Fun commentary.

One of the reasons having two conflicting versions of events in the Bible wasn't an issue, I think, is that Hebrew poetry focused on saying the same thing twice in different ways. Thus, you'd have a line about a future King entering entering riding a donkey, followed by another saying he rode on an ass. The point wasn't what he rode on, but that he'd enter like a common person and not royalty. Later you had early Christians, not familiar with poetic forms, try to have Jesus fulfill this prophesy by having him ride TWO animals into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Then they had huge crowds cheer him on, completely missing the point

The original version of Abraham sacrificing his son actually has him do it. If you look at the current story, the passage where he's told to stop is clearly inserted later. The next passage has God praising Abraham for not staying his hand, and Abraham walks down from the hill alone with his son never mentioned again in stories from that source. When child sacrifice was finally abandoned, they did the best they could to clean most of it from the texts.

Oh, I wish I really knew. I found three or so production drawings someone in the forum here pointed me too, but I would love to find a script for the pilot or a series bible. Find out how exactly they were going to tackle it as an ongoing series (and if the gay issue was going to be addressed at all, as while it's hinted at in the books it's ignored apart from one couple in Dragonquest). However, we do know why the series died.

http://www.annemccaffreyfans.org/forum/ … php?t=2151

As quoted from Moore's bog:

The second encounter occurred years many years later after I had become an established writer and had been invited to participate on a panel at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills along with several much bigger names, including J. Michael Straczynski and… Harlan Ellison. It was the first time I’d met the man and in all honesty, I was too embarrassed to say very much, to him lest I start to gush, so satisfied myself with a simple “Hello, I love your work” and then we went into the panel.

Now, this panel occurred at a very particular moment in my career. I was working on “Roswell” as an executive producer, but I was deep into preproduction on the ill-fated pilot I’d written for a series based on Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” books. It had been a difficult and unhappy development process, but we were only five days away from the first day of principal photography. A major problem had arisen, however. The network had commissioned another writer to rewrite my draft over my objections and in my opinion, had eviscerated everything that I loved about the project. I didn’t want to shoot that draft and they did. As I drove into the parking lot of the Museum I learned via a cell phone call from my agent that a critical conference call with the network was scheduled to take place the next morning which would determine the fate of the entire project, and when I took my seat on the panel I was frankly distracted by the thought that my very first pilot, my very fist shot at running my own series was in serious jeopardy of coming to ruin right before my very eyes unless I “played ball” as they like to say.

The panel discussion was fun and interesting and after a while I forget my Pern problems and simply enjoyed being on the same stage with some legendary figures of the genre. At the end, the final question was put to all of us was “Do you have any advice for young writers starting out?” It’s a familiar question, and to be honest, I have a stock response, (which I will someday bore readers of this blog with when I really need material) and I gave it in my usual inimitable fashion, congratulating myself on having held my own throughout the night.

But when the question came around to Harlan, he leaned forward into the microphone, and with all the passion and ferocity I remembered so well from that convention stage in Stony Brook he said:

“Don’t be a whore!”

The world quite literally spun around me under the hot lights and it felt as though the Universe was conveying a message directly to me. It was so simple. “Don’t be a whore!” Don’t write crap because they pay you well. Don’t put your name on something that you know will suck. Don’t sacrifice whatever integrity you have as a writer for a check.

The next day, during the infamous conference call, there came the point my agent had warned me would come, when I either played ball and went with the script I knew in my heart was terrible or my beloved pilot was going to die, and when that moment came, Harlan’s words rang in my ears like the church bells above Quasimodo’s head.

“Don’t be a whore!”

I wasn’t. The project died. And I have been grateful to Harlan Ellison ever since.

I think it may be a case of ALLOWING, not releasing. There were two things which Lucas, personally, wanted to never see the light of day again: the original cuts of the first movies, and the Holiday Special. So, what did we see released by Rifftrax within months, if not weeks, of Disney buying Lucasfilm? The video on demand version of their Star Wars Holiday Special riff. Now, Disney did not provide a good copy, as we're seeing the same taped from TV version the original mp3 version was synced to (and which they sort of illegally pointed you to when you bought it), but still. Disney let it come out.

So, what has to happen for us to get the original trilogy? Disney just has to say "yes" when FOX asks. That's it. They need do no work, spend no money. They give FOX whatever assets they need, perhaps, yes, negotiating a fee, and then step aside. Maybe Fox pays them to do the restoration, who knows.

It's not about quality, it's about what is interesting to talk about. Failures can offer more topics for them to cover.

I think this may be the first time you've done a remake where the original was never mentioned. Well, apart from explaining the Hulk bits were a sort of tribute to Bill Bixby.

That sounds a bit like the anime Tenchi Muyo, where a tree forms the heart of space ships. I put a tree in a ship in my Bells Across the Universe books, but just because the designer was a bit too nature loving.

Basically, don't worry about if an idea has been used before. All art is borrowing, be it intentional or accidental. It's all in how you combine the parts with your own style and imagination.

Good Morning Vietnam was the only live action movie of his I really liked, I think. Certainly no others come to mind. Usually I just avoided his stuff as they didn't look like something I was interested in. Always liked him, though. His old standup concerts are on Youtube.

The Alien/Predator thing started with a rather good comic, when Dark Horse realized they had the rights to both movies and crossed them over. That was a year before Predator 2, which was probably just an injoke reference to the comic.

I was just amused at how Disney got the rights to Oswald back. They traded the Football Announcer Al Michaels for him, letting Michaels go to NBC's Sunday Night Football now that ABC had lost its NFL contract. So, Universal gave up something they weren't using in return for Disney letting an employee get the job he wanted. Win-win.

I'm familiar with the guy Eddie interviewed about the comic strip doc. He was on a podcast with three other web comic artists for awhile, promoting a book they were doing about how to make a go of it doing web comics, "Webcomics Weekly". A fun listen, as it dealt with both the artistic and business side, and how to make a living giving your art away.

OK, that looks a lot like a space ship from the Japanese manga/anime 'Outlanders'.

If so...