Discworld

#Pratchat24 – Arsenic and Old Clays

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In episode 24, meteorologist Nate Byrne joins Elizabeth and Ben for a Discworld tale of murder, golems and nobility in Terry Pratchett’s 1996 novel Feet of Clay.

Two old men have been murdered in Ankh-Morpork, but they’re not the worst of Commander Vimes’ woes. His best Sergeant is six weeks from retirement; his worst Corporal might be the Earl of Ankh; his newest recruit is an alchemist with some pretty strange ideas for a dwarf; and someone has poisoned the Patrician, though he’s damned if he can figure out how. And somehow, the golems are involved…

Content note: this episode contains brief discussion of (fictional) suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Following on from Men at Arms (from way back in #Pratchat1!), Feet of Clay evolves the Watch – and its leader – even further, and introduces some of Pratchett’s most memorable supporting characters: Cheery Littlebottom, Wee Mad Arthur and Dorfl the golem. It gets a bit deep on questions of artificial life, gender expression and identity, and is a heck of a mystery novel to boot. Did you figure out “whatdunnit”? Who’s your favourite new character? And what do you think the Pratchat coat of arms and motto should be? Use the hashtag #Pratchat24 on social media to join the conversation and let us know what you think!

PS – we recorded this just before the casting announcements for The Watch television series, so don’t be disappointed when they don’t come up! We’ll find a place to discuss them in the near future.

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Guest Nate Byrne is a meteorologist, weather presenter and science communicator. He presents the weather for ABC News Breakfast, which means he gets up very early and had been awake for around 14 hours when we recorded this episode, making his jokes and insights even more impressive! You can find Nate’s writing for the ABC here, and follow him on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next month we’re joined by author Claire G Coleman as we head back to the early days of Discworld with Equal Rites. Plus our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, has launched! You can subscribe for as little as $2 a month to check it out. You’ll find all the details on our Support Us page.

#Pratchat23 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 23, “The Music of the Nitt“, discussing the eighteenth Discworld book Maskerade with guest teacher, opera singer and Dungeon Master Myf Coghill.

  • This episode’s title puns on the name of protagonist Agnes Nitt and “The Music of the Night”, one of the most famous songs from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. (See below for more on the musical.)
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a series of ten fantasy novels written by American author Stephen R. Donaldson between 1977 and 2013. Covenant is an author from our world who loses two fingers before being diagnosed with leprosy, shortly before his wife divorces him. When he is knocked unconscious he is transported to “the Land”, a fantasy world where he is a hero of prophecy in the conflict against the evil Lord Foul, though Thomas thinks that the Land is a delusion. The series has had a mixed critical response. If you’re going to look into them, please note our content warning: the first book contains an act of rape and this is referred to many times throughout the first trilogy.
  • The English sit-com Keeping Up Appearances was a farce created by Roy Clarke (of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine fame) which ran on BBC One from 1990 to 1995. It starred Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, a woman who aspires to move among the upper class, and is desperately ashamed of her lower class family. A running gag is that she tries to have everyone pronounce her family name “bouquet”, despite the fact that her middle class husband Richard – played by Clive Swift – has always pronounced it “bucket”.
  • Avengers: Endgame (2019) was the final film in the Avengers series, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It brought together characters from the previous twenty-one Marvel films in a massive crossover, and became the highest-grossing film of all time.
  • Deadpool and its sequel Deadpool 2 are films from 20th Century Fox about the titular superhero character, a mutant mercenary with rapid healing powers. While technically part of the X-Men film franchise, the films are made on a lower budget and Deadpool – who often breaks the fourth wall in the comics and is aware he is in a movie – comments on the lack of cameos from more famous actors and characters, especially Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
  • Dolores Umbridge is appointed as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and thus major villain, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She is loyal to the Ministry of Magic, even when its infiltration and corruption by Voldemort’s Death Eater followers is apparent, and conducts a Macarthy-esque witch hunt (if you’ll excuse the term in this context) to find traitors – including torturing poor Harry.
  • OP is short for “Original Post” or “Original Poster” and is used in online discussion forums to refer back to the first post in a thread and its author. (OP is also used in games jargon as shorthand for “overpowered” – a description of a card, item, ability or other element in a game which is considered to give a player or character who possesses it an unfair edge.)
  • Tuvan throat singing, also known as hooliin chor, is practiced by the Tuva people of Siberia; its most popular style, khoomei, is also found in Mongolia. It is a form of overtone singing, in which the singer manipulates their mouth, larynx and pharynx to create a second “overtone” over the top of a droning, fundamental tone, a bit like the drone of a bagpipe. This TEDx talk from Baltimore in 2016 features the Tuvan band Alash providing a traditional example.
  • Permeate is actually a generic term meaning a substance that has passed through a porous or permeable membrane, as in the process of osmosis. In dairy farming, it is used to refer to the parts of milk that are not retained in the ultrafiltration process used to collect and add additional milk proteins to raw milk for making cheese. Traditionally this kind of permeate was added back to milk to increase the yield and to help standardise it – a process intended to make sure milk has consistent levels of fat, proteins, sugars and so on. This was basically all unknown outside the dairy industry until 2012, when Australian company Dairy Farmers launched a marketing campaign labelling their milk as “permeate-free“. Despite their web-site clarifying that milk permeate isn’t dangerous or unhealthy, the labelling – and a story on the current affairs program A Current Affair – gave them a short-lived edge in the market until all the other milk companies in Australia followed suit, despite the fact that smaller dairies wouldn’t have been using permeate in the first place.
  • Parabens, or parahydroxybenzoates, are a group of chemicals used as preservatives in cosmetics and sometimes food thanks to their antibacterial and fungicidal properties. There’s little to no evidence that they pose any serious health risks, but they can cause (usually mild) allergic reactions in a small percentage of people. While they’re synthetically produced for commercial use, parabens do occur naturally and many synthetic parabens are identical to natural ones.
  • The song “Smelly Cat” was written and performed by the character Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) on the sit-com Friends, initially in the second season episode “The One with the Baby on the Bus”. It was popular with fans and revisited many times over the life of the show, often with celebrity musical guests – including Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who co-wrote the song. It’s been covered many times; Lisa Kudrow even sang it on stage with Taylor Swift in 2015.
  • La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) is an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). The opera follows the story of Violetta, a courtesan whose love for the young bourgeois Alfredo is thwarted by prejudice against her past.
  • “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry and a popular meme for women showing resiliency in the face of patriarchy. The phrase became popular after US Senator Elizabeth Warren was interrupted by Mitch McConnell and other Senators while trying to read a letter sent to the Senate in 1986 by Coretta Scott King criticising Senator Jeff Sessions for limiting the voting rights of black Americans, as part of her objections to Sessions being appointed US Attorney General. The Senate voted to silence Warren on the grounds that she was breaking a Senate rule against maligning other Senators; afterwards McConnell said: “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
  • Sieglinde is a major mortal character in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second work in his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle). She is based on Signy from the Norse Völsunga saga, one of the main sources for the opera. In Die Walküre, Sieglinde was separated from her brother Siegmund at birth, and they fall in love before discovering they are twins, though this doesn’t dissuade their love. Siegmund dies in a fight with Sieglinde’s husband, a king she was forced to marry, and Sieglinde wishes to die rather than live without him until the Valkyrie Brunhilde convinces her to stay alive and give birth to their son, Siegfried, who goes on to be the hero of the final two operas in the cycle, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
  • The O.C. was an American teen television drama set in Orange County, California which ran from 2003 to 2007. We joke about not talking about it because it starred the other, more famous Ben McKenzie as Ryan Atwood, a poor, abused teen thrown out of home by his mother. Ryan is adopted by his public defender, and his struggle to fit in amongst the affluent O.C. kids was a major driver of the show’s first two seasons, though it was also very much about tempestuous relationships and love affairs and all that good high school drama stuff.
  • The excerpt from La Traviata is from a 1958 performance by Maria Callas; you can find the full performance on YouTube.
  • Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer and, famously, a contemporary and “rival” of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though they competed for the same positions, it seems unlikely the rivalry went very far, and that they instead had mutual respect for each other. In Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus he is the main character, presented as bitter and jealous of Mozart’s seemingly God-given talent, and he claims to have poisoned Mozart with arsenic. Rumours like this did plague the real Salieri, but historians don’t take them seriously, and the play and subsequent film have revived interest in his work. The role was originated in the West End by Paul Schofield opposite Simon Callow as Mozart; in the original broadway production he was played by Ian McKellan, opposite Tim Curry. In the 1984 film version he is played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for the role.
  • Singin’ in the Rain is a 1952 American film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly, who also stars as Don Lockwood, a humble silent film star in the 1920s during the introduction of “talkies”. Don’s insufferable leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), has a terrible voice, and has to be dubbed over by Don’s love interest, chorus girl Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Despite this plot point, in one scene where she is being dubbed, Jean Hagen performs both Lina’s annoying voice and Kathy’s replacement!
  • The Dunning-Kruger effect is the psychological phenomenon where someone who is not good at something is likely to overestimate how good they are, while those who are good at something are likely to underestimate their ability. This is because the same knowledge and skills are required to do something and judge the results.
  • Terry’s first publisher was Colin Smythe Limited, named for its founder and based in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire. After publishing his first four books – including the first two Discworld novels – Colin became Terry’s agent in 1987, co-publishing with Victor Gollancz in the UK and representing him to larger publishers all over the world. Colin also handled all rights to Terry’s intellectual property until the founding of Narrativia, Pratchett’s own production company, now run by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett. Colin Smythe Limited still publishes books; you can find out more about the company at colinsmythe.co.uk. The Terry Pratchett section of the site contains details of every edition of every one of Terry’s books; we’ve found it useful on many occasions!
  • Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti is a 1790 comic opera composed by Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) and Don Giovanni fame. As Myf points out, the tutte of the title is feminine, and so rather than “so do they all” means “so do all women” – the argument of the character Don Alfonso, who believes that all women are unfaithful. (Another common translation of the full title is All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers.) Alfonso makes a bet against two military officers, who swear their fiancées, who are sisters, will be faithful to them. To prove it, the officers pretend to have been sent away to fight, then return disguised as “Albanians” to try and seduce each others’ fiancées. Alfonso bribes the sisters’ maid to help him win his bet, and the two women do eventually succumb, though they endure a false wedding to the “Albanians” and mock outrage from their fiancées before all is forgiven. In Australia, Così fan tutte is most well known from Louis Nowra’s 1992 play Cosi, in which the residents of a psychiatric hospital try to stage the opera.
  • As we may have mentioned before, the character known only as Janitor in the NBC/ABC medical sit-com Scrubs was originally intended to be a figment of main character JD’s imagination. During the first season of the show he never speaks or interacts with any other characters, but the idea was scrapped.
  • 21 Jump Street was a US police drama produced from 1987 to 1991 about a group of young police officers who use their ability to pass as teenagers to go undercover in high schools and colleges.
  • In the sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, one of the main characters is the hologram Arnold Rimmer, a computer simulation of a dead man based on recordings of his memories and personality. Rimmer is famously a coward, but in the episode “Dimension Jump” the crew encounter “Ace” Rimmer, a heroic version of Arnold from an alternate universe. Before leaving on a dangerous test flight, he utters his now-famous catchphrase: “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.”
  • The Somebody’s Else’s Problem field originates in Douglas Adams’ third Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Its basic premise is that while making something invisible is impossible, its very easy to boost peoples’ natural tendency to ignore things they find hard to accept. Thus a device that generates an SEP field can run indefinitely on a 9 volt battery.
  • Die Fledermaus is a 1874 German operetta composed by Johann Strauss II, with a libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée. It’s based on the German farce Das Gefängnis (The Prison) by Julius Roderich Benedix. We previously mentioned it in episode 12, as Nanny mentions “die flabberghast” when they seemingly wander into the pages of Dracula.
  • Sailor Moon is the lead character in Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon), a manga and anime series from Japan that debuted in 1991. Usagi Tsukino is a school girl who uses a “sailor crystal” to magically transform into Sailor Moon, one of several “sailor scouts” who use their magical powers to protect the Earth from the forces of evil. Tuxedo Mask is a man wearing…er…a domino mask and a tuxedo. He initially appears mysteriously to help the Sailor Scouts, who don’t know that he’s Usagi’s school friend and love interest Mamoru Chiba, who also has a sailor crystal.
  • “Four Yorkshiremen” is a classic British comedy sketch originally written and performed for At Last the 1948 Show by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and was later made more famous when performed in live shows by members of Monty Python, including a performance for The Secret Policeman’s Ball featuring Rowan Atkinson. In the sketch, four wealthy Yorkshiremen compete to tell the most extreme stories of the poverty they experienced growing up.
  • “NPCs” are, in the parlance of roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, “non-player characters”: antagonist or supporting characters played by the Dungeon Master. The name derives from “player characters” or “PCs”, meaning the characters controlled by the other players – who are usually the protagonists of the game.
  • The Sydney Opera House, built on the Gadigal land of Bennelong Point in Darling Harbour, was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who won an international competition held by the New South Wales government in 1957. He quit the project in 1966, six years before the completed building was officially opened by the Queen in 1973. The official web site tells the story of the Opera House’s construction in depth.
  • Tripod vs the Dragon was a comedy musical written and performed by Australian trio Tripod, which began life in the US as Dungeons & Dragons: the Musical. The final version debuted at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2010. You can find the soundtrack album on Bandcamp.
  • Call Me by Your Name (2017) is a multi-award-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, based on a 2007 novel by André Aciman. It’s set in northern Italy in 1983, and is the coming-of-age story of teenager Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), who meets and falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate-student assisting Elio’s father.
  • Only wine made in the Champagne region of France is allowed to be marketed as Champagne; Australian winemakers have to do with the term “sparkling white”. At the time of recording, Australia was considering a European trade agreement which would impose similar restrictions on many other foodstuffs, include feta cheese.
  • The leader of the Magi in The Mummy – the action film starring Brendan Fraser which we’ve mentioned many, many times in previous episodes – is Ardeth Bay, played by Israeli actor Oded Fehr.
  • Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa is best known for playing Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, but was also Ronon Dex in Stargate: Atlantis, had a go at being Conan the Barbarian, and most recently played Aquaman on the big screen. He plays the character of Duncan Idaho in Denis Villeneuve’s new film version of Dune, due in 2020.
  • The character of Billy, introduced in the second season of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, is played by Dacre Montgomery. He has a poetry podcast called DKMH.
  • We’ll hopefully get to Carpe Jugulum in 2020.
  • Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the modern term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD). The change seeks to clarify that a patient has distinct “personality states” rather than truly separate personalities, and it is far more common in films and other media than in real life. The way it is portrayed in film is seen as highly misleading and harmful by many mental health professionals, not least because most characters with DID are shown to have at least one personality which is sadistic, violent and dangerous.
  • The smaller Melbourne-based opera companies mentioned are Cordelia’s Potted Operas (the link is to their Facebook page), GBD Productions and BK Opera.
  • Norma is a 1831 Italian opera composed by Vincenzo Bellini, with a libretto by Felice Romani based on the play Norma, ou L’infanticide (Norma, or The Infanticide) by Alexandre Soumet. It’s a tragedy about Norma, a druidic priestess in Gaul during the Roman occupation (aka Asterix times), who is caught up in a love triangle with a Roman officer and her friend, another priestess. Melbourne Opera’s production opens on September 17, 2019.
  • You can read all about Victorian Opera’s under 30s program on their web site.
  • Amahl and the Night Visitors is a 1951 English opera in one act composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, who also wrote the libretto, originally for NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame program. It was the first opera written for US television, and an Australian version was broadcast in 1957. Amahl is a disabled boy whose family are visited by the three Magi, Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, who are seeking a place to rest on their long journey to bestow gifts on the newly born Jesus Christ.
  • Lorelei is a 2018 Australian operatic cabaret composed by Julian Langdon, with a libretto by Casey Bennetto and Gillian Cosgriff. It features the Lorelei, three sirens who begin to wonder if the men they lure to their deaths really all deserve to die. It was originally staged by Victorian Opera; an Opera Queensland season opens in March 2020.

#Pratchat23 – The Music of the Nitt

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For episode 23, Elizabeth and Ben are joined by opera singer Myf Coghill on a trip to Ankh-Morpork’s opera house in Terry Pratchett’s 1994 Discworld novel of witches, phantoms and experimental cookery: Maskerade!

Nanny Ogg’s coven with Granny Weatherwax is short a witch. She decides young Agnes Nitt – last seen dabbling in the craft while wearing black lace and calling herself “Perdita” – is just the person to fill the position. But Agnes has run off to Ankh-Morpork and joined the opera, where a mysterious “Opera Ghost” has turned from good luck charm to demanding, dangerous and possibly deranged. Can “Perdita” find out the identity of the Opera Ghost before the bodies start stacking up – and before Granny and Nanny stick their noses in and do it for her?

Pratchett delves into a world hitherto unknown to him and takes Granny and Nanny to the big city for their penultimate book, heavily influenced by The Phantom of the Opera, and about much more earthly matters than their previous adventures. We learn a lot about opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the world of publishing, and delve into Pratchett’s treatment of Agnes, a beloved character whose unflattering portrayal was the subject of many questions and comments.

Did Maskerade bring out the opera fan in you? Do you think Agnes deserved better? And despite being a bit of a downer, is this one of the best Discworld books we’ve discussed so far? Use the hashtag #Pratchat23 on social media to join the conversation and let us know what you think!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:18:45 — 63.9MB)

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Guest Myfanwy Coghill is an opera singer, soon-to-be qualified teacher, and Dungeon Master (of the Dungeons & Dragons variety). You can follow her on Twitter at @_merlenoir_.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We’re staying in Ankh-Morpork for Feet of Clay in October before heading back in time to explore the origins of Granny Weatherwax in November with Equal Rites. Plus our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, has launched! You can subscribe for as little as $2 a month to check it out. You’ll find all the details on our Support Us page.

#Pratchat21 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea” featuring guest David Ryding, discussing the seventeenth Discworld novel Interesting Times.

  • The episode title puns Memoirs of a Geisha, a 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg in 2005. The film was criticised for casting Chinese actors as some of the Japanese characters, while Golden was criticised for his portrayal of geishas and sued by Mineko Iwasaki, one of the ex-geishas he interviewed for the book, as he named her in the acknowledgments despite her requesting anonymity. She later went on to write her own autobiography, Geisha, A Life, which corrects many misconceptions she saw in Golden’s book.
  • Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, published in 1993. We covered it in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, with guest Cal Wilson.
  • “Inscrutable” is a word long associated with stereotypical depictions of Asian cultures, especially the Chinese. It stems from a lack of effort to understand the differing cultural conventions encountered by Europeans, and seems to have reached a height in Victorian literature.
  • Bill Bryson is an American-British non-fiction author whose work covers language, travel, history and science. His best known works include Notes From a Small Island, The Mother Tongue and A Short History of Nearly Everything.
  • The white saviour is a trope in which non-white characters are unable to save themselves, and are rescued from disaster by a heroic white character. The Wikipedia article lists a large number of examples.
  • “Eurogames” are a tradition of modern boardgames with their roots in post-war Germany. Such games often focus on strategic depth and a balance of luck and skill. The Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995, was one of the first such games to become popular in America, and features players trying to build the most successful settlement by gathering and spending various resources on a fictional island with limited space. Ted Alspach’s The Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a more recent example, first published in 2014, but there are many, many more great ones. Some of Ben’s favourites include Carcassonne, Cyclades, Inis and Ticket to Ride.
  • One of the editorial directions popularised by Stan Lee during his time at Marvel Comics was the idea that “any issue could be someone’s first“. This mostly manifested as in-character expository dialogue, but also as footnotes from the editor pointing readers to previous issues for backstory.
  • Potatoes often appear in fantasy fiction as a staple of medieval Europe-like worlds – but they weren’t brought to Europe from the Americas until the 16th century. This is explored in Adam Roberts’ academic work about Arthurian fiction, Silk and Potatoes, and also in the “Fantastical Feasts” episode of the podcast Imaginary Worlds (though the latter is now only available via paid subscription).
  • We’ve previously noted the possible influence on Pratchett of Mel Brooks’ 1960s spy sit-com Get Smart in Guards! Guards!, Good Omens and Lords and Ladies.
  • Gunpowder was invented in 9th-century China, and was first seen in Europe 400 years later, around the same time the first cannons were invented – also in China.
  • Bob Hawke was the extremely popular Labor Prime Minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He died in May 2019. He is remembered both for the many achievements of his government, and for being a larger-than-life figure who embodied the “larrikin” Australian stereotype while at the same time showing great compassion and emotion. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 (see below), he extended temporary permits and offered permanent visas to tens of thousands of Chinese students so they could stay in Australia rather than return to the violence at home.
  • On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square, the main public square in Beijing, to suppress the hundreds of thousands of students gathered there to protest for a variety of democratic reforms. Many were killed, with the death toll estimated in the thousands, and there were also reports of torture and mass arrests. A famous photo was taken the following day of a lone “Tank Man“, standing in front of a column of tanks to slow down their progress.
  • The Golden Horde was a khanate – an empire ruled by a Khan – that succeeded the Mongol Empire. It lasted for about 250 years from the mid 13th century, though some remnants of it survived into the 19th century. The Horde was founded by Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan.
  • The members of the Silver Horde are:
    • Genghiz Cohen – aka Cohen the Barbarian, age unknown
    • Boy Willie – the youngest one, aged 80; his name references Billy the Kid
    • Caleb the Ripper – aged 85, source of most of the unfortunate jokes
    • Ronald “Teach” Saveloy – our favourite
    • Truckle the Uncivil – the sweary one
    • Old Vincent – aged 87; doesn’t talk much, presumably the second oldest (though Cohen might be older)
    • Mad Hamish – the oldest one; uses a wheelchair
  • Three Men in a Boat is an 1889 comic novel written by English author Jerome K Jerome, following the titular three men on a holiday they take on the Thames River.
  • We previously explained chicken parmigiana in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, but in short, it’s an Australian perversion of an Italian dish in which a chicken schnitzel is covered in tomato sauce and cheese (among other things). The original Italian version uses eggplant, and is distinct from its Australian offspring.
  • Bunnings sausages may be the most Australian thing we’ve ever referenced on the show. Bunnings Warehouse is a chain of large hardware supply stores found across Australia and also in New Zealand, now owned by Wesfarmers, who also own the Australian versions of Kmart and Target. Many Bunnings stores hold a “sausage sizzle” in their carparks on weekends. This is a common Australian fundraising activity, in which cheap sausages are cooked on a barbecue and sold in slices of white bread with tomato or BBQ sauce and fried onions. The proceeds are donated to a local charity or other cause. (Sausage sizzles are also commonly held at polling stations on election days, giving rise to the “democracy sausage” meme.)
  • Lisa McCune is an Australian actor best known for her portrayal of Senior Constable Maggie Doyle during the first six years of the long-running and popular early 2000s cop drama Blue Heelers. Doyle was famously killed off in front of her fiancee, fellow cop PJ, while waiting to enter a witness protection program at the beginning of season seven. McCune went on to star as naval lieutenant Kate McGregor in Sea Patrol from 2007 to 2011, and also has a highly successful career on stage, including Australian productions of many big musicals.
  • Horror novelist Anne Rice, best known for writing Interview with a Vampire and its sequels, wrote a widely circulated Facebook post which began “After the publication of The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments.”
  • Ben is correct in that the distinction between turtles, tortoises and terrapins is not a definitive, scientific one, and the usage of the terms varies a bit depending on where you live. Land-based chelonians – the group that includes all turtles and tortoises – are called tortoises everywhere; aquatic chelonians are generally known as turtles, but if they live in fresh water may be known as terrapins in the UK. Similarly there are three families of pinnipeds – mammals with flippered feet. These are the true or earless seals; sea-lions and fur seals (who have ears); and walruses. True seals can’t walk on land or balance a ball on their nose; only sea-lions and fur seals can do that.
  • Zen buddhism originated in China, but the “zen garden” is a Japanese tradition.
  • Twoflower’s boss (and later, his imaginary dragon friend) is actually named Ninereeds; Nine Turning Mirrors was a previous Grand Vizier, killed by the boy emperor during a poisoning attempt in Mort.
  • Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thick crust and a sweet filling usually made of red bean or lotus seed paste. Folk tales say that the revolt of the Han Chinese against the rule of the Mongols was coordinated by messages either hidden in mooncakes, or printed on their surface in parts. Their distribution was supposedly ensured through rumours of a plague that could only be warded off by the consumption of mooncakes.
  • “Fridging” in narrative is the act of killing off or otherwise harming a woman to provide a male protagonist with motivation for their story, without treating the woman as a character in her own right. The term “women in refrigerators” was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, who noticed the prevalence of this trope in superhero comics; it references the fate of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in Green Lantern #54 (coincidentally published the same year as Interesting Times). The term was popularised by a web site of the same name which documented instances of the trope in comics.
  • My Little Pony: The Movie was released in 1986 with an extraordinary voice cast including Hollywood stars Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman. Leachman plays Hydia, an evil witch who creates the “Smooze”, a gross purple ooze that will destroy the ponies’ home of Dream Castle. Several of the ponies go on a search for the Flutter Ponies, magical winged ponies who may be able to help, and yes, they do destroy the Smooze by flapping their wings and creating a magical wind.
  • A persistent rumour has done the rounds of the Internet for years that American comedian Sinbad played a genie in a comedy movie titled Shazaam. Despite the fact that the movie never existed, many people swear they remember it, and deny they are thinking of the genie film Kazaam, which really did exist and starred basketball player Shaquille O’Neil. Shazaam is considered by some to be an example of the “Mandela Effect”, where some people have developed erroneous memories of which they are so certain, they believe them to be evidence of time travel having changed history. The name comes from a similar phenomenon in which people claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s.
  • The 2019 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, or NGV, was “Terracotta Warriors and Cai Guo-Qiang“. It features a collection of artefacts from ancient China, including a large number of Terracotta Warriors, as well as specially-commisioned works by contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose art incorporates the ignition of gunpowder. Liz wrote about the exhibition for The Saturday Paper.
  • The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was the third in the series starring Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell. It also starred Jet Li as the Emperor, and features both yetis and and army of animated terracotta warriors. It’s…well, let’s just say there’s a reason we usually only talk about the first Brendan Fraser Mummy movie.
  • Lemmings is a popular series of videogames originally published by Psygnosis, the first of which was released in 1991 for home computers like the Amiga 500, and later ported to a variety of game consoles and computer platforms. The titular Lemmings are green-haired, pink-skinned bipedal creatures who are dropped into a variety of landscapes and walk mindlessly into danger. The player must assign individual lemmings to dig holes, build stairs and redirect their fellows to help guide them safely to the exit.
  • The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a fantasy novel for children, the debut novel of English author Alan Garner. It’s set in Cheshire and follows the adventures of two children as they attempt to keep the weird stone of the title safe from the evil spirit Nastrond, meeting a variety of witches, wizards and magical creatures along the way.
  • The Simpsons episode “Bart vs. Australia“, from the show’s sixth season in 1995, is one of the broadest parodies of Australia ever created. In the episode, Bart makes a collect call to an Australian number to find out if water spirals in the opposite direction in toilets in the southern hemisphere (it doesn’t), leading to him being indicted for fraud. While the episode has had a mixed reaction in Australia, some elements of it are still popular, notably the use of the term “dollarydoos” to refer to Australian currency and a spoof of the famous “that’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee.
  • American actress Lucy Liu rose to fame as cold-hearted lawyer Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, at the time one of the only female Asian characters on American television. Liu went on to star in a number of hit films including Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill before being cast as Dr Joan Watson in the modern take on Sherlock Holmes, Elementary (one of Ben’s favourite television shows).
  • B D Wong played psychiatrist and profiler Dr George Huang on nearly 250 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Father Ray Makuda on prison drama Oz, but many will know him best as scientist Henry Wu from Jurassic Park and its sequels Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He’s also been in Mr. Robot, The Flash and more recently Gotham, where he plays a wonderful version of the character Hugo Strange. He’s also an award-winning theatre and musical actor, and the author of a memoir about he and his partner’s experience having a child with the help of a surrogate mother.
  • Masayori “Masi” Oka is best known as the time travelling Hiro Nakamura on the superhero show Heroes and its sequel, Heroes Reborn, though you’ll also find him in the reboot of tropical cop drama Hawaii Five-0 and a number of films including the 2008 version of Get Smart. He used to work as a digital effects artist for Industrial Light and Magic, and worked on all three Star Wars prequels!

#Pratchat21 – Memoirs of Agatea

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Twenty-one today! In this episode, Elizabeth and Ben are joined by David Ryding of Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature as we rejoin Rincewind and some of his old friends in Terry Pratchett’s 17th Discworld novel: 1994’s Interesting Times.

Rincewind, the worst student Unseen University ever had, has quite literally been to hell and back. But when a summons arrives in Ankh-Morpork requesting the presence of “the Great Wizzard”, his old faculty bring him home, then send him to the far-flung Agatean Empire. All is not well on the Counterweight Continent: rebels are (gently) questioning centuries of enforced order, inspired by the revolutionary pamphlet “What I Did on My Holidays”. The ruthless Lord Hong plots to change the Empire forever. The walls have failed to keep out a horde of barbarian invaders – seven of them, in fact. And it’s about to be visited by a very special kind of butterfly…

Pratchett revisits characters from his first Discworld novels, as Rincewind is reunited with Cohen the Barbarian in Twoflower’s homeland. But in 2019, twenty-five years after it was first published, his depiction of a comic fantasy Asia leaves a bit to be desired. There’s plenty going on, and some stirring speeches, but it’s also hard to ignore that nearly all the main characters are white folks “saving” a foreign nation from itself – a nation inspired by real-world Asian countries. Is there a clear message in the book? How does this sit on the evolution of Pratchett’s work from parody to satire? And were you glad to see such old favourite characters return, or could you have done without them? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat21 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest David Ryding has been Director of the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature office since its establishment in 2014 (though Melbourne has been a City of Literature since 2008). Prior to that he was director of the Emerging Writers Festival, then executive director of the NSW Writers Centre (now know as Writing NSW). You can find out more about what he does at the City of Literature office at cityofliterature.com.au, and they’re also on Twitter at @MelCityofLit. If you’re looking for other great literary podcasts made in Melbourne, you can find some listed on their site here.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We hope you enjoyed our first ever live show, recorded at Nullus Anxietas VII, where we discussed Cohen’s previous adventure in the short story “Troll Bridge”! We’d love to record more bonus episodes in future, and you can help us do it by supporting Pratchat.

In August we leave the Discworld and indeed the land of fiction to read one of Pratchett’s oddest books: The Unadulterated Cat, a 1989 collaboration with cartoonist Gray Joliffe in which he makes the case that the only “real cat” is one that destroys gardens, eats wildlife and makes a thorough nuisance of itself. If you have questions, send them to us via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat22.

#PratchatNA7 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for our bonus live episode “A Troll New World” featuring guest Tansy Rayner Roberts, discussing the 1991 Discworld short story Troll Bridge.

  • Troll Bridge was first published in the 1991 anthology After the King: Stories In Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, the most recent edition of which was released in 2012. Other authors in the collection include Stephen R. Donaldson, Jane Yolen, Gregory Benford, Emma Bull, Poul and Karen Anderson, Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove, Karen Haber and Charles de Lint, among others. The story was reprinted in 2001’s The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (which also features stories by Neil Gaiman and Terry Jones) and A Blink of the Screen, the 2012 collection of Pterry’s short fiction.
  • For those of you listening in the future: a great accompaniment to this episode is the February 15, 2022 episode of LeVar Burton Reads, a podcast in which Star Trek: The Next Generation star LeVar Burton reads a piece of short fiction. In this episode, he reads “Troll Bridge” – and gives a lovely short introduction to Terry’s work, and the Discworld itself. If you’re confused as to why Burton would be doing this, before his run on Star Trek, Burton – at the time known for his role in the television series Roots – was the presenter and executive producer of the children’s story reading programme Reading Rainbow on PBS. Burton was the host and also read some of the picture books featured, but it also featured a raft of different celebrities and actors doing the reading. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton was better known to US audiences than Patrick Stewart! It had a long run from 1983 through to 2006; in 2012, a Reading Rainbow iPad app created by Burton’s company RRKIDZ became the most-downloaded app in the App Store. In 2014, Burton launched a massively successful Kickstarter campaign to expand the reach of the app to Android and the web, but a legal dispute with WNED, the PBS station that owned the Reading Rainbow brand and had licensed it to Burton, ended with him no longer being able to use the name. Burton launched his weekly podcast – for which he primarily reads adult fiction – in 2017.
  • The short film Troll Bridge by Snowgum Films was adapted for the screen and directed by Daniel Knight, and stars Don Bridges as Cohen, Glenn van Oosterom as the horse and John Jenkins as Mica. It was a mammoth undertaking, especially considering it’s a fan film, albeit an extremely polished one: the cast and crew all worked without pay, with production costs paid for by a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It’s currently screening in film festivals and fan conventions around the world, but you can still pre-order a digital, DVD or Blu-Ray version ahead of its release in November. Head to www.trollbridge.film to see the trailer and find out more.
  • 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. (We’re not so fussed about the sequels, though.) We’ve mentioned it in passing in the show notes before, in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat19. The character Liz describes is, coincidentally, named Captain Winston Havelock, and is played by the late Welsh character actor Bernard Fox. Depending on when you started watching television, you might remember him as the witch-doctor Dr. Bombay on the sitcom Bewitched.
  • English actor Jude Law famously took on the role of Albus Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, playing a younger version of the character originated on film by Richard Harris and Michael Gambon. He also plays Lenny Belardo, a young Archbishop of New York who becomes the first American Pope of the Catholic Church, in The Young Pope and its upcoming sequel The New Pope.
  • It was announced in early April 2019 that a prequel to the hit 1978 musical Grease was in development at Paramount Pictures, with a script to be written by John August (best known for his work with Tim Burton, as well as his podcast Scriptnotes). Provisionally titled Summer Lovin’, it will supposedly explore the fling that Sandy and Danny had, though as Tansy mentions, we really already know everything we need to thanks to the song “Summer Nights”. We previously mentioned Grease in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • The Clacks are a system of sophisticated semaphore-like signalling towers which allow the transmission of information very quickly across the Sto Plains to and from Ankh-Morpork. They’re first mentioned in The Fifth Elephant, play a prominent role in Going Postal, and are also important to the plot in Monstrous Regiment and Raising Steam.
  • The Silmarillion is a collection of five works originally pitched by Tolkien as a sequel to The Hobbit, but they were rejected by his publisher as being too obscure. Heavily influenced by Celtic mythology, they tell the story of the creation of the world in which his other books are set, including Middle-Earth, and of the conflicts between its various deities, and form a backstory which explains the history that led to The Lord of the Rings. It was published after his death, compiled from incomplete writings by his son, Christopher.
  • Technically Troll Bridge is the first time we meet a troll under a bridge on the Discworld, as it was published a year before Lords and Ladies, but it’s likely they were both being written around the same time.
  • You can hear all about Good Omens (the book at least) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Xena of Amphipolis, played by New Zealand legend Lucy Lawless, is the protagonist of Xena: Warrior Princess, the hugely popular fantasy adventure series filmed in New Zealand which began life as a spin-off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Xena starts out as a ruthless warlord encountered by Hercules, but he convinces her to walk a more righteous path. In the series, which ran for six seasons from 1995 to 2001, Xena roams the world of Ancient Greece trying to help people, accompanied by Gabrielle, the Battling Bard of Poteidaia. In the opening episode of season three, “The Furies“, Xena claims that she is the daughter of Ares, god of war, a frequent antagonist (and a great visual for Greebo, as discussed in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“). While Xena indicates this was a lie to fool the Furies, it’s left ambiguous, so she could be a demi-god…but most of us prefer to think of her as an exceptionally skilled mortal warrior.
  • We explained the Star Wars concept of “midi-chlorians” in the show notes for #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, which was recorded the night before this live show. In brief: they’re an explanation for why some people can use the Force and some can’t. It didn’t please fans, who didn’t feel the need for such a pseudo-scientific explanation when it was introduced in the 1999 prequel film The Phantom Menace. They’ve rarely been mentioned since.
  • The trailer in question is the first full teaser for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last of the sequel trilogy and the final film in the Skywalker saga, to be released in December 2019.
  • The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a Netflix sitcom created by Tina Fey. The titular Kimmy is a young woman who moves to New York to make a new life after spending 15 years in an underground bunker kidnapped by a cult leader. She ends up living in a tiny basement apartment in Queens with struggling musical performer Titus Andromedon. In the season four episode “Kimmy and the Beest!”, Titus gets a gig directing a school musical and takes it all way too seriously.
  • There is some evidence that “trolling” was a fishing term for dragging bait to attract fish, distinct from “trawling”, or dragging a net. That certainly could be the origin of the “Internet troll”, but there are other competing theories too. It probably dates back to the late 1980s, but it’s first documented use is from 1992 on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, where it was more gently used to “troll for newbies” – posting well-debunked stories that existing posters would know were false, but to which new users would respond.
  • In February 2013 – so a little more than five years ago, Liz – authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in frozen IKEA meatballs manufactured by IKEA’s main supplier in Sweden. IKEA temporarily stopped all sale of meatballs across Europe. This was part of a wider scandal that year in which it was revealed that many food supply companies in Europe had substituted cheaper meats like horse and pork for beef to increase their profit margins, with as much as 1% of beef products in Britain containing some horse DNA.
  • Guest Sarah Pearson revealed the existence of Library Captains in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • Dr Dan Golding discussed Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Asimov, resident Pratcat, can be heard in the afore-mentioned episode 10 and also #Pratchat18, episode 18.
  • We discussed Small Gods with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • We discussed Lords and Ladies with Nadia Bailey in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • Each Nullus Anxietas convention has a theme, and the theme for NA7 was Going Postal – hence Liz’s comment that she may have been playing to the audience by favouring the book. The next convention, to be held in Sydney in July 2021, has the theme “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousande Surprises”. We hope to see you there!
  • We discussed The Colour of Magic with Joel Martin in episode 14.
  • Lucy Lawless has indeed been filming a new television show in Melbourne: a new “comedy drama” titled My Life is Murder, starring Lawless as private investigator Alexa Crowe. It’ll screen on Network Ten in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand and Acorn TV in the US in mid-2019.
  • Zoë Bell is a New Zealand stuntwoman and actress. Aside from working on Xena: Warrior Princess, she has also been stunt double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok. Her acting work includes the film Death Proof and the videogame Fallout: New Vegas. Liz’s interview with Zoë was printed in Metro magazine (and is not available online).
  • You can find out more about Night Terrace at nightterrace.com.
  • Cary Elwes is most famous for playing Westley, aka the Man in Black, in The Princess Bride, but is also beloved for his portrayal of the lead character in Mel Brooks’ spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You might also know him as Dr Lawrence Gordon in the horror film Saw and its sequel Saw 3D, and he’s joined the cast of Stranger Things for its third season on Netflix.

#PratchatNA7 – A Troll New World

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Back in April, Liz and Ben attended the seventh bi-annual Australian Discworld Convention, Nullus Anxietas VII! They enlisted fellow convention guest (and friend of the podcast), author Tansy Rayner Roberts, to discuss Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld short story: 1991’s “Troll Bridge”!

Cohen the Barbarian has led a long life, but his greatest glories and biggest adventures seem far behind him. It’s time to tick a few items off his bucket list – starting with facing a troll in one-on-one combat. But when he and his annoying talking horse reach one of the few troll bridges left on the Disc, things aren’t as straightforward as they were in the old days…

With the Snowgum Films adaptation of “Troll Bridge” being screened at the convention, it seemed only right to cover the source material in this, our first ever live show! Like a lot of Pratchett’s work, “Troll Bridge” is by turns silly and deep, drawing on the traditions of Tolkien and Howard while at the same time pointing out that their worlds couldn’t stay the same forever. Did you find it poignant? When do you think it happens in Cohen’s timeline? And is a short story enough for an entire podcast? We’d love to know! Use the hashtag #PratchatNA7 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts is an award-winning writer and podcast host. She’s written fantasy novels, short fiction, feminist essays and much more; of particular interest to Pratchat listeners is Pratchett’s Women, a collection of essays about the women in the Discworld novels. She co-hosts the podcasts Galactic Suburbia (about sci-fi and writing in Australia) and Verity! (about Doctor Who), and has her own fiction podcast Sheep Might Fly. You can find Tansy on the web at tansyrr.com, on Patreon at patreon.com/tansyrr, and also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We’d like to extend our warm thanks to everyone who attended the convention; you all made us feel so welcome, and it was such a special experience to be among so many Discworld fans, speaking on panels and chairing debates and meeting you all! Especially big thanks to those of you who came to be in our first live audience, and to the massive team of hard-working volunteers at Nullus Anxietas, without whom fan conventions like this just couldn’t happen. That goes eig- er, one more than sevenfold to Suzie Eisfelder, Lisa Lagergren, Steve Lewis and all the other members of the committee, who organise such a massive undertaking every two years. We hope to see you all in Sydney in 2021 for Nullus Anxietas 7A!

We also hope to do some more live shows in the future, probably as bonus episodes like this one. Regular episodes will continue to be released on the 7Ath of each month…and in #Pratchat21, coming up next in July 2019, you can find out what Genghiz Cohen did next as we discuss Interesting Times.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – and maybe make a few more live episodes like this? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders” with guest author Nadia Bailey discussing the fourteenth Discworld novel, 1992’s Lords and Ladies.

  • The episode title references the long-running, much beloved and extremely twee crime drama Midsomer Murders, which debuted on ITV in 1997 and is still running, 21 series later. It’s based on the Chief Inspector Barnaby books by Caroline Graham in which first Tom Barnaby, and later his cousin John Barnaby, solve murders in the fictional, sleepy English county of Midsomer, which after 124 episodes is now often joked to be the murder capital of Great Britain.
  • There are two examples of Steven Moffat writing women who marry men who follow them around in Doctor Who – first in his most famous episode, Blink, and then in the Christmas special The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. There are similar behaviours in his other work, going all the way back to Press Gang.
  • We previously mentioned The Craft in our Witches Abroad episode, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of its stars, Fairuza Balk, made her major screen debut in another film referenced this episode: Return to Oz (see below).
  • The Last Unicorn (1982) is an adaptation of the 1968 fantasy novel by American writer Peter S. Beagle, and has a pretty star-studded voice cast including René Auberjonois, Alan Arkin (who plays the incompetent magician Schmendrick), Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow (who plays the titular unicorn), Angela Lansbury and Death himself, Christopher Lee! It has music written by Jimmy Webb, including songs performed by the band America.
  • Narnia is a fantasy world invented by English writer C S Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia books. The White Queen first appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where it is revealed she has trapped Narnia in an endless Winter. Her origins are explored in the prequel The Magician’s Nephew (1955).
  • The Tuatha Dé Danann (TOO-a day DONNan; Ben butchers this and is very sorry) are the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. They reside in Tír na nÓg, often translated into English as the “Otherworld”, which could be accessed (among other ways) via “passage tombs” under the earth – much like the Long Man’s barrow. They have some things in common with elves, but a closer analogue are the aos sí (“ays SHEE”) or Sidhe (“SHEE”, as popularised by William Butler Yeats and, much later, the fantasy roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming). The Sidhe appear in both Irish and Scottish mythology, and take many forms and roles – “banshee” is an English form of bean sidhe, for example. They are often said to live in another world (or underground in barrows, or across the sea – it’s mythology after all), but this is not usually considered to be Tír na nÓg.
  • If the plot of Maurice Sendak’s award-winning Outside Over There (1981) sounds familiar, that might be because it served as partial inspiration for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) – Sendak is thanked in the credits. The book forms part of a “trilogy” following a child’s psychological development, following his better-known books In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are.
  • The very long dining table appears not only in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) but also in a whole host of films, TV shows and other media. TV Tropes calls this cliche “table space“.
  • This is indeed the first appearance of “millennium hand and shrimp“, later used by the beggar Foul Ole Ron (from Soul Music onwards) and bag lady Mrs Tachyon (in the Johnny Maxwell books). Terry apparently generated it using a gibberish computer program, into which he fed a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song, “Particle Man”, one line of which is “Millennium hand and an aeon hand”. (Ben was very excited to discover while researching this episode that Terry, like Ben, was a big TMBG fan!)
  • A lot has been written on mental health in academia; a good place to start if you’re interested might be this Guardian series on the subject, which spans three years.
  • Howl’s Moving Castle, originally a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, was fairly loosely adapted into an animated film by Studio Ghibli in 2004. Both are wonderful.
  • Return to Oz is a 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz, loosely adapting two of the later Oz books by Frank L Baum. As mentioned above it stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale, who after returning from her trip to Oz is seen as mad by her guardians and is sent for psychiatric treatment – including turn-of-the-century style electro-shock therapy. While it was not a big success at the time it has become a cult hit, in no small part because of its creepy imagery and for-the-time amazing practical and stop-motion effects. (The film also inspired the final track on the eponymous debut album, which uses Dorothy’s experiences as a metaphor to describe drug use in the queer community.)
  • The “Jesus picture” meme is also known as “potato Jesus“, and you’ve almost certainly seen it.
  • The game Jason Ogg plays with his Binky-iron horseshoe is not quoits, but…er…horseshoes. They both involve tossing a round object at a peg, but quoits is specifically played with circular “quoits”, these days usually made from rope or rubber.
  • Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga aimed at teenage girls, which launched in 1991. It’s best known in English speaking countries via the 1995 anime adaptation, which ran for 200 episodes. It follows the adventures of Tokyo middle-school student Usagi Tsukino, who is given the power to transform into “Sailor Moon”, a soldier with magical powers who is destined to save the Earth. Sailor Moon’s main love interest is “Tuxedo Mask”, a hero whose disguise is…er…a tuxedo and a mask. However the high school student who transforms into him is for a long time unaware of his secret identity, so they can only meet when in costume. Sailor Moon remains hugely popular, especially in cosplay circles, where you will often see the whole gang of “sailor scouts”.
  • If you’ve seen the 1987 film The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 novel by William Goldman), you can revisit the “to the pain” speech on YouTube here. It really is quite similar to the Elf Queen’s threat to Esme, but it’s worth noting that in the film the speech is given by the hero! (If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, the scene is quite near the end of the film and is a bit of a spoiler.)
  • The Doctor Who story with the Morris Dancers is 1971’s The Daemons, starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It also features a white witch named Olive Hawthorne as a supporting character, and she has quite a few things in common with a certain ex-member of the Lancre coven…
  • We previously mentioned Get Smart in our Guards! Guards! episode, but the specific running joke mentioned here is Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, encountering an enormous version of something and remarking: “Why, that’s the second biggest [thing] I’ve ever seen!” This joke is also used in one of Ben’s favourite videogames, The Secret of Monkey Island, in a scene he recently recreated in his Instagram feed.
  • Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, often cited as his first tragedy. It’s a graphically violent story about (fictional) Roman general Titus, who angers the Goth queen Tamora, setting off a vicious cycle of revenge. If you’re going to look it up, we’d just like to give you a content warning for murder, torture, mutilation and rape. It’s…not gentle.
  • The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who have lived on an isolated island ever since Prospero was deposed as the Duke of Milan. The play begins with a tempest summoned by Prospero to wreck a ship carrying he betrayers onto his island, but it’s not a revenge story; it’s usually classified these days as a romance.
  • The club started by Reg Shoe for the “vitally challenged”, and first seen in Reaper Man, is the Fresh Start Club, not the “Second Chance Club” as Ben misremembers.
  • Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies; while the central plot is serious – a villain slandering a young woman, Hero, to ruin her wedding to the dashing Claudio – it is feisty verbal fencers Benedick and Beatrice, who are tricked into revealing their mutual love, who always steal the show. Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version starred him as Benedick and Emma Thompson – to whom he was still married at the time – as Beatrice, and is a traditional but wonderful adaptation with grand music and a cast including Denzel Washington, Imelda Staunton, Keanu Reeves, Robert Sean Leonard, Richard Briers, Michael Keaton, Ben Elton, Brian Blessed and – in her film debut – Kate Beckinsale. Joss Whedon’s black and white 2013 film has a contemporary setting and stars faces familiar to fans of Whedon’s work: Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof as Beatrice and Benedick, plus Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and Jillian Morgese.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue, super-fast hedgehog and Sega’s biggest videogame franchise, starring in a tonne of games beginning with 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive (aka the Sega Genesis), and also appearing in a short-lived animated television series, also called Sonic the Hedgehog, which ran from 1993 to 1994. In case Liz’s pun on his name is too blue (sorry) for you, he was also briefly spoofed in one of Ben’s favourite childhood shows, Tony Robinson’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, as “Chronic the Hedgehog”.
  • Pet Sematary is one of Steven King’s most famous novels, published in 1983. It involves an ancient burial ground, hidden behind the children’s “pet sematary”, where the dead don’t stay buried. It was adapted into a successful film in 1989, and a new adaptation comes out this year.
  • The Milgram Experiment, named for psychologist Stanley Milgram, was a 1961 social experiment supposedly showing that ordinary people will obey an authority figure even when instructed to do things beyond their personal ethical boundaries. The experiment was considered unethical, and prompted significant changes in the way psychological testing was approved. In 2012 the validity of the original study was called into question when evidence was uncovered suggesting Milgram had manipulated or misrepresented the results.

#Pratchat17 – Midsummer (Elf) Murders

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In our seventeenth episode we join everyone’s favourite dysfunctional coven – and guest, writer Nadia Bailey – as we return to Lancre for Terry Pratchett’s 1992 Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies!

The Lancre coven have returned from their trip abroad, but despite the impending royal wedding of Magrat and King Verence, all is not well in the Ramtops: it’s circle time, when the walls between worlds are thin, and in the witches’ absence someone has been toying with powers beyond their understanding. As usual Granny Weatherwax thinks she can sort everything out herself: facing down a young witch wannabe and keeping the Gentry at bay. But Granny is off her game. Is it the arrival of an old flame? Or is her time as a witch of Lancre nearly up? She’ll need Nanny and Magrat’s help to see off the threat of the Lords and Ladies…

Bringing us back to the witches after only one book away, Lords and Ladies is a particularly Pratchett take on the ancient Celtic stories that inspired modern ideas of fairies and elves. One of the few novels to cross the streams between the witches and wizards, it also gives us more of a glimpse into Esme Weatherwax’s past, hints at the future of witchcraft (and royalty) in Lancre, and introduces the infamous “Trousers of Time”. Is this your favourite witches novel? What do you think of the parallel universes, other dimensions and alternate timelines it describes? And is this the best take on elves since Tolkien? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat17 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest Nadia Bailey is an author, journalist and critic whose work has appeared in The Australian, The Age, The Lifted Brow and many others. The Book of Barb, an unofficial celebration of the surprisingly popular supporting character from the first season of Netflix “kids on bikes” drama Stranger Things, was her first book; it was followed by The Stranger Things Field Guide in December 2018. In between Nadia wrote The World’s Best BFFs, a book of profiles of celebrity best friends. All three are published by Smith Street Books. You can find Nadia online at nadiabailey.com, and she tweets at @animalorchestra.

You can find full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Don’t forget that you can see Liz and Ben at both Speculate 2019 on March 15 and 16, and at Nullus Anxietas 7, the Australian Discworld Convention, on April 13 and 14! Plus Ben’s new show, You Chose Poorly, plays at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from April 1-7.

Next month, to tie in with our appearance at Speculate, we’ll be leaving the Discworld and blasting off into outer space as we discuss one of Pratchett’s early sci-fi novels, The Dark Side of the Sun, with writer Will Kostakis! We’ll likely be recording around the time of Speculate 2019, so get your questions in via social media before March 15th using the hashtag #Pratchat18.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat16 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, featuring guest, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones, discussing the thirteen Discworld novel, 1992’s Small Goods.

  • The episode title plays on the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, probably more famous these days for being punned in popular culture than for the song itself! The best known version was recorded by the Hollies in 1969, though it’s also been recorded by Neil Diamond. A charity version featuring many UK artists was the UK number one Christmas single in 2012, supporting charities associated with the Hillsborough disaster – a disaster at a football stadium in 1989, where nearly 100 people were killed after a gate was opened and allowed more fans into a section of the grounds that was already dangerously crowded. The charity supported victims and their families through a new investigation into who was responsible, following the failure to prosecute police officers in charge of security and safety during the match.
  • The film Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, the titular highlander, who discovers he is one of the immortals – seemingly ordinary humans who cannot die unless decapitated, and who are drawn to fight each other, stealing the magical power of other immortals whom they defeat until only one remains to collect “the Prize”. As well as being very 1980s, it has a killer soundtrack by Queen, songs from which can be found on their 1986 album It’s a Kind of Magic.
  • We’re pretty sure the cake Liz is thinking of is Breudher, a delicious buttery Sri Lankan cake with a Dutch influence.
  • Teen Power Inc. is a series of thirty books written by Australian author Emily Rodda (and others), first published in the 1990s. They feature six teenaged protagonists who create the titular agency to make some extra cash, and end up solving various mysteries. The series was republished in the US in the mid 2000s as The Raven Hill Mysteries.
  • Johnson and Friends (1990) was an Australian television program for children under 5 about Johnson, a stuffed elephant, and the other toys who live under the bed of a young boy and come to life when he’s asleep. It predates Toy Story by five years, but the “secret life of toys” genre has a much longer history than that anyway.
  • We’ll leave you to work out the coarse pun in Brother Nhumrod’s name for yourself, but the Biblical Nimrod was a king, a “mighty hunter”, and a great-grandson of Noah mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Chronicles and Micah. Tradition says he was leader of the kings who built the Tower of Babel, though this is not written in the Bible. Because of this folly, Dante placed him in the Circle of Treachery in Hell. “Nimrod” has also become an insult meaning a dim-witted person, popularised by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, who use it as a taunt for Elmer Fudd, presumably mocking him for not being a “mighty hunter”.
  • A Royal Commission is a type of formal public inquiry carried out in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and began in 2013. It investigated evidence of widespread protection of child abusers in a variety of community, sporting, religious and other institutions throughout Australia. The commission heard evidence from tens of thousands of people and handed down its final report in 2017.
  • After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007, rumours circulated that Sir Terry had “found God”. He answered with this piece in The Daily Mail, in which he revealed he was “brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.” He went on to say that while religion was never really discussed at home, and he was never a believer, he never disliked it.
  • The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – meaning to move debt from one place to another, rather than paying it off – is a pretty old phrase. Big thanks to listener Zoe, who linked us to entries from the Oxford and Brewer’s Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable. They tell us that the phrase has been around since at least the 14th century, and that the names were likely picked just because they were alliterative, though the phrase later acquired connections to the Saints.
  • The 2003 American musical Avenue Q explores adult concepts in a world inspired by Sesame Street – a city neighbourhood where humans, puppet people and furry monsters live side-by-side. The original production won three major Tony Awards. The song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” features the neighbourhood – including their superintendent Gary Coleman (“yes, that Gary Coleman“) – agreeing to the premise of the title.
  • “White privilege” is the concept that in many Western cultures, people with white skin have a number of privileges they may not even be aware of, that are not extended to people of colour. At a basic level it manifests as a cultural idea of white as default or normal, but – like all forms of privilege – it also influences social status, freedom and opportunity. While it has been written about in some form since the 1930s, and given its current name in the mid 60s, it was brought to mainstream attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
  • To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to have succumbed to belief in an extreme dogma, without understanding the consequences. The phrase is a reference to the Jonestown Massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones had his followers drink cordial (which may or may not have been Kool-Aid brand – this is still being disputed) poisoned with cyanide and prescription drugs.
  • Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall was published in 2018. We highly recommend checking out the Seafurrers blog – maintained by Bart the cat – for even more tales of nautical cats! It has several entries describing the exploits of Trim, who accompanied English explorer Matthew Flinders. And yes, despite what the current Australian government might think or spend 7 million dollars on, James Cook never circumnavigated Australia.
  • Jonah was commanded by God to delivery a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, warning them they must repent for their wicked ways, but Jonah instead tries to flee from God on a ship. When a clearly unnatural storm brews, the sailors work out by casting lots that Jonah is to blame; he offers to be thrown overboard, but they refuse until it becomes clear there’s no other way to survive the storm. Jonah is saved from drowning by a giant fish, which swallows him whole; he prays to God and after three days is vomited up on shore, and this time obeys God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh. He gets his nose bent out of shape when God shows the city mercy following their repentance, so God teaches him a lesson by growing a plant to give him shade in the desert, then having a worm bite the plant to kill it.
  • Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered in 1996, was Lloyd Webber’s 14th major stage musical, and the second musical adaptation of the 1961 British film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills. (You might know her from several Disney films of the 1960s, including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap.) The film was based on the 1959 novel by Mills’ mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Mills was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. Elizabeth’s recollection of the play she saw at the age of 7 is…vaguely correct. In the parts that matter.
  • Prosperity theology is the belief that God rewards an individual for their faith – often expressed through donations to the church – with blessings of material wealth and miracles of healing. In the United States its popularity dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it really rose to prominence through televangelism in the 1960s to 1980s with influential figures like Oral Roberts (yes, that’s his real name) and Jim Bakker. It was adopted more widely by some Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s, by which time it was estimated more than 15% of American Christians believed in some form of prosperity theology. It is criticised by many Christians for, among other things, a reliance on non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
  • Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report was originally published in the magazine Fantastic Universe. The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise changes many things about the original story, including the ending. A sequel television series, in which one of the precogs helps a detective solve crimes about a decade after the events of the film, aired on Fox in 2015 but was cancelled after one season of ten episodes.
  • While Ben remembers both names correctly, he fails to remember that Constable Washpot is Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets. “Washpot” is a somewhat derogatory nickname given to him by other members of the Watch. He goes on rounds with his friend Smite-the-Ungodly-with-Cunning-Arguments.
  • Many religions believe that only people who meet certain criteria will enter Heaven – various Christian denominations require the faithful to be baptised, for example. But the most famous example of a very small number who will be saved are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are often said to believe that only 144,000 people will enter Heaven. This is based on a fairly literal interpretation of chapter 14 of the Book of Revelation, but while they do indeed believe only 144,000 people will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the other faithful will live on in an Earthly paradise of God’s making. Which is just as well, as there are now more than 20 million members of the church worldwide.
  • Liz’s talk about “the gourd” is a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman), a man born at the same time as Jesus Christ, is mistaken for the Messiah. His followers willingly drink a Kool-Aid of their own devising and despite his protests interpret his every act as holy, seizing on things he drops as relics – including, briefly, “the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem”.
  • “Fake news” traditionally referred to deliberately misleading or fabricated information spread in the form of seemingly legitimate journalism. The phrase was co-opted by Donald Trump (among others) to describe any news story or media outlet which he dislikes, regardless of their accuracy. This increasingly popular usage caused the British Parliament to abandon use of the term in official documents. “Fake News” was selected as Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, though they disputed Trump’s claim that he invented it.
  • Steptoe and Son and Open All Hours are British sit-coms about a scrap merchant and his son, and a gormless shop keeper, respectively. Neither are really that close a match for Didactylos and Urn’s discussions of the philosophy market, but the sentiment is in there.
  • The educational programming language Logo was invented in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and intended to teach principles of the functional language LISP. Robot turtles pre-date Logo by nearly 20 years, but the language is credited with the popularity of turtle graphics and turtles equipped with pens. The first Logo turtle was named “Irving”.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future dystopia in which books are banned and squads of “firemen” are sent to burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist – a disillusioned fireman named Guy Montag – meets a resistance group whose members each preserve a work of literature by memorising the entire text, reciting it on request.
  • There are many examples of lost works throughout the history of literature. Shakespeare supposedly wrote many plays which have not survived, most famously Love’s Labors Won, though its existence is disputed. Jane Austen left behind several unfinished works, including the novels Sandition and The Watsons. Emily Bronte had supposedly begun work on a second novel after Wuthering Heights, but no evidence of it has ever been found. On a similar note, all of Sir Terry’s unfinished works and notes were destroyed, as per the instructions in his will, by having his hard drives crushed under an antique steam roller.
  • Up until the late 1970s it was common practice for the BBC to junk archive recordings of old programs, as pre-digital storage took up a lot of space and it was not common to rebroadcast old material. As a result, nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who made between 1966 and 1969 are missing, though audio recordings do exist. Copies have occasionally been located outside of the UK, and since 2013 there have been persistent rumours that most of the missing episodes had been located by a fan, but they have yet to materialise…
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, dir. Gareth Edwards) was the first of the Star Wars anthology films – new stories set in the universe established by George Lucas’ films, but not part of the main “Skywalker saga” series. It is set immediately before the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), and shows how a small team of rebel soldiers steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the first Death Star. In the third of the original Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, the Empire has built a second Death Star; rebel leader Mon Mothma famously proclaims that “many Bothans died” to steal its plans.
  • A hagiography is a biography of a saint or other important spiritual person.
  • The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II in which many high-ranking Nazi officers were tried for war crimes, including their participation in the Holocaust. It had a major effect on international law, including the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
  • “Spirits of place” are local gods or spirits who watch over a specific place. They are a staple of many religions and folk beliefs, but are probably best known from classical Roman religion, where they were known as genius loci. They are also popular in fiction; Ben’s favourite examples are the gods of the River Thames and its tributaries in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and its sequels.
  • The modern Santa Claus is mostly derived from the English figure Father Christmas and the Dutch character Sinterklaas, as well as tales of the historical Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the Greek city of Myra in the fourth century CE. As well as the lesser known exploits cited by Avril, he is said to have secretly given gifts to the faithful, the aspect most associated with Santa. There are also theories that Santa Claus co-opts pagan beliefs and the Germanic god Wodan, but we’ll leave those ideas for Hogfather.
  • UHF (1989; dir. Jay Levey) – known outside America as The Vidiot from UHF – was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first and only feature film. He plays George Newman, a man whose overactive imagination gets him fired from many jobs, but when he ends up in charge of a low-budget local television station his bizarre program ideas make the channel a hit. It features a slew of film and television parodies, and co-starred Fran Drescher (The Nanny) and Michael Richards (Seinfeld).
  • The Peter Capaldi moment discussed by Avril and Ben is his speech from 2015’s The Zygon Inversion, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. He and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart both say “this is not a game”, and at a key moment the Doctor offers the villain forgiveness. The podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death – on which Ben and Avril have both been guests – uses an excerpt from the speech in its introduction. You can watch the whole speech on YouTube here.
  • On the social media platform Twitter, whose logo is a stylised bird, new user accounts are represented by an icon of an egg.
  • “Doublethink” describes the act of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It was coined by George Orwell as part of the government-created language Nuspeak, which he invented for his dystopian novel 1984.
  • Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and popular science writer, especially on the subject of evolution. His 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker explains and gives evidence for biological evolution. In the last decade or two Dawkins has spent as much time criticising religion as explaining science, and is considered a major influence on several atheist movements, but has been criticised for making inflammatory remarks, especially via Twitter. In 2018, a study regarding scientists’ attitudes – including those about religion and atheism – interviewed 137 UK scientists, and though no specific questions were asked about Dawkins, 48 participants mentioned him, most because they disliked him. He wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998, before his anti-religious obsession really took over.
  • “Bin Chicken” is the most popular (and cruel) nickname given to the Australian White Ibis, the reasons for which are chronicled in “AUSTRALIAN SONG ABOUT BIRDS” by Christian Van Vuuren, co-creator of the web series Bondi Hipsters and television comedy Soul Mates. This Gizmodo article presents a rather more positive view.
  • Aside from Lester del Rey’s short story “The Pipes of Pan”, first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction in 1940, early examples of gods requiring human belief to survive in fiction include Lord Dunsany’s short story Poseidon from 1941, Belgian author Jean Ray’s 1943 novel Malpertuis, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera, “Thespis”, written in 1871. More recent examples include Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Sandman.
  • The original Clash of the Titans from 1981, directed by Desmond Davis, was the last film to feature stop-motion animation by famous movie magician Ray Harryhausen. It retells the Greek myth of Perseus (played by Harry Hamlin, later to star in the first season of Veronica Mars), the hero who slew Medusa and the Kraken (or Cetus, in the original myth), and features the Greek gods (including Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis) playing a game very similar to the one seen in The Colour of Magic. The 3D 2010 remake stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and is surprisingly not awful. The sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012) specifically deals with the waning of the gods thanks to a lack of belief.
  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961; dir. Robert Stevenson) is a Disney romantic comedy based loosely on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor. It stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard (no, really), a brilliant but forgetful scientist who invents a substance which absorbs energy when it strikes a hard surface, allowing it to bounce higher and higher, which Prof Brainard calls “flubber”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was remade by Disney in 1997 as Flubber starring Robin Williams. The original was so popular it became the first ever Disney film to have a sequel: 1963’s Son of Flubber. The title of the film lends it’s name to the stock character of an academically gifted (or obsessed) individual who neglects the more practical and/or emotional parts of life.