In memory of Terry Pratchett, the Glorious 25th, and the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road...



... I thought I'd bring this back one more time.

The News



After fifteen -- fifteen! -- years, the Discworld fan-film (if you can even still call something that features Rob Wilkins as Executive Producer a fan-film) Troll Bridge is finally ready for release! The official trailer has dropped here, and you can also see their website here.

If you want a copy for yourself, apparently they're in a weird position where they can only take money while they're still able to spend it on the film. That means that it's essentially pre-order only. You can find the options here.

(My thanks to Discworld Monthly for letting me know about this; I've been receiving it for close to two decades now, and it's great for dropping tidbits like this.)

The Missions



The PPC has a long history with the Discworld, and it all began when the Original Series was kicked off Fanfiction.net. Suddenly, Jay and Acacia were no longer constrained by the rule that your story had to be set in a single fandom. Pretty much immediately, they transferred their agents to the Department of Implausible Crossovers; a couple of missions later, they paid their first visit to the Disc.

The Luggage Runs Off With the One Ring

There haven't been all that many other missions onto the Disc. I did a few, and there's a handful from random people, but I'm going to link here to the only other team who's done more than one mission into the continuum:

A Promise To Be Kept stars the ever-famous Agents Trojie and Pads, along with July and Library. Confession: I haven't actually read it. I intend to fix that today. ^_^

The OFU



There is an Official Fanfiction University of Discworld, written by me. It's one of the very few completed OFUs, and yes, I do someday plan to do a sequel. (To my knowledge, no-one has ever completed an OFU sequel, so...)

The Work-in-Progress



I actually have a PPC story with a bit of a Discworld bent in the works. Here's a snippet, though be aware that I have no idea when I'm going to finish it:

It's a grand life for the Nac Mac Feegle clan here in the Headquarters o'the bigjobs' PPC. There's nae beasties to hassle ye, nae lawyers to go writin' yer name, and nae Quin o'th'Fairies sneakin' in every Friday night. Well… that is to say, the mini-beasties are quite friendly, the lawyers never leave their lair, and the Fair Folk are all agents who never have time to play their tricks. It comes out to the same thing, ye ken?

The Fannish Idea

I ran across this a few days ago, and was quite taken with the idea: what if the Discworld became a Cinematic Universe?

The page plots out four phases, 22 films spanning the length and breadth of the Discworld series. I like the fact that they're willing to take a few liberties with the timeline to make the series work - for instance, they have The Colour of Magic as the seventh movie, after Rincewind has already been introduced - but I think they might take it too far at times. The idea of Tiffany Aching playing Agnes Nitt's role in Carpe Jugulum doesn't sit well with me, partly because Agnes is a very cool character, but also because it means seriously messing with Tiffany's very tightly-plotted arc; their Carpe takes place after Tiffany has only had two films, so she's still very early in her witchery.

I do like the way they've pretty much used the Susan books as the end-of-phase teamups. I don't know if it was intentional, but that's how it falls out, and I think it works. Susan has a habit of dragging in other characters.

On the flip-side, I'm not at all fond of the 'every mid-credits sting leads directly into the next movie' conceit. They clearly had fun with it, but they also had to stretch badly for some of them. The biggest one is that they frame Small Gods with two scenes establishing it as a story told by Mightily Oats to Tiffany, which... fine, I guess, but given that it contains almost no characters with actual relevance, I don't see the point. (What you'd actually use Small Gods for, in addition to 'for its own benefit', is to establish the character of Lu-Tze and the History Monks. They already make cameos, so amplify that and set things up for Thief of Time.)

Ultimately, it's clearly an idea they've put some thought into. They allow for their actors to rotate out, carefully bringing Tiffany in late to fill the young-hero Spiderman role, and the overall narrative they're telling holds at least vaguely together. The biggest issue, though, is that unlike comics (where the source material has been changed countless times already), the Discworld is a single series with a defined plot. I don't know that the fanbase would appreciate the drastic changes they propose, and I don't know that you could sell Guards! Guards! (their first movie) to an audience that didn't know it already.

Ultimately, assuming the estate would even allow such monkeying, I think the whole thing would swing on the actors. Much like Robert Downey Jr carried the MCU through to the first Avengers, whoever played Sam Vimes would need to be similarly amazing.

hS