"Conan the Barbarian returns as animated Amazon series" Topic

link

Interesting, not that I have a Amazon Prime account.

Cartoon = pass for me.

This guy did Primal and the early years of Clone Wars. I'm in.

Amazon? Pass.
"Animated"? Pass pass.

+1 @Flashman14

The first season of Primal was great.

Tarkovsky as in Stalker?

Never understood the resistance to animated shows. If a tale is well told and well presented, the manner of the presentation should matter not at all, or indeed might well be a high artistic endeavor. Hand-drawn animation is an art form, and sometimes exceptional. That it lends itself well to child audiences isn't relevant— some of the greatest literary masterpieces were written for children.
Also not relevant is that animation is often used for humorous stories. Is not wit itself a literary art? Shall we toss aside Shakespeare because of his comedies?
(And I defy one to create comedic art as terrific as "High Diving Hare" or "Rabbit Seasoning"— or for that matter, dialogue so richly humorous.)
Animation, even humorous animation, is serious art.

What animation does do is allow for visual construction of scenes and elements which could not be achieved with live action filming. Appearance, color, movement can be crafted to a precise degree, while stylized imagery and exaggerated features can produce different moods, thematic situations, and more in a very effective way.

Now, I'm not trying to pre-defend this particular endeavor. It could be utter carp. The art could wind up being bad. The dialog could be flat. Conan might wind up coming across like a Yorkie having a go at a mail-man. I've no idea. But if so, it won't be the fact of animated or unanimated that makes the difference, here or there. It will be a failing in the trio it always is: writing, directing, acting.
Nothing else really matters.

Genndy Tartakovsky has an overall excellent track record. I'm on old guy now, but I loved Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, the real Clone Wars animated, ect. I'm hopeful.

BTW that movie poster has Samurai Jack vibes.

I see this as a gateway for another generation to learn about Conan and REH.

Check out what Amazon did to Tolkien in Rings of Power.
Then guess how Amazon will handle "toxic masculinity" from Conan.

Good Point.

+1 OFM. Amazon will make a hash of it.

What's to hash? REH wrote for the "penny a word" pulp fiction magazine world. Conan is male fantasy escapism with some "weird world" stuff thrown in.
This ain't no great literary work. Killer apes, giant snakes, willing women, evil wizards/noblemen/priests/ wizard-noblemen-priests and some muscles and a big sword… imaginative and original, but let's not get it confused with Shakespeare (or even Tolkien, for that matter).
It's schlock. Great schlock, maybe, but schlock.

I suppose you could try to go woke and make something lamer than a octoplegic giant squid, but the guy behind it all doesn't seem to swing that way. Pretty solid track record for adult-oriented animated action stuff.
Either way, it's pretty damn hard to over-schlock Conan. What's to ruin?

Maybe with the toxic masculinity issue that will make Conan gay or trans? I mean if we can have a woman play Achilles…

I'll give it a shot. I like REH's works for what they are, not what I want them to be. Parzival makes very valid points. If it sucks, it sucks and I'll stop watching it. I liked Genndy Tartakovsky's other animation shows, good times and good memories, I'll try it and determine if I like it and move forward from there.
That being said, I hope it's good, could always use ideas for games.

"What's to ruin?"

Parzival, have you ever READ pastiche Conan? Or even real Conan with the deCamp bits excised? Karl Edward Wagner said it just wasn't possible to duplicate Howard--and he was one of the people who was paid to try. Not that I would expect Amazon, still cranking out "Rings of Power" to try very hard.

I have exactly three volumes of pastiche Holmes on my shelves as good as Arthur Conan Doyle, and maybe better. But that's out of literally thousands of volumes of pastiche Holmes.

And you must someday explain to me the logic by which you determine literary merit by the pay received by the author. Somewhere along the way, work out how much Jane Austen received for Pride & Prejudice. The inflation adjustment might be tricky, but I bet it was less than REH's penny a word. I don't think ACD did much if any better with A Study in Scarlet.

Oh. Just to start the ball rolling. Austen got 110 GBP for 122,189 words--1,110 words for each 1813 pound, or between four and five words per British penny. ACD didn't do so well--25 GBP for 43,000 words--1,720 words for each 1887 pound, or a bit over seven words per British penny. Good luck with the inflation adjustment, and I trust this puts an end to taking either of them seriously as writers.

Yep. Still mad. Using measuringworth.com and usinflationcalculator P&P netted Jane Austen 12,200 2026 dollars, or ten cents a word, give or take. ACD's 25 1887 pounds comes to 4,500 2026 dollars, so still about ten cents a word. But let's also pay Two-Gun Bob. One US cent a word in 1935 works out to nearly a quarter a word today. Pay him $740 USD FDR dollars for the roughly 74,000 word Hour of the Dragon, and it would be 18 grand in Trump's second term. Clearly he was more than twice the writer that Austen and Conan Doyle were.

OR we could stop slinging around "penny a word pulp fiction" as a measure of literary merit. Plot, characterization and prose style are measures of a writer--not his pay, not the other works printed by the same publisher or in the same magazine, and most especially not the quality of the paper his works are printed on. Otherwise, I'd have to take the authors of Dreams of My Father, Why not the Best? and The Art of the Deal seriously as authors.

I was on a Flashman group. Someone wrote a Flashman pastiche about his service in the American Civil War.
Bear in mind that Fraser was happy to include contradictory anecdotes, just for fun. But he refused to write a Flashman novel about the ACW, because he lamented two White nations representing the cream of White civilization tearing themselves apart. Yup. Racist a bit? 🙄
But someone decided to self publish a Flashman pastiche.
I called him out, and he re-wrote it without Flashman. Which tells you how good it was.

Anyway…
I reject all Conan stories not written by REH. That includes Lin Carter, deCamp…
I've also avoided all pastiches. If the original author didn't write it…

My point was that "penny a word" promotes over-writing. Because even writers from that era of payment admit that it does. The word that should have been excised, the sentence that repeated the idea already expressed, the extended description of a place, person or thing of no significance, all are preserved because the writer gets more money if he pads it out. (Game of Thrones ring a bell?)

I have read REH Conan. I have not read not-REH Conan. Since I have little interest in reading the former again, I have even less interest in reading anybody trying to imitate him, whether they do it well or poorly.

The Conan stories are bloated, purple, turgid prose— they just happen to also be imaginative and evocative, which overcomes the previous qualities to some extent. He ain't Shakespeare. Or Bradbury (a near contemporary, whose writing is exceptionally good). Had REH not taken his own life, he might well have honed his craft for the better… but that we can never truly know.

REH's style is overblown and wordy, even if we set aside the penny-word comment. But he created a unique character (more than one), a different world (or alternate time), and started a genre. I give him credit for that. But no, I don't consider his work to be a mark of literary greatness on a level with more celebrated writers, even in the genre he created, or certainly its siblings in fantasy, or cousins in science fiction.

That's my opinion of REH and Conan. If yours differs, well, it differs. But "mad" about it? What's the point of that?

Again, great schlock and entertaining schlock. But schlock… in my opinion.

:eyeroll:

Sorry. I'm touchy about judging the work by the pay. But all payment methods carry penalties. Pay by the word--and almost all magazine sales were and are paid by the word--and you have no incentive to cut. Pay by the line and you get Dumas' dialogue--
"you think so?"
"Yes."
"Truly?"
(Yes, Dumas was so paid, starting out.)
Pay for the novel regardless of length, and I have some mid-range Spenser novels--well, no I don't: they weren't keepers.

But contemplate that "unique character" when you get blase about an adaptation. Who in Hollywood these days does unique characters--much less respects someone else's?

If we're lucky, the new project sinks like a rock. If not, there will be another generation which thinks they know Howard or Conan and in fact has no clue.

Generally, while I'm sure the workshop/MFA crowd love it, I have my doubts about "honing his craft"--or anyone's craft, really. Howard had been a professionally published author for 12 years by the time of his suicide, and had sold a bookshelf of stories. One of Piepenbrink's Rules of Thumb is that within ten years or ten novels of first success, practically everyone has addressed the issues which interest them, included all the interesting characters they know or can invent, and set a story in pretty much every setting they're familiar with. There are exceptions, even if it's odd to mention Shakespeare and Terry Pratchett together, but much more often they either repeat themselves or amp up the ideological volume--late Heinlein, late LeGuin, late M.Z. Bradley, late George Chesbro…

Style. Yeah, Howard's is a more adjective-heavy one than is now fashionable. Many were at the time, even among people paid at a higher word rate. I find it suits him. Bradbury, please note, is NOT a literary contemporary. Bradbury didn't publish until two years after Howard was in the ground. And while I've read a bit of Bradbury, the only thing which stays on the shelves is "Lorelei of the Red Mist" which he completed for Leigh Brackett--absolutely seamless, and she left no outline and gave no verbal guidance. I think that one time, Bradbury channelled his inner Brackett, because nothing else of his resembles his half of that story.

I think that's a pity. But many Bradbury fans would disagree.

Oh. And I specifically mentioned deCamp and Carter, because, unlike the later blatant pastiches, they can sneak up on you. ALL the Conan published in the 1950's 1960's and early 1970's was at least "edited" by deCamp--sometimes grossly so--outlines and incomplete drafts went out as finished work when deCamp and Carter were through with them, or integrated into the same volume. It's easy for a casual reader to read such and think he's reading Howard. Poul Anderson's pastiche Conan may not be any good, but at least it doesn't claim to be Howard. (And I like Poul Anderson--when he's writing his own stuff.)

Had Howard lived on (he was only 30), his continued work would have coincided with Bradbury's career. Thus I said they were "near contemporaries"— because they were.

For Bradbury, one needs to read The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Summer, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric, at the very least. Evocative, tight, often beautiful… Bradbury is superb. He's among my favorite authors. Prolific without becoming callous, careless or clichéd. REH could have learned a lot from Bradbury. And their interests overlapped— Bradbury loved Edgar Rice Burroughs's works, and quite probably read REH, though I can't prove that. It certainly seems he would have known of successful others in the field (and magazines) he was writing for. If so, I don't know what he thought of it. But the man loved Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, not to mention horror stories and monster stories, so Conan seems right up his alley, as far as subject matter goes.

I get why people like Conan. I just don't myself. Which is odd, because I like the idea of Conan a great deal— just not the execution.

You're right: I missed the "near." But it isn't that I'm unfamiliar with Bradbury: it's that for me he doesn't resonate. The stories rarely reach me emotionally. But yes, very much the overlapping circle. Bradbury was part of LA science fiction community as a fan and later aspirant writer, tutored by Leigh (Planet Stories) Brackett and Ed (Captain Future) Hamilton, who used to double date with C L (Jirel of Joiry) Moore and Henry Kuttner--so at least two Weird Tales writers, and Kuttner, like Howard, contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos. But I tend to see Bradbury as the next generation along with Robert Bloch.