I guess that was a benefit of casting a man with the physique of a cartoon Viking as the voice of a cartoon Viking! It made the live action casting quite easy!

Then I imagined that while every other character required an audition, Stoic the Vast got Gerard Butler swaggering into a room full of wannabe Vikings who immediately went down on one knee and spontaneously started chanting ‘Returns a King’ from 300.

Nobody knows where he got that wolfskin and since nobody wanted to ask absolutely no-one else ever will.

Haha, pretty good. My friend Brian suggested: “Bart, I don’t want to LARM you”

Yeah the Looney Tunes is a solid comp. It’s related to how I sometimes feel about just-fine adaptations of books I love, too.

Good point on the fact that it’s not just a mere 15 years since the original but 6 since the finale. Pre-production must have started like 3 years after The Hidden World released.

> Do they still overcook the Magic: The Gathering crap? That was my only really severe note for How To Train Your Dragon.

It’s still there, yeah, and still annoying, but it’s only a few lines.

First, do no LARM.

There’s a Winger Speech that Brad Pitt gives in F1 after their calculated strategy has collapsed about how if for each of the hundreds of individual actions that constitute a race you can manage to shave of a tiny fraction of a second, over 70-odd laps, that’s real time, and the difference between last and first. (It amounts to “race good,” I guess.) I guess if you do the opposite you can add twenty minutes to a movie.

It can be kinda difficult to evaluate things like this when they’re not actively bad, I think. An example that recently made itself known to me was a pair of Bob Clampett Looney Tunes shorts, Injun Trouble and Wagon Heels, the latter being a very close remake the former (in color! the live-action plus CGI of its day, I guess), but the latter also being MUCH better and funnier and even weirder despite being very, very close. And it stymies me, because if I didn’t know about the original, I’d just adore it unreservedly, but since I do, do I take points off, or what? Then again, this is a situation that I don’t believe has ever pertained to these live-action remakes, so maybe it’s not an important question for them. (Though I’ll note it couldn’t have been too hard to make the supporting kid cast less annoying. Do they still overcook the Magic: The Gathering crap? That was my only really severe note for How To Train Your Dragon.)

Anyway, this one just kinda hollows me out. The HTTYD franchise only concluded six years ago. That’s reaching a place of “we might really not have a viable culture anymore.”

Maybe the sequels can follow their planned evolution instead of the stories we got. (I think I’m remembering that right, but I’m kidding anyway, they’re not actually going to swerve.)