Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Interesting, so it skips the original book, The Sword of Shannara? Interesting.
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Elfstones is quite often pointed to as a favorite with fans of the books series. It has a diverse cast of characters, a memorable storyline, and the stuff that came before in Sword of Shannara can easily be filled in along the way. Thus avoiding the plotpoint-by-plotpoint ripoff of LoTR that the first two thirds of Sword represents (as pointed out by critics--
and owned up to by Terry Brooks himself in various conversations) that would probably kill the show before it started. It makes sense to avoid all that by starting with Elfstones (the various stalled Shannara movie projects were going in this direction as well).
I hear they're also "de-subtleizing" the far-future, post-apocalyptic, our-world setting that Terry teased readers with for so many years (with so few actual words). I think this is a good move, too. It will serve to set it even further apart from other popular fantasy TV series/movies without completely alienating fans of those others.
This will, of course, upset those purist fans who get "all het up" about faithful adaptions and such, but I welcome it. And as much as I cherish my nostalgic memories of devouring the original trilogy as a lad when they were first published (plot-point analysis was never my strong-suit at ten years old
); the post-apoc, far-future teases the books contained never quite satisfied my curiosity for more of it.
The "newer" Shannara books have held less and less appeal for me as the years rolls by, but I'll be checking this one out. Can't remember the last time I turned to MTV, though. Don't even recall what channel it is offhand!