I Am A Pirate

A couple of weeks ago, I fired up a p2p file sharing client and downloaded a movie with the express purpose of watching it. It was copyrighted and not distributed for download by its maker. But I feel no guilt for illegally downloading a movie.

My wife and I are big Terry Pratchett fans. We've read every one of his Discworld books. And last year, for her birthday, I ordered a DVD player I could hack to be region-free and had Amazon.co.uk ship me the UK release of SkyOne's Christmas miniseries of Hogfather (based on a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel of the same name).

So, when I found out that they'd done another Discworld miniseries, based on The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic, I was ecstatic. Only there was no DVD to buy. Not in America, not in the UK, nowhere could I find a legitimate DVD for sale. I wrote to SkyOne customer service and asked if there was an estimated release date for the DVD so I could buy it as soon as it became available. They wrote back and said that there were no plans to release it on DVD. But... but... but... wha???

As far as I was concerned, I'd done everything I could. I'd acted in good faith. They might stop me from buying the DVD, but they wouldn't stop me from seeing the movie. So I downloaded it.

That said... eh. One of my biggest gripes about film adaptations of books is when they change the character to fit the actor they cast to play him. Rincewind is a younger man, period. But they wanted David Jason, so they made Rincewind older. Twoflower, for all intents and purposes, was Chinese. So they cast Sean Astin.

Yeah, I thought the same thing you're thinking.

I will say that Jeremy Irons as Lord Vetinari was different than I expected. My wife and I had Alan Rickman on our Discworld casting wishlist, but Jeremy made the character his own. I still want James Earl Jones to take over as the voice of Death and I want Liam Neeson to play Sam Vimes. Just think of Liam, draped in muck, eyes flaring, shouting "where's my cow!" as he fights his way through a throng of dwarves.

If Brendan Fraser wasn't getting so long in the tooth, I'd recommend him for Carrot. It needs a Brendan Fraser type. They'd probably cast Kylie as Angua, not because she's right for the part, but because if they can find an excuse to cast Kylie... But I'm babbling.

I'm a pirate in the name of Terry Pratchett fandom and proud of it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.