Popular but overlooked or unpublished concepts?

[emap]

I remember when USA network was new, they showed mostly cartoon shows, Flintstones, Scooby Doo, so on so forth. Some of those were pretty darn good, but I was young then so probably think different of them now.

While we are talking about old networks, MTV. They used to actually show, music videos.

Anyway back to the fantasy movies, though you are so wrong Sean , If you want to actually watch fantasy movies, check out torrents. I find movies in there on a fairly regular basis and most of those are straight to video. Sometimes there is one or two from sci fi and sometimes, those are actually enjoyable though not in a good movie way.

 

[PerilEyes]

Mind control self-awareness was an interesting read.

 

[Dazzle1]

Very few. Willow and Dragon Heart both stand out but other than that nothing jumps off in my head. In the mid to late 90's we had a slew of tv shows for a bit. Off the success of Hercules we got Xena, Beast Master, Sinbad and two or three other shows that I can't name off the top of my head.

Dungeons and Dragons. . .god that movie was so bad. I think I mentally checked out of that film somewhere around when that dude made a carpet trap out of oatmeal. I can only imagine how long it must have taken to get oatmeal to the perfect consistency so it looked like a colorful carpet and the real reason you killed the prisoner wasn't because they were intruders. It was going to take you weeks to unfuck that. Ironically the made for tv sequels are much, much better.

I don't really remember the 80's chalk it up to being six years ten months old when they ended.

However I agree with your assessment. Also Sci-Fi movies don't count as movies.

Wait. . .doesn't you agreeing with me make you wrong?

I agree partialy with you, there were a lot of bad fantasy and sci fi shows and movies in the 80s and beyond.

and when this genre is bad it is really bad.

Asfar as Sci fi being expanded shows for the most part true. Part fo the problem with the TNG movies were that the tv 2 part episodes were superior stories

 

[Sean Renaud]

I wasn't arguing that 2 part stories on shows weren't great. I was arguing that the five part Power Rangers series that introduced the Green Ranger does not constitute a movie. I was further stating that there is only one Cinderella not (I think they are up to three or four, my niece loves that crap. It rots brains!) Made for tv and straight to video don't count as movies. You need a theatrical release. And that's why I also mentioned that no amount of love for the Angry Video Game Nerd or Nostalgia Critic (or recently getting comercial son regular television) makes youtube shows legit tv.

I remember when USA network was new, they showed mostly cartoon shows, Flintstones, Scooby Doo, so on so forth. Some of those were pretty darn good, but I was young then so probably think different of them now.

While we are talking about old networks, MTV. They used to actually show, music videos.

Anyway back to the fantasy movies, though you are so wrong Sean , If you want to actually watch fantasy movies, check out torrents. I find movies in there on a fairly regular basis and most of those are straight to video. Sometimes there is one or two from sci fi and sometimes, those are actually enjoyable though not in a good movie way.

I do remember when USA was cartoons during the day and cheesy not quite porn at night. Stuff like Bikini Carwash company. (What? I was like twelve and unlike brats today I couldn't just sign onto the internet and get whatever kinky shit I wanted. I had to make due with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition!)

I am not wrong!

I find decent stuff on Netflix these days and like I said vampires have had a good decade. So much that I'm actually a bit tired of them and I never expected to live in a world where I could say I don't need any more of this. I'd love for us to get another Herc/Xena/Legend of the Seeker(though that should have been on HBO to compete with Game of Thrones without being water down for public television) but I guess DaVinci's Demons will have to do and he's a leget bad ass.

SyFy throws so much shit at the wall that some of it has to stick. Sharknado was hilarious, Big Ass Spider was positively amazing and they've got a few more, they even occasionally manage to make something that's supposed to be "scary/exciting" and nail it.

My point on the original subject however remains that as a whole fantasy is a genre that doesn't get tons of love. You don't see a lot of super hero stories about Catwoman getting raped because you didn't until recently see a lot of super hero stories to begin with. You don't see a lot of orcs vs elves because we have five soon to be six Lord of the Rings movies over the last fifteen years and. . .shit else of merit.

Oh and just you wait. One day, when you're not paying attention I'm gonna sneak up behind you and agree with you. I'll agree with you so hard you'll scream "Sean was right, Sean was right!" and then I'll post your quotes all over the internet where your loved ones will find them.

 

[prettynun2010]

concept No.2,3 and 5 are so intererst and I like it, i also have many rare sex-stories ideas/plots, send message or contact me if you interest.

 

[emap]

Don't hold your breath.

The problem with fantasy in movies is besides Lord of the Rings and Hobbit they weren't written until recently ish. Conan isn't quite fantasy, it has wizards that never really do much of anything. A movie or novels about a guy running around with a sword fighting other guys with a sword isn't really fantasy, it's more of a historical story.

Which is part of the problem, until recently fantasy was a so what thing. I mean think about it, until Dungeons and Dragons elves, fairies, and so forth were folk tales that were ignored by and large. Because of that game people looked at the folk tales and said what if.

Before the red box, I think the first one was red I never owned it, there was for fantasy King Arthur and Lord of the Rings. Suppose some could call Beowolf a fantasy though not really, that was written with all of the beliefs of the time that are now folk tales. More or less the same thing with King Arthur, mages and alchemists, same thing different title, were all over.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I dunno. It seems that people have been writing "fantasy" in the broad sense for quite a while. Even if you want to make the case that guys fighting with swords isn't fantasy it's historical fiction. Which I suppose if you work with the real world and don't have wizards is more or less true. Robin Hood at the time was probably no more fantastic than say Die Hard is today.

 

[emap]

Robin Hood wasn't fantasy in the sense of being fantasy. It was based on an actual guy but it was also saying don't worry there is someone making it better. Which there wasn't but different subject.

Fantasy is not establishing a pantheon of gods, so Zeus and so forth are right out the window. Also not explaining strange things, which means fairies and such from Scotland and Ireland are not in there. Doesn't leave you with much, King Arthur to a certain degree qualifies, but not very well.

Seriously think about it, besides certain things, Green Knight for one, there was no fantastical things happening in the stories. So you have to move closer to now, Conan is the closest before Lord of the Rings. It's not precisely fantasy, but it is. Low magic fantasy is still fantasy, even though it's not what many want.

Course going by the can't be establishing a pantheon Lord of the Rings is taken out. Tolkien was trying to establish a British fantasy. Makes sense, Ireland and Scotland have fairy folk, Britain has stiff upper lip. Before Dungeons and Dragons there wasn't fantasy novels besides Lord of the Rings. Which Dungeons and Dragons patterned itself after, elves are the same, dwarves, so on so forth. The only thing different between the game and the novel, mages.

Fireball is not tossed by Gandalf though would have been handy in Moria. If I remember right the first actual fantasy novels were written by test players of Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[Sean Renaud]

How real Robin Hood is seems to vary greatly on depending on the historian. Regardless your point is made there.

King Arthur has at least two Wizards (Merlin and Morgan LeFay), a Dragon, two separate magic swords that are usually remembered as a single sword. There are fantasy elements but I was going to use Dracula and Frankenstein as examples of fantasy that are fairly old. Maybe a Midsummer's Night Dream and MacBeth while I was at it.

I think MacBeth predates all of it and I'm sure there are other things older than the "current" batch if we accept your fairly spot on taking Tolkien as the origin. I'm not sure discounting him because he was establishing a pantheon counts though. While he was establishing British Fairy Tales unlike Zeus and other similar pantheons he knew that nobody was going to believe in this stuff (well unless years after we're all dead some aliens discover DVDs and think they are historical records.)

However some of the things on that list were super hero fantasies and I don't see why Maid Marian and the Sherrif of Nottingham or dear God just open the Bible to a random page, wouldn't work for those purposes and even framed that way they don't get a lot of love.

 

[emap]

Galaxy Quest just popped in my brain.

You are forgetting one thing, fables. Fables had truly amazing things happen, but all to prove that you shouldn't do something. Like the guy that has to look at himself in the lake all day long being turned into a tree. Romans did that, Greeks before them. Shakespeare, if he wrote his own stuff or not, poked fun of the establishment.

Just about all of his plays said royalty are stuck up assholes who will get their own eventually. They also were all fables, you should not be like this guy. Midsummer if I remember correctly is a party of truly weird and then gives someone an impossible task and do it or die. You see the same in a number of novels written in the same time frame.

 

[Acktion]

*snip*...I'd love for us to get another Herc/Xena/Legend of the Seeker(though that should have been on HBO to compete with Game of Thrones without being water down for public television) but I guess DaVinci's Demons will have to do and he's a leget bad ass...*snip*

Nooooo! Not somebody else botching Terry Goodkind's awesome series!

Yes, in fact, I did throw "The Sword of Truth" at the television screen screaming like a lunatic. I also threw one of Jim Butcher's books at the screen when I saw the mess they made of the "Dresden Files".

Why the hell is it that these people buy the rights to make a movie/television program out of a best selling book and then change shit up so that basically only the names are the same and then they wonder what it fails?!

I mean it's not like they couldn't use CGI to get the effects right or...

<pauses and looks sheepish>

Oh, but you guys were actually talking about something else. Please, forgive my outburst.

<Sits back down and starts picking up spilled popcorn>

"Never give up, never surrender."

Carry on, please.

 

[Sean Renaud]

True enough about the fables, but I don't see why someone couldn't take either the Medusa (Girl so hot Aphrodite got hissy and made her ugly) or Arachne (talented seemstress got turned into a spider by Athena [I think]) and tell a story about a hot girl who gets plenty of sex from Gods and then a Goddess who didn't get her ehem holy sacrament comes down and makes a very clear case about why you don't deny her by mating you with a bull!

Sword of Truth sucked because they were watering it down for a television audience and the story is all about sex, rape, slaves and gratuitous violence. Of course it came out mangled on a television show like that. I has faith.

 

[LWulf]

I would quibble about there being a need for magic in a fantasy or it isn't one.

Flip it around. If a story had magic and no swords, is it still a fantasy?

Outlander had swords, a dragon (of sorts) yet no magic, AND was set to presuppose that this might have been where such legends (an alien from another world) were real.

Does it still qualify as fantasy? I think so. I am also against things like changing Pluto from a planet to a moon and concepts like "high fantasy."

 

[Sean Renaud]

There is a reason why Sci-fi/Fantasy is often treated as one genre and it's because once you strip away the flavor Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have more in common than not.

I would say yes, magic in a modern setting would qualify as fantasy, but I think Conan qualifies as fantasy. It takes place in a largely imaginary place (it's implied to be ancient Earth and for a while when Marvel owned the property was officially a second universe that could be visited) I don't set my standard quite that high. (except stating that made for tv and straight to video movies don't count as movies. They are vanity projects a half notch above fan fiction.)

 

[LWulf]

There is a reason why Sci-fi/Fantasy is often treated as one genre and it's because once you strip away the flavor Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have more in common than not.

I would say yes, magic in a modern setting would qualify as fantasy, but I think Conan qualifies as fantasy. It takes place in a largely imaginary place (it's implied to be ancient Earth and for a while when Marvel owned the property was officially a second universe that could be visited) I don't set my standard quite that high. (except stating that made for tv and straight to video movies don't count as movies. They are vanity projects a half notch above fan fiction.)

Actually, all Conan stories had magic in them. Whether it be the marvel, big screen or it's original written version.

The original Robert Howard stories quoted much the same as the movies did:

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And onto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!

Howard basically describes Conan as a prehistory Turk or generally in that region of the world.
Aquilonia is modern Lacedonia in Campania
The sons of Aryas refers to the Aryan nation which Howard wrote about previous to Hitler's misuse of it. Aria, or the Aryan nation, is believed to be in the middle east.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I was submitting to emaps definition where a setting is magic free if the wizards can't turn into dragons at will and blow up entire continents.

 

[emap]

Hey I never said that.

Conan is fantasy, low fantasy, which means there is little in the way of visible magic. Lord of the Rings is the same thing, think about it. What does Gandalf do that is magical besides make a light in the mines of Moria and get everything to understand him and listen? Oh and besides the fight with Saruman, I think that is how it is spelled, it's not talked about much in the novel but they show it in the movies.

Star Wars is like Lord of the Rings because basically it is the same story. Seriously, there's no ring, and there is space flight, fighting, and laser guns. Take away the space ships, the guns, and think of lightsabers as magic swords and you got fantasy. Jedi are low magic mages like in Conan or Lord of the Rings.

The thing is, Lucas thought up Star Wars before Dungeons and Dragons took off and everyone knew about it. Everyone knows the story of Lord of the Rings, that is probably the best known novel on the planet. Shut up about bible most of the people carrying one around to beat others with don't actually know what it says.

 

[LWulf]

First, Gandalf was a grey wizard. That means he was a lesser conjurer of magic. Good for crafting complicated smoke rings, making fireworks that do more than the average whistle-pop, talking with butterflies, whistling up a Mearas (shadowfax), picking a fight with Saruman the white (and losing), and picking a fight with a balrog (and tying but eventually winning (Besides having a hissyfit and breaking that land-bridge, remember when he enchanted his sword with lightning to cast the balrog's ruin on the mountainside?)). When he became Gandalf the white, he led an army against the Uruk-hai at Helm's Deep (enhancing the morning light to blind the Uruk-hai), not to mention he also cleansed King Théoden of his possession by Saruman.

Now the elves had more powerful magic, but their magic is suffused in all the world around them which is why Arwen could summon the wrath of the river to wash away the black riders. Also, Elrond used his magic to restore Frodo as best he could.

Magic is said to be fey. That's a word meaning "fairy" but also means "contrary". In other words, it can't be trusted in a pinch. This is why wizards usually carry some form of blade as well as a wand.

Now in Conan, the Wizard of the Mounds (played by Mako) summoned the spirits of the wind to revive Conan and bring him back from the dead. In the beginning though, there was a witch who transformed herself into a demon or maybe a succubus. James Earl Jones transformed himself into a snake, and... there was something else but it flew right out of my head.

Now in the second Conan movie, you see the first wizard, transformed himself into a dragon of smoke to bore the princess to his island, then transformed himself into a ...bear. Then Mako opened a door with his magic, then had a fight of wills with the sorcerer who tried to close the door.
Needless to recount the whole dreaming god transformation part of that movie.

Yeah. No magic in either of those two stories.

Edit: The problem is that we have advanced far enough in reality to almost equal what was thought as significant magic, even though it wasn't "great." We have achieved flight, which is "great," but of lesser "magic" we have doors that open when we walk near them, and warding spells that warn us when intruders have entered our sanctum (alarm systems). With cellphones or ipads we have "gesture technology" that allows us to turn a page with a wave of our hand. There are probably dozens of other (technology based) magic we use every day.

Granted that is technology and not us exercising our mind over our environment, but technology grants us a limited step up to be what would in other times (even a hundred years ago) be considered magical.
that tends to make us look down our noses at what was described as lesser magic, but magic none the less

Okay, maybe that's a touch harsh, but definitely overlooked if not that we are arrogant.

 

[emap]

I didn't say no magic.

Think about it this way, Conan and Lord of the Rings are considered low magic now. When they were new they were both considered fantastical and not many thought they would do as well as they have, or that any other stories of the same would do any selling. Why there was so little in the way of fantasy stories after mages went away as something you could encounter in real life.

To be considered high magic now one has to have gods and mages on par with gods in magic power. Mage duels are fought for hours with fireballs, lightning, and magic missiles tossed. Someone has to be trying to destroy the world. Dragonlance at least made sense on that part, a god was trying to destroy the world, some they have a guy living on the planet trying to destroy it. Apparently pondering where he would live is not something to worry about.

 

[Sean Renaud]

There is a reason why Sci-fi/Fantasy is often treated as one genre and it's because once you strip away the flavor Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have more in common than not.

Star Wars is like Lord of the Rings because basically it is the same story. Seriously, there's no ring, and there is space flight, fighting, and laser guns. Take away the space ships, the guns, and think of lightsabers as magic swords and you got fantasy. Jedi are low magic mages like in Conan or Lord of the Rings.

Can I snuggle you? I want to snuggle you so hard you squeak.

 

[i_would]

• Self-awareness while under the influence of mind control.

[...] the woman's conscious to slowly slip away over time or become "corrupted" by the mind control to the point that it isn't necessary.

That - but in an opposite manner. Like an erotic version of the TV show Dollhouse (where sex was already one of the reasons for clients to hire one of the dolls, of course, but more explicit and focussed on sex). So sad that show was cut short...

One (or more) of the girls (and/or guys) start to regain their conciousness and own will.