Hope you enjoy! I thought it was pretty similar. And you’ll definitely see how perfect the casting was.
Just know that the books, as they stand right now, only go through the end of season 5. And I’m fully convinced that George R. R. Martin is going to die before he finishes the last two books because it’s been ten years since the last one and he keeps getting distracted with side projects.
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But, but, but, he’s WORKING on it! Promise! Went to the mountains to write and everything! Perfection takes time! 
I remember also reading the saga of George R. R. Martin vs. the Planning Commission. He lives in Santa Fe which has extremely strict zoning and architectural laws and he’s spent a lot of time getting projects approved (or failing to do so in a couple cases).
Alright, listen. My real name has R. R. in the middle. I’ll take over and finish the books. Nobody will ever know.
I’ve always said that I should write books. Having an R. R. in your name is automatic sales.
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Alright Ser Rizak
Go for it!
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So far nudity and sex scenes is more prevalent on the television series.
I’m nearing the end of Season 1 (book). And reading gives some insights on the thoughts of some characters which the TV series did not (or can’t convey).
I’ve finished reading the Sword of Truth series more than 4 or so years ago.
SoT are more magic-oriented than GoT. But it also got sex, violence, intrigue etc in it although SoT seems to focus more on Richard and Kahlan.
In GoT the story focus on more than one character.
We had a weird evening watching early GoT with a friend of my wife who has read the books. She knew character names when we didn’t, which was odd.
Thankfully it was an episode with very little sex, as she’s also a somewhat repressed person. (Who has also fallen into some dangerous conspiracy theory stuff, but that’s more why we barely ever talk to her.)
It’s an HBO series. The first season is pretty bad this way, and it tapers off. See also: Westworld.
I remember reading the Sword of Truth series (up to book 5 or so) and thinking the author had some serious issues to work out re: women.
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Kind of like Stephen Brust’s Jhereg series. You can really tell when he was getting divorced.
Bait and switch?
Might be a budget thing. 1st season they’re desperate for viewers and probably have a couple neat ‘effects’ set pieces scheduled… Second season if it’s big hit they’ve got the budget more controlled and can try for more artistic merit.
GoT kept to a pretty good nudity quotient. It’s also around the time I started pointing out the rare male nudity to my wife. It’s pretty uncommon and she has a point that it’s only fair to have some representation. Hodor.
Not really related but we enjoyed the first season of Lupin which is a subtitled French show about a guy who carries out ridiculous crime schemes because he’s inspired by the literary character and has some weird grudges he’s working out. Second season… has not caught us the same. It feels like they lost the sense of being a tight plot and are kind of winging it. A similar show was Sneaky Pete which had a very tightly plotted first season (with Bryan Cranston as the bad guy) then kind of flamed out. The later seasons weren’t bad, just not as good.
I think it’s more a case of “okay you’re invested into the show, we can cut down on the gratuitous nonsense now.”. I think it says something unflattering about perceptions of their viewers. I thought the story was tighter in S1 but S2 was also quite good. S3 took things in a very different direction but I enjoyed it. I have the first 2 on disc, will eventually buy the 3rd.
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I’m reading Gary Wolf’s Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which is the book that inspired the movie of a similar title.
It is very different. I think it’s set closer to the 80s (although it’s vague so far) and, most importantly, the Toons aren’t film workers but do photo shoots for comic strips, advertising, etc. The plot is only superficially similar in that Roger hires Eddie Valiant to do some Film Noir-cliche detective work for him. As per Film Noir convention, the plot gets deeper and more twisted.
The Toons speak in Speech Bubbles and are specifically forbidden from ‘human’ alcohol but have their own kind, which is described as ridiculously strong.
Mr. Wolf isn’t a bad writer, but I think he hit the jackpot when this got turned into a movie. The movie works better on some levels: It brings in the ‘horrible golden age of Hollywood’ tropes and loses the awkward writing around Toon characters shooting out a stream of word balloons.
Then there’s sequels: The sequels do the weird (but in this case, at least, correct) trick of moving to follow the movie storyline. I haven’t read them, but from what I’ve hear they explain the first book as a weird dream Roger had. I’ll probably read them too eventually.
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WFRR was good when it got released and hit the circuit.
I’m just glad they decided to make the toons talk normally. Think it would have looked ridiculous if they talked via speech bubbles, and we all had to pause the movie just to read what they’ve said.
Anyway.
When it came out, it put other similar themed movies who featured toons alongside humans (Mary Poppins etc) to shame, as care was taken with human-toon interaction.
I’m gonna watch it again. Ooklets will also enjoy it.
Still busy with GoT. Past Season 1, now busy with Season 2, introducing the Onion Knight.
And the Red Woman.
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One of my favorite characters.
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The movie holds up better than a lot of stuff from that era. The effects are pretty good (and, I’d argue, inspired a lot of later CGI gimmicks) because of doing things like having an armature move a ‘real’ object which is painted over by animators.
The behind-the-scenes is interesting: It’s commonly considered a ‘Disney’ property but it’s not wholly owned by them. There was an argument with Spielberg about other contracted movies so he was reluctant to work with them which is a major reason why we never got a sequel. The animation work was done in the UK and was really down to the wire to be completed by the release date.
The switch to normal speech greatly improved the concept besides probably being easier.
But, I can see it now: word balloons and the muted trombone from Peanuts.
I finished * Who Censored Roger Rabbit?* and it remained weird. The movie is much better I feel.
So in this world (which to my understanding the sequels retconned as a dream of Movie-style Roger’s) the Toons speed in speech bubbles which have a physical presence. This applies to cartoon tropes like ‘speed lines’, stars, etc. as well. There’s some (plot-relevant) stuff with this: Is a Toon’s last words a thing that an be considered evidence? There’s some suggestion that they’re permanent-is, while other places seem to suggest they fade quickly. Toons can also ‘doppel’ which is making a clone of themselves: The basic Toon is roughly similar in mortality to a human, but can imbue a clone of themselves to do stuff like dangerous stunts.
In general an issue is the book’s background felt like a poor economy of Weird Stuff. I find generally that sci-fi and fantasy often work best when there’s a minimum of new stuff. A story that explores “What if the world was mostly ours, but with one big new tech” is often better than a story where there’s tons of new tech/magic.
In this case Toons aren’t “new” to the setting’s 80s (the time is established by one or two references to tech that helps nail it down) but since Roger and others need to introduce facts of Toon to the less-knowledgable Eddie Valiant.
So Toons (in this work) are mostly used for comic strips, books, and advertising: They’re photographed (photographers being at least something of celebrities in and of themselves) which goes against one reason real-world cartoons made sense: Photos require more effort to print after all. More human-looking Toons can break into advertising (That’s Jessica Rabbit’s current gig) where being able to to stunts is impressive.
The bad is there’s a lot of casual racism and related stuff. The use of Toons as our target of racism is pretty much implicit, sure, but there’s also a weird divergence with a Persian restaurant that was a bit harsh and unnecessary. Not unusual for the time, though.
Like the movie, most of the characters are supposed to be flawed: The tropes of detective stories generally center on the protagonist as a flawed, damaged person who focuses on the story’s mystery as a form of redemption/therapy/absolution. This is true in both the RR movie and book, but the book strips Valiant of his history and just makes him come off as kind of a goon. He does clean up a bit, and it’s a messier, less pleasant world, so perhaps an ending where he does a song and dance number wouldn’t fit.
There’s also some mild abuse thrown at women and a crossdresser that comes off as a bit ugly and unnecessary, even for the genre.
I’ve read worse books and am interested to see how the sequel goes: From what I’ve heard, the sequel jumps to be more aligned with the movie canon and attributes the first book to a bad dream. I didn’t like the casual racism and similar and the premise seemed more complicated than the movie for minimal payoff. The movie is a much higher and better developed version of the concept, I feel.