Happy Gauda Prime Day!

[altariel]

'Tis the season to be mistaken for a bounty hunter and shot dead by your best friend! Happy Gauda Prime Day, one and all!

And please extend a big Freedom Party welcome to sarannarandir, who has found her way to my LJ via a post I made about an article she published in Foundation all those years ago about the end of B7. The internet is a wonderful thing.

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's a real shock. Just had our annual rewatch, now following it up with the equivalent episode from Robin of Sherwood.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Ah, presumably you mean the one where the One True Hooded Man buggered off to be a star on Broadway, only to be replaced by son of 007. Terrible shame, that.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

That's the one. *sigh* I can't understand why they cast Young Mr Connery, one screen test would surely have been enough to discover the limits of his talent.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Mr C had (and still has if his brief appearances on Smallville are anything to go by) the acting talent of an average plank, but he was pretty enough in his younger days. Not as pretty as Mr P, though. In fact - was anyone as pretty as Mr P? He's worn well, too, which is more than I can say for Mr C. I saw Mr P in theatre a few years ago. Mmmmm.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Can't say Michael Praed without saying Mmmm.

Photo album on his website here.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that just ate up an hour of my time. Mmmmm!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just have to add: Prince Michael of Moldavia. That's Mmmmichael of Mmmmoldavia.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

That shower scene! [fans self vigorously]

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I am astonished that, in the context of Gauda Prime Day, Depressing Shows About Robin Hood, and ablutions, no one has mentioned one Monsieur Darrow in a steambath.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Ha. Still never seen that.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

Oh gods that episode! I cried for days! I remember as the plot unrolled thinking "no, but there will be a way out, there always is, he'll come up with some incredibly cunning... noooo!" Teenage hormones howlingly to the fore.

(Deploying wrong-fandom icon because it at least involves an archer, and I remember someone pointing out once what a brilliant Legolas MP-as-RoS would make if one's personal mental image of Legolas isn't a blond...)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's a relentless episode. You keep thinking they're going to get away with it, and they don't. Then they do. Then you realize that it wasn't Robin. Then there's the bowman at the end. And it all went out at Easter. Awesome.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I did like the fey aspects of RoS. It was quite funny to see the Costner movie, six years later, take so much from RoS (including the character of the Saracen who was only in RoS as an accidental result of Mark Ryan looking so good with two scimitars)... and then twist the Pagan and Christian aspects back round to make the Pagans the bad guys and the Christians the Good, when in RoS the Church was completely corrupt. Presumably this was to pander to the American Bible Belt audience, you know, the ones who think Harry Potter is an evil influence on their young.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes at that age MP would have made a perfect Legolas! Not that I hated the actual Legolas, you understand, even when he surfed down the steps on a shield. (Oh, please!) But I thought Orlando Bloom made a decent elf.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

Oh me too - I loved the way he looked and moved (and according to all the DVD documentaries, he did become a pretty decent bowman; most of the shooting footage in the films really is him). And my personal-canon-Legolas is blond, so that was fine too. But MP was a pretty yummy archer as well...

And yes, I loved all the Herne-the-Hunter/pagan side of RoS. It gave it a genuinely rooted, ancient, really English feel that the Costner movie failed beyond all measure to get. (The moment that makes the Costner movie for me is Sean Connery's appearance as the Lionheart at the end - hilarious because when I first saw it in the cinema, the audience all gasped at exactly the same time as the characters on screen!)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The Costner movie not only used a Saracen character (apparently thinking the Saracen was one of the traditional Robin Hood characters along with Little John, Will Scarlet etc) after watching RoS, but they used many of the same locations and even used the same horsemaster. And, of course, Alan Rickman's scenery-chewing pantomime sherriff (which totally rescued the whole movie for me) was very much based on Nicholas Grace who was so good in RoS, always bitching with the equally convincing Abbot Hugo (Philip Jackson.)

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

And, of course, Alan Rickman's scenery-chewing pantomime sherriff

"No more handouts to the widows and orphans AND CANCEL CHRISTMAS!"

[adores]. Though I do wonder whether the director/producers realised to quite what an extent AR was hamming it up...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Maybe not, since most Americans are unfamiliar with British Pantomime. They just don't get it at all. They think it's something to do with (silent) mime.

(All together now...'Oh no it isn't!')

Ah, I adore Alan Rickman.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

All the more argument in favor of the version where Paul Darrow doesn't exactly say "Ha ha ha, once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine" but you can hear him thinking it. And his double act with Ford Prefect is priceless.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

Alan Rickman - pantomime villain extraordinaire. Whether it's the Sherriff of Nottingham or Severus Snape. [melts]

It's true, pantomime is a fairly peculiar genre when you think about it, and its conventions are all its own - but it's not exactly silent (my parents are taking my two boys to Aladdin this afternoon and I think they're braced for SERIOUS NOISE...)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, pantoimime is not silent at all. That's why it's so weird when USians latch on to the half-word that means something to them and assume it's classic mime like French mime artist Marcel Marceau. Serious noise, serious audience participation.

So you sit an American down and try and tell them that the principal boy is a woman in tights falling in love with another woman, and that the dame is a man in drag who will almost certainly try and strip to her frilly drawers at some point during the show... and right then and there they are thinking this is an X-rated entertainment for adults. But take them to see any panto and it doesn't take them long to get into, 'It's behind you!' and 'Oh no it isn't!'