimes is laying in the gutter looking at a fizzing sign ( very analogous to a neon sign in the real world) that was created by the wizards of Unseen University (UU from here on). So a wizard did it** (when did this become Xena warrior princess?)
Next to the iconograph, I will give them props here, The actual look of the Iconograph is spot on. What is wrong is when Vimes takes out the Iconographs ... ITS A FUCKING TABLET. Iconographs are like photographs but instead of having film (or digital sensor in 2021) it has an imp that paints the pictures onto paper, card or onto celluloid (Moving Pictures) there is literally a scene where Vimes is scrolling through pictures like its fucking Instagram
One of the things that the first two Discworld games did was take story threads from the books that had been published to that point and weave a narrative around them and it worked and it worked well because things were familiar but had new twists and turns. The watch tries something similar but completely fucks the landing, everything is just completely nonsensical with them pulling bits and pieces (even jokes) completely out of context. They have literally taken pieces of every watch book and just smoshed them together without a care in the world for what these events are. From the outset of the show, we are seeing young Vimes with his commanding officer ( should be John Keel but not sure if it was actually named ) and Vimes end up laying out Buggy swires. This is within the first 30 seconds of the show and I was already pissed off. Buggy Swires is a gnome, not a human. He's the aerial unit of the watch riding birds. He spends his off days making a powder in the watch house and using said powder to blow up birds noses, nuts them and makes them fall in love with him. So definitely not fucking human.
The Librarian at UU is an orangutang. Originally he was human but a magic spell from the Octavo turned him and he likes it this way. In the Watch, I really don't know what the fuck he is. He's this weird hybrid homunculus, but definitely not the Librarian.
Angua is a werewolf, she came to Ankh-Morpork to escape her family in Uberwald, one of her key features was her long ash blonde hair and she was always had an immaculate appearance. When she first appears she hides that she is s werewolf until she realises this is Ankh-Morpork and no one actually cares and becomes an asset to the watch both in and out of wolf form. The watch show well misses the point of her completely. Short died white hair, dirty as all hell and they lock her up on full moons - another point they miss is that werewolves in the Discworld universe is that they are bi-morphs and although the urge to change into a wolf at a full moon is great, it doesn't mean that she has to change. This is so fleshed out in the novels that it's hard to miss. There are even some werewolves that are born who can't change the switch that allows them to change is broken and are stuck as a human or a wolf - these are usually killed off in families such as Angua's but one of her brothers escapes and is living his life out as a champion sheepdog.
Hi, future Uiaad here, I wrote the above last night before I went to bed. I had wanted to go into how not Discworld everything is. How Terry Pratchett lovingly crafted a living breathing fantasy world without being dry and boring. How he tackled serious subject matters in a light-hearted serious way that actually makes you think about things. I even asked @AmandaRose and @VinsCool to proofread the final version for tone. I woke up this morning and realised that this isn't Discworld. It may borrow elements and character names but that's all. It is still a big slap in the face to the memory of such a great man. A man who had great hope for the project before he passed away. His Daughter Rihanna and manager Rob were strong-armed out of it not too long after his passing. Rihanna (most famous for being lead writer on Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider) said "Look, I think it's fairly obvious that The Watch shares no DNA with my father's Watch." And that is absolutely true.
There is a long history of Pratchett adaptations to TV from the original Cosgrove Hall aminations that got me into Pratchett, to begin with to The Sky adaptations a few years ago which Pratchett worked alongside to create. And barring a few niggles here and there they were fabulous fun for the whole family. The Hogfather is the gold standard for these it was 99% perfect. My niggle with The colour of magic/Light Fantastic was David Jason as Rincewind - While he is an absolutely great and fabulous actor, for me personally he was just way too old for Rincewind. And for Going Postal for me it just Moist Von Lipwig's character wasn't quite there and them forcing Adora Belle Dearheart to deliver an anti-smoking message was just wrong. But this isn't about those and The Watch just isn't Discworld and it wasn't for me. I would like to invite you all if you have the opportunity to watch it and tell me what you think about it. If you like it then great you have found enjoyment in something I just couldn't and I really really wanted to enjoy this.
The Watch is my favourite part of the Discworld series. From the promo stuff from one or two years ago I knew they had made changes. Vetinari had been changed from being male to female and there was a bit of a whohar when people found out that Lady Sybil was black but people who made a fuss about that are just cunts and obviously completely missed the point of Pratchett. I'm going to stop here. I could ramble on now Vetinari could work as a woman but doesn't because of her clothing, but that's too much and if I had to unpack everything I would have to actually watch more of it to be fair to the show.
So the verdict. Well if you are a Discworld fan and have been invested in the characters for years, you're probably not going to like this. If you've never read a Discworld novel then you may like it I really don't know. I really did try and set aside what I knew about the Discworld to see if I could enjoy it for what it was, but I couldn't.
If you have made it this far, thank you for reading you are awesome to have read this drivel.
And no this isn't the blog I've been talking about forever now. That is still coming I promise I need a bit of a clearer head to finish that.
*Terry's joke, not mine
** Simpsons joke
However, what we ended up with was something made by someone that had merely glanced at a Discworld novel through a bookstore window on a drunken night out.
There is an old story Terry Pratchett used to tell, back when Discworld was just taking off. He had a meeting with Warner Brothers who were interested in Mort (A boy who becomes Death's apprentice and destroys the fabric of reality ) He went out for a meeting and sat there while two execs schmoozed him until they got down to the nitty-gritty and they turned to him and said: " We absolutely love Mort ... but can we lose the Death angle?" Terry politely decline and left the meeting. This is what has happened here. Hollywood execs have seen the shape of something that popular and think " we could make a mint off this " and then out the very core of what made something special and vomit up what is left over our screens
I really need to rewind a little here and take a step back so I can explain why I could only stomach to watch 6 minutes and 24 seconds.
Back in about 97 ish, as most things do in my life, it started around 2 in the morning unable to sleep, just clicking through the channels hoping to find something at least barely entertaining and then I reached channel 4. There was a cartoon on, which at the time beat Open University programs on BBC 2. Turned out, it was the Cosgrove Hall ( Count Duckula for those who remember ) adaptation of Soul Music and the next night they showed the adaption of Wyrd Sisters (interestingly Christopher Lee voices death). Well, I was hooked and wanted more, but being from a small town in the middle of nowhere... well I kind of forgot about it for a while. It was probably a couple of months later when I bought a Playstation magazine and what was on the demo disc? Discworld 2: Missing presumed (or Mortality bytes in the US ) I played the demo to death over and over again until I finally got the game ... which I played to death as well - Well not quite true, it seemed the Laser on my PS1 was a little weak would just crap out when loading particular scenes (I believe it was the AM futures Wearhouse and the sewer below the "clickies" theatre) but when I got my PS1 I played it to death and laughed. Then I made a mistake. By this point, I knew it was a book series and decided to start reading them. The mistake was trying to read it from the start. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. While these two books are the very start of the Discworld and the introduction of Rincewind and Twoflower as well as other famous characters like the Librarian, The late and great Terry Pratchett himself didn't recommend starting here and those two books weren't for me. And so I moved on and kind of forgot about Discworld for a couple of years.
Then Boom! Discworld Noir was released, played it loved it, and part of me wanted to try Discworld again, but again, things kind of petered out and then my parents bought me the Death Trilogy (Mort, Soul Music and Reaperman). I read them over and over again. My original copy is still at my mum's missing the spine it has been read that many times over the years. I fell in love with Pratchett's style of writing. I fell in love with the world he had created, a world where time, fate and even luck were as big a characters as the main characters themselves, From Witches and Wizards to Guards and Conmen every one had their moment to shine. And so my obsession with Pratchett began. From the books to bookmarks, plushes, pins, jigsaws, t-towels, tote bags even a limited signed copy of Discworld Massif print that takes pride of place on my wall above my tv and consoles. Discworld means a lot to me. Over the years I have gotten to know its inhabitants like I would know a next-door neighbour or a workmate. I've read the books countless times over and over and over again. I've replaced several books more than once ...
Discworld when you read it on the surface is are silly fantasy novels that give you a cheap laugh but look beyond the surface and you see a mirror of our own world. But rather than dealing with them heavy handly by forcing a situation, Sir Terry Pratchett managed to weave what he wanted to get across into the story naturally dealing with issues of sexuality, gender issues, race (altho race directly isn't addressed in the way you think) and classism. The Watch wanted everything from the off and wanted the best of both worlds, they wanted something new but also to draw from the mind of Terry and draw in the fans. But with the choices, they have made they have failed spectacularly.
Let's take a look at Cheery Littlebottom, they are a Dwarf. I use they here for a reason because Dwarfs are Dwarfs on the Discworld they don't (at least when Cheery was introduced in Feet of Clay) distinguish between the sexes. Of course, there are male Dwarfs and female Dwarfs but both look indistinguishable from each other(which can lead to some unexpected results on wedding night* haha), all of them have beards, leather armour, metal helmets and of course axes. Cheery has a whole arc from feet of clay running the way through to Raising Steam where she (yes intentional) is breaking away from the Dwarfen norms of hiding her femininity and starting with her, other dwarfs soon followed until even Rhys Rhysson, the low king of the dwarfs came out as female. It's the arc of one person finding out and being exactly who she wants to be, even in the face of the Deep Down Dwarfs (Very old fashioned Conservative dwarfs who don't want times to change, who want nothing to do with the far off city Ankh-Morpork and never come above the surface). I could probably sit here for hours discussing Discworld politics and the reflections from our world to the Disc. This is what Terry wanted. He wanted us to talk about the issues and not hide in the past like the deep-down dwarfs. This isn't about her gender, it's about her having the courage to come out and not confronting the norms of society, which I think is a message a lot of people can identify with within 2021.
After I wrote the above paragraph I went back and gave it another chance. I watched an extra 15 minutes and it kept getting worse.
The Watch is an absolute flaming bag of dog shit alight on my doorstep. Before we get to Cheery, spend a little while going on about other things that don't make sense contextually. There is electricity. They have electric light bulbs. Although Ankh-Morpork was edging towards electricity by the end of the series, there wasn't any sort of electrical system - I can maybe explain this away - In guards, guards!? (first watch novel) Sam Vimes is laying in the gutter looking at a fizzing sign ( very analogous to a neon sign in the real world) that was created by the wizards of Unseen University (UU from here on). So a wizard did it** (when did this become Xena warrior princess?)
Next to the iconograph, I will give them props here, The actual look of the Iconograph is spot on. What is wrong is when Vimes takes out the Iconographs ... ITS A FUCKING TABLET. Iconographs are like photographs but instead of having film (or digital sensor in 2021) it has an imp that paints the pictures onto paper, card or onto celluloid (Moving Pictures) there is literally a scene where Vimes is scrolling through pictures like its fucking Instagram
One of the things that the first two Discworld games did was take story threads from the books that had been published to that point and weave a narrative around them and it worked and it worked well because things were familiar but had new twists and turns. The watch tries something similar but completely fucks the landing, everything is just completely nonsensical with them pulling bits and pieces (even jokes) completely out of context. They have literally taken pieces of every watch book and just smoshed them together without a care in the world for what these events are. From the outset of the show, we are seeing young Vimes with his commanding officer ( should be John Keel but not sure if it was actually named ) and Vimes end up laying out Buggy swires. This is within the first 30 seconds of the show and I was already pissed off. Buggy Swires is a gnome, not a human. He's the aerial unit of the watch riding birds. He spends his off days making a powder in the watch house and using said powder to blow up birds noses, nuts them and makes them fall in love with him. So definitely not fucking human.
The Librarian at UU is an orangutang. Originally he was human but a magic spell from the Octavo turned him and he likes it this way. In the Watch, I really don't know what the fuck he is. He's this weird hybrid homunculus, but definitely not the Librarian.
Angua is a werewolf, she came to Ankh-Morpork to escape her family in Uberwald, one of her key features was her long ash blonde hair and she was always had an immaculate appearance. When she first appears she hides that she is s werewolf until she realises this is Ankh-Morpork and no one actually cares and becomes an asset to the watch both in and out of wolf form. The watch show well misses the point of her completely. Short died white hair, dirty as all hell and they lock her up on full moons - another point they miss is that werewolves in the Discworld universe is that they are bi-morphs and although the urge to change into a wolf at a full moon is great, it doesn't mean that she has to change. This is so fleshed out in the novels that it's hard to miss. There are even some werewolves that are born who can't change the switch that allows them to change is broken and are stuck as a human or a wolf - these are usually killed off in families such as Angua's but one of her brothers escapes and is living his life out as a champion sheepdog.
Hi, future Uiaad here, I wrote the above last night before I went to bed. I had wanted to go into how not Discworld everything is. How Terry Pratchett lovingly crafted a living breathing fantasy world without being dry and boring. How he tackled serious subject matters in a light-hearted serious way that actually makes you think about things. I even asked @AmandaRose and @VinsCool to proofread the final version for tone. I woke up this morning and realised that this isn't Discworld. It may borrow elements and character names but that's all. It is still a big slap in the face to the memory of such a great man. A man who had great hope for the project before he passed away. His Daughter Rihanna and manager Rob were strong-armed out of it not too long after his passing. Rihanna (most famous for being lead writer on Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider) said "Look, I think it's fairly obvious that The Watch shares no DNA with my father's Watch." And that is absolutely true.
There is a long history of Pratchett adaptations to TV from the original Cosgrove Hall aminations that got me into Pratchett, to begin with to The Sky adaptations a few years ago which Pratchett worked alongside to create. And barring a few niggles here and there they were fabulous fun for the whole family. The Hogfather is the gold standard for these it was 99% perfect. My niggle with The colour of magic/Light Fantastic was David Jason as Rincewind - While he is an absolutely great and fabulous actor, for me personally he was just way too old for Rincewind. And for Going Postal for me it just Moist Von Lipwig's character wasn't quite there and them forcing Adora Belle Dearheart to deliver an anti-smoking message was just wrong. But this isn't about those and The Watch just isn't Discworld and it wasn't for me. I would like to invite you all if you have the opportunity to watch it and tell me what you think about it. If you like it then great you have found enjoyment in something I just couldn't and I really really wanted to enjoy this.
The Watch is my favourite part of the Discworld series. From the promo stuff from one or two years ago I knew they had made changes. Vetinari had been changed from being male to female and there was a bit of a whohar when people found out that Lady Sybil was black but people who made a fuss about that are just cunts and obviously completely missed the point of Pratchett. I'm going to stop here. I could ramble on now Vetinari could work as a woman but doesn't because of her clothing, but that's too much and if I had to unpack everything I would have to actually watch more of it to be fair to the show.
So the verdict. Well if you are a Discworld fan and have been invested in the characters for years, you're probably not going to like this. If you've never read a Discworld novel then you may like it I really don't know. I really did try and set aside what I knew about the Discworld to see if I could enjoy it for what it was, but I couldn't.
If you have made it this far, thank you for reading you are awesome to have read this drivel.
And no this isn't the blog I've been talking about forever now. That is still coming I promise I need a bit of a clearer head to finish that.
*Terry's joke, not mine
** Simpsons joke
