Quote from: daniel_ream;920419Now I find myself wondering if Sam Raimi has read that, because there's an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys set in Atlantis that's eerily similar in visual style.

There's also that old George Pal movie version of Atlantis that featured heat ray turrets (along with submarines and a magically transformed boar-men slave class).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054642/

Quote from: Simlasa;920487There's also that old George Pal movie version of Atlantis that featured heat ray turrets (along with submarines and a magically transformed boar-men slave class).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054642/

Oh, that's almost certainly it then.  HTLJ cribbed a lot from old sword and sandal movies that nobody remembers.  People forget that it started as part of the Action Pack, which was quite literally "let's get the TV rights to 70's B movies and remake them".

Quote from: daniel_ream;920042While that's true, I would argue that many more people are familiar with the D&D tropes than non-D&D fantasy, if only because so much non-D&D fantasy has been so heavily influenced by D&D by this point.

A few years ago I'd have said Game of Thrones is the exception that proves the rule, but there seems to be an explosion of fantasy based on history with a thin gloss of magic over it right now and I hope that helps drag the genre away from D&D.

A more likely scenario is that with the popularity of GoT, there will be more tits and ass in future fantasy movies/TV shows.

Quote from: TristramEvans;920164This is a bit iffy of a conjecture. For one, while Tolkien did indeed popularize the notions you put forth,he was neither the first, nor is his interpretation that incongruent with folklore and myth. Victorian fantasy, if anything is the outlier. Anyone familiar with the Norse and Celtic mythology that Tolkien was drawing upon recognizes his interpretations as merely drawing on older sources than what would have been the "pop culture" or zeitgeist of his era (e.g. the Victorian nursery fairies). Moreover, in this regard, Tolkien was following in a tradition started before him with Lord Dunsany, William Morris, E.R. Eddison, etc. Beyond that, the elements you're claiming as "Tolkienesque" were not intrinsic to D&D, in fact not present at all in OD&D. They were a veneer dropped on after the fact, and by that point there were a number of other significant influences such as Poul Anderson that combined into a D&D interpretation of, for example, elves, which are not much like Tolkien's elves at all. Certainly the triad of Elf/dwarf/halfling is directly lifted from Tolkien, but its a surface addition to the game that in and of itself doesn't define D&D in any meaningful way.

Two generations of dumbasses never got this through their thick skulls. If only I had a dollar for every time someone whined "But... but... the elfs in LOTR are as tall as men, not shorter!" or "But... but... Gandalf used a sword!" I could have retired years ago.

That said, Tolkienesque fantasy is like the tomato sauce you use to make your own marinara. It's a simple, convenient and generic enough place to start and it's easy to add what you want to make your own special blend. Tolkien was but one of many pinches and dashes Gygax used to create D&D. He just happens to be the most popular by a huge margin, so a number of gamers to this day assume that every setting should be like Middle Earth.

Quote from: Bren;920382There's a Shannara TV series. Watched the first half dozen episodes. It sucked.

Wow? I read about the Urshurak movie back in 79. Took em 34 years?

Quote from: Onix;920195And Edison didn't invent the light bulb by himself. He had a crew of researchers. But he was the person who brought it to the public. In the same way, Tolkien didn't create in a vacuum but he popularized the genre. Even if D&D's creators read all Tolkien's influences and contemporaries (which they likely did) through the 80's and 90's whenever someone tried to pitch a D&D game, they would ask "Have you read Lord of the Rings?" It is the touchstone that people would reference.

Again I'm not saying D&D = Tolkien, but you're suffering from the curse of knowledge. As someone who has dipped deeply into the game and compared it to the literature, the gulf seems like the Mariana Trench. To anyone else who looks at the map, and compares the two, it's just a line on the map and the two are situated right next to each other. Sure there's some water between them, but they're in the same region.

Because of the curse of knowledge I doubt you'll be able to see it from that perspective though. That's okay, but for the majority of humans, D&D bears more than a passing resemblance to Tolkien. Yes there are differences, I'll grant that in spades. It was clearly written with many influences but when you make the D&D poster it looks an awful lot like the Lord of the Rings roster in a dungeon fighting Smaug.

I understand the argument, I guess my point is that masses believing it so doesn't seem a good enough argument to make it so. So yeah, I may come across as the geeky pedant every time I object to D&D being called "Tolkienesque", but then again, really how many of the masses are ever even going to employ that term? And yeah, its an uphill, pointless battle educating one person at a time about the wide gulf I'm perceiving vs their bird's eye view of a map, but heck, making pointless pedantic geeky arguments is 88% of the reason I post on forums

Quote from: AaronBrown99;919912You're completely wrong. Sex differences are clear and obvious, only modernist/hegelian insanity says that men and women are the same. We act differently, we think differently, we face challenges differently.

Heres the rub in REAL life yes men and women have different tendency's but in fiction these things break down the fact that people except these breaks from reality to a reasonable degree is called suspension of disbelief.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the gender of a character has little to do with characterization unless its tied to something.

For example if you write a story and the only different between the main character is there gender you will perceive them as different even though the only thing that changed is there gender.

That is to say there characterization didn't change but your perception of them did.
A good example of what im getting at can be found in Kinos journey where your perception of Kino tends to be different in the tv show compared to the books.

You see in the books Kino is written gender-less But in the tv show do to need of a voice and covering how Kino became a traveler they ended up gendered.
Because of this people who watch the tv show tend to think of Kino as a girl.
Where as in the peaple who have read the books its pretty even split with a margin that think of Kino as gender-less.

 

Another example can be found in Assuko Asano's  no.6 where she has talked about how both the main characters Shion and Nezumi could have just as easily been women.

Whats more she played with that idea a lot and show cased it even in the final work.

The only reason they both have to be the same sex is because she wanted people to focus on there interactions as people and not assume that they where automatically romantic.

Or even look at the myriad of charters that are women that could be men and you would not know the difference this also goes the other way as well with male characters that could as easily be women and you wouldn't know the difference.

Quote from: Omega;9203501: Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam. Its not Star Wars. It just uses clips from it and has some inevitable costume rip-offs. Weird movie.

2: Star Wreck? Thats Finnish. There is though a Turkish Star Trek that actually is a Star Trek rip-off.

Well yah Turkish star wars isnt a full on knock off still ballsy to rip some of that  footage though.
As to the Russian star trek its a thing we have a book on tv shows that talks about it .
And its Russian made during the cold war some time big speeches about Lenin and the like.

Quote from: kosmos1214;920715Another thing to keep in mind is that the gender of a character has little to do with characterization unless its tied to something.

[...]

Or even look at the myriad of charters that are women that could be men and you would not know the difference this also goes the other way as well with male characters that could as easily be women and you wouldn't know the difference.

Utter, utter bollocks.

If your media field is entirely recent anime, then your conclusion is going to be severely biased by the fact that Japan is currently undergoing a massive national masculinity crisis.  Japanese men are increasingly more passive, submissive and feminized.  Forget breeding, people aren't even having sex any more because Japanese men have pretty much given up on pursuing women, as well as other traditionally male pursuits.  The country is in irreparable demographic collapse at this point.  This is reflected in their popular culture and their media.

What sex[1] people are absolutely defines their character, outlook, behaviour and actions; media that people actually consume reflects this.


[1] Gender is for nouns.  Biological organisms have sex.  Unless they're Japanese.

Quote from: daniel_ream;920745Japanese men are increasingly more passive, submissive and feminized.  Forget breeding, people aren't even having sex any more because Japanese men have pretty much given up on pursuing women, as well as other traditionally male pursuits.  The country is in irreparable demographic collapse at this point.  This is reflected in their popular culture and their media.

As an occasional anime watcher with little investment in the genre's life or death, I have raised a skeptical eyebrow and wish to know details pertinent to this theory. How exactly is a sexless demographic crash reflected in their media?

Quote from: kosmos1214;920717As to the Russian star trek its a thing we have a book on tv shows that talks about it .
And its Russian made during the cold war some time big speeches about Lenin and the like.

According to a quick search apparently Cosmos Patrol from the 60s never existed. There is though Москва - Кассиопея from the 70s. Though only in a general "exploration ship" sort of way from what have seen so far.

Quote from: Omega;920779According to a quick search apparently Cosmos Patrol from the 60s never existed.

There's always Raumpatrouille Orion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1OKB0yXh0E

Quote from: AaronBrown99;919648What's wrong is that they're typically just male characters in girl costumes (see any Joss Whedon 90lb girl knocking out 200lb men with one hit).

GRRRRL POWER!

It gets old FAST.

Ehh? Just have to say for the record here, that a kick from any classically trained ballet dancer, like say Summer Glau, can be a completely crippling experience for any man.

When I was much younger, I played football, full tackle football. However my greatest sports injury occurred while dancing Shaherizad when I was kicked by my partner (whom was not my first choice as a partner as I had been practicing with another young lady, except that for the actual performance the choreographer had insisted I dance with the Primadonna at the last minute without a rehearsal or any chance to practice to accomodate style differences. She was a spoiled little brat, who could not dance.), this extremely clumsy ballerina wearing pointe shoes. She was in a full spin at the time and had drifted slightly like an off-balance top in toward where I was holding up another ballerina, and she caught me perfectly.

Thank god for cups, or I would have never had children after that. As a result  I dropped my charge, and we had to end that dance segment early and close the curtain. Shortly after that I crawled off of the stage in agony, and it would be a couple weeks before I would dance again. The Ballerina, maybe 104 tops. Me, 165, and crippled with a single spinning kick...

In that scene in the Odi Bar where River Tam grabbed Jayne by the balls and then reverse kicked him in the back of the head with her combat boots, this made me flinch as I instantaneously remembered my own experiences with the Shaherizad.

Quote from: GameDaddy;920790Ehh? Just have to say for the record here, that a kick from any classically trained ballet dancer, like say Summer Glau, can be a completely crippling experience for any man.

When I was much younger, I played football, full tackle football. However my greatest sports injury occurred while dancing Shaherizad when I was kicked by my partner (whom was not my first choice as a partner as I had been practicing with another young lady, except that for the actual performance the choreographer had insisted I dance with the Primadonna at the last minute without a rehearsal or any chance to practice to accomodate style differences. She was a spoiled little brat, who could not dance.), this extremely clumsy ballerina wearing pointe shoes. She was in a full spin at the time and had drifted slightly like an off-balance top in toward where I was holding up another ballerina, and she caught me perfectly.

Thank god for cups, or I would have never had children after that. As a result  I dropped my charge, and we had to end that dance segment early and close the curtain. Shortly after that I crawled off of the stage in agony, and it would be a couple weeks before I would dance again. The Ballerina, maybe 104 tops. Me, 165, and crippled with a single spinning kick...

In that scene in the Odi Bar where River Tam grabbed Jayne by the balls and then reverse kicked him in the back of the head with her combat boots, this made me flinch as I instantaneously remembered my own experiences with the Shaherizad.

You still didn't disprove his statement.

ONE PUNCH.  Not a kick to the genitals which will take down just about anything.  But a punch to the head, from a 100lbs. woman to a combat trained 180+ male.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;920814You still didn't disprove his statement.

ONE PUNCH.  Not a kick to the genitals which will take down just about anything.  But a punch to the head, from a 100lbs. woman to a combat trained 180+ male.

While certainly anything can happen, there's a good reason that the UFC and other organizations have weight classes. Ronda Rousey or Joanna Jedrzejczyk can beat up a lot of guys out there, but as badass as they are they'd get their butts handed to them if they ever had to take on someone like Daniel Cormier or Michael Bisping in a fight.

That's why I always have to suspend disbelief when I see much smaller fighters, male or female, wading through supposedly capable opposition in movies and television shows. It happens a lot.