Shannara coming to television

[AnemicOak]

An official first look from Comic-Con at the upcoming TV series based on Terry Brooks' popular fantasy series. The first season will focus on events that take place in The Elfstones of Shannara.

[fjtorres]

Hmm, the production team has good SF&F cred but, MTV?
Most odd.

[AnemicOak]

I thought that too when I saw it. Of course MTV hasn't really been "Music Television", like it was when I was growing up, for years now.

[GERGE]

I never really liked Shannara books. Maybe a refined TV Show might be better. Let's hope so.

[drofgnal]

Impressive trailer for a TV show.

[booklover6]

I read the first book in junior high school and really loved it. I may have read the next two, but then stopped. I am definitely interested in the show! Can't wait to show my kid. I've been telling him he ought to listen to the audio book.

[pwalker8]

Interesting, so it skips the original book, The Sword of Shannara? Interesting. I still have my copy of the Original Sword of Shannara with illustrations by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I'm pretty I still have my copy of the Elfstones of Shannara sitting around as well ( I think the Brothers Hildrebrandt did those illustrations as well, but am not sure). It's been a long time since I read the Elfstones. I have the Sword in ebook, but not the others. Hum, I see Amazon has the trilogy in ebooks. Ch-Ching. More money for Terry Brooks.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Interesting, so it skips the original book, The Sword of Shannara?

Possibly because (as Brooks himself acknowledges) it's a blatant rip-off of LOTR, from which it lifts the entire plot and many of the characters. It was really only with "Elfstones" that Brooks started writing his own books.

As Wikipedia says:

In 1978, the influential fantasy editor Lin Carter denounced The Sword of Shannara as "the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read". Elaborating on his disapproval of the book, Carter wrote that "Terry Brooks wasn't trying to imitate Tolkien's prose, just steal his story line and complete cast of characters, and [Brooks] did it with such clumsiness and so heavy-handedly, that he virtually rubbed your nose in it."

Assessing The Sword of Shannara three decades after its publication, the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey ... found that the novel was distinctive for "the dogged way in which it follow[ed] Tolkien point for point". Within Brooks' novel, Shippey located "analogues" for Tolkien characters such as Sauron (Brona), Gandalf (Allanon), the Hobbits (Shea and Flick), Aragorn (Menion), Boromir (Balinor), Gimli (Hendel), Legolas (Durin and Dayel), Gollum (Orl Fane), the Barrow-wight (Mist Wraith) and the Nazgûl (Skull Bearers), among others.[33] He also found plot similarities to events in The Lord of the Rings such as the Fellowship of the Ring's formation and adventures, the journeys to Rivendell (Culhaven) and Lothlórien (Storlock), Gandalf's (Allanon) fall in Moria (Paranor) and subsequent reappearance, and the Rohirrim's arrival at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields (Battle of Tirsys), among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sw...d_of_the_Rings

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Interesting, so it skips the original book, The Sword of Shannara? Interesting.

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!

[theducks]

MTV?
How do you subscribe-watch this series if all you have (want) is OTA TV?

New Zealand is fast becoming a Epic-Fantasy film center

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by theducks

New Zealand is fast becoming a Epic-Fantasy film center

That's 'cause New Zealand is a really cool country

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Possibly because (as Brooks himself acknowledges) it's a blatant rip-off of LOTR, from which it lifts the entire plot and many of the characters. It was really only with "Elfstones" that Brooks started writing his own books.

As Wikipedia says:





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sw...d_of_the_Rings

Blatant rip-off is somewhat extreme. Did he use certain plot conventions from LOTR? Sure, so have most of the high fantasy books since the 70's. It became a whole sub-genre for a while. The word Tolkienesque entered the vocabulary for a reason.
======================
Tolkienesque - resembling J.R.R. Tolkien or his writings, particularly the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A common theme in tolkienesque literature is a company of heroes embarking on a quest to defeat an evil dark lord. Other features are the presence of humanoid races found in Tolkien's fictional Middle-Earth, such as Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Trolls and/or Hobbits (Halflings)
=======================

To a great extent, that's the whole point of putting books in public domain,- using the public domain book (or music or movie) as the basis for a whole new work. One could write hours about the books that were inspired (i.e. blatant rip-offs) by Xenophon's The Anabasis (i.e. the March of the Ten Thousand) and there are some very good books out there that use the Anabasis plot line. The point is what an author does with the new work. Sometimes it's drek, sometimes it turns out quite well.

LOTR's itself was inspired by other works. There truly is little new under the sun.

btw, I will point out that it's extremely rich that Lin Carter, who was best know for writing pastiches, would criticize anyone for using another work as an inspiration. I also note that in the wiki article, Brooks acknowledges that Tolkien was a major influence, not that it was a rip-off. I think that Frank Herbert is correct in his defense of Brooks.

[tubemonkey]

Tolkienesque - resembling J.R.R. Tolkien or his writings, particularly the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A common theme in tolkienesque literature is a company of heroes embarking on a quest to defeat an evil dark lord. Other features are the presence of humanoid races found in Tolkien's fictional Middle-Earth, such as Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Trolls and/or Hobbits (Halflings)

I'm gonna start me a story that has nothing in common with LOTR. I'll call my place Liddle-Mearth and it'll be inhabited by Olves, Arcs, Dwurves, Trills and/or Hebbits (Wholelings)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Blatant rip-off is somewhat extreme. Did he use certain plot conventions from LOTR? Sure, so have most of the high fantasy books since the 70's. It became a whole sub-genre for a while.

There is, however, a significant difference between "using certain plot conventions", and using the same story, point for point, which is what Brooks did. I read "The Sword of Shannara" soon after it first came out in 1977, and even I, as a teenager, instantly recognised that it was a rip-off of LOTR. It really is that blatant, to my mind.

[DiapDealer]

In Brooks' defense, I don't think it was "blatant." Blatant as in, "I'm going to sit down and write a story that is LoTR with different colored trousers." Inspired by Tolkien (as many writers were), a lawyer-cum-wanna-be-writer started writing an epic fantasy (when epic fantasy wasn't being published). After pounding away at what turned out to be the first two-thirds of Sword of Shannara, he grew dissatisfied with the way his story was going (because he knew it was closer to ripoff than homage--which was not his intent). After taking a long, soul-searching break, he returned to the project and finished the last third of the book. Which—to anyone who paid attention when reading the book—is exactly where the plot deviated from the formula of Tolkien's masterpiece. That was where/when Brooks discovered his own voice and his own style and never looked back from there. He went on to write 32-and-a-third more novels with no resemblance to Tolkien's plots (unless one wants to grant an unlimited patent to Tolkien on elves, monsters and magic).

So it's really about time to put the "Shannara is a Ripoff of LoTR" meme to bed. It's not as if he's the only fantasy writer to get his/her start writing about a Party on a Quest with/for an Artifact led by a Wise (yet not completely forthcoming) Old Man with special gifts.

Twenty-seven Shannara books and counting, with twenty-seven non-LoTR-like conclusions, and twenty-six non-LoTR-like beginnings and middles; yet someone always wants to dwell on the first two-thirds of the very first book of a burgeoning fantasy author who didn't quite have his feet under him yet (and recognized it).

Give the ripoff bit a rest. Whether you like the Shannara series or not, it's not fair to the guy's body of work ... which speaks entirely for itself (in its own voice).

I'm not saying the various plot-point comparisons/analyses aren't valid. I'm just saying the ridiculous scrutiny of Sword of Shannara was at least partly due to the fact that it had the (mis)fortune of being the first commercially successful epic fantasy since LoTR was published (and/or culturally embraced). So it got branded with the stigma that the virtual flood of LoTR ripoffs that followed were able to avoid for the most part.