FLAPJACKS: Why are we here?
ME: Is that an existential question or a specific one?
FLAPJACKS: The second one. Why are we at the One of a Kind Show?
ME: Because I’m Christmas shopping.
FLAPJACKS: That doesn’t answer the question, though. That explains what you’re doing. It doesn’t explain why you’re in the land of magically high prices. We had to pay just to get in the door!
ME: No we didn’t.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, we didn’t, because you “know people.” But spiritually we paid to get in the door.
ME: That doesn’t make any sense.
FLAPJACKS: Neither does shopping where you have to pay fourteen bucks just to get in the door for the privilege of shopping, but hey, look at all these people.
ME: Look, there’s perfectly nice stuff here.
FLAPJACKS: I’m not saying it’s not nice. It’s very nice. Except for that guy selling the clay goblins.
ME: I missed that.
FLAPJACKS: He wanted thirty dollars each for the small ones. He wasn’t getting much traffic.
ME: So maybe he misjudged his potential market. Why is that so bad?
FLAPJACKS: Because he is this entire show in microcosm. Handmade stuff that nobody wants for too much money.
ME: Well, it’s handmade. The entire ethos of this show is –
FLAPJACKS: Look, I get it. It’s nice to have nice things that people made, sure, and not all of the stuff for sale here is clay goblins. But let’s be honest: we walked through this entire thing twice before you bought anything, and it was because you were visibly wincing at the prices.
ME: I was really hoping that wasn’t that obvious.
FLAPJACKS: It was.
ME: It’s not that it isn’t nice stuff.
FLAPJACKS: If I may give you an example? You looked appreciatively at a pepper mill that was made from a hollowed-out tree branch. And I agree, that was a clever bit of craftsmanship. But they wanted seventy dollars for that pepper mill, which, let’s be blunt, did not take more than a couple of hours to make if you don’t count the time for the lacquer on the outside to dry. Figure that the raw materials cost them ten bucks or so, including amortizing the cost of the drill, and that is sixty dollars’ worth of labour. That person is telling you that his labour to create tree-branch pepper mills is worth thirty dollars an hour. Extrapolate that out to a forty-hour workweek and that’s sixty thousand dollars a year in income. Is tree-branch pepper mill creation worth that?
ME: I think you’re picking an outside example that you perceive as particularly easy, simple and reproducible. I mean, there’s a guy here who makes watches. That’s not easy. Surely we’re willing to pay a premium for skill?
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, but you overlook the fact that his prices are actually reasonable. Like, he starts at $400 or so for a wristwatch and the craftsmanship is obvious. If you want a fancy watch, his watches are not unreasonable as compared to going to… okay, I don’t know who makes fancy watches in the corporate world. Fancy Watch Place or something. The watch guy’s wares are priced comparably to what one might buy elsewhere – as compared to the two other places that were selling watches, which were showier, uglier, and more expensive for what they were.
ME: This seems like a bad apples argument. The fashion sellers here aren’t overpricing as compared to designer originals. The artists selling painted goods aren’t selling their art for less than what you’d buy it elsewhere. Original anything is more expensive.
FLAPJACKS: But shouldn’t there be a ceiling on what more expensive should be? I mean, look at that circular scarf over there. It’s pretty nice, granted. But it’s twenty-eight bucks at American Apparel.
ME: But this one is handmade from wool. I think actually that might make a good Christmas present for somebody. Excuse me, how much are those scarves?
DEALER SPEAKING IN ROUGH FRENCH ACCENT: Fifty-five.
FLAPJACKS: I suppose that isn’t too bad.
ME: It’s only about double the price, and that’s fair for not having to pay to produce their I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-fetish-porn catalogue, right?
FLAPJACKS: I concur. Go forth and shop.
ME: All right. Excuse me, I would like to purchase this circular scarf, please.
OTHER DEALER SPEAKING MUCH BETTER ENGLISH: Well, that will be $135.
ME: Wait, what?
DEALER SPEAKING IN ROUGH FRENCH ACCENT: I am sorry, I think you mean regular scarf. Neverending scarf is one-thirty-five. I am sorry.
ME: Uh, yes. I have to just go hit a cash machine. I will be back… when I have enough money for this.
FLAPJACKS: We’re walking awfully fast here.
ME: Shutupshutupshutup.
FLAPJACKS: You realize they basically asked for an extra eighty bucks to sew the two ends of the scarf together?
ME: And that’s why I am not buying it. I will, in a very specific sense, never have enough money for that.
FLAPJACKS: Well, this is fascinating. We went from “I’m willing to pay that to avoid the fetish porn catalogue” to “okay, fine, I’ll pay to promote unhealthy depictions of women wearing T-shirts provocatively” in less than thirty seconds.
ME: I am not paying that much money for a scarf and I don’t care who knows it.
FLAPJACKS: Apparently you’re willing to sometimes pay double to buy ethically, but not five times as much. There’s probably an XKCD strip that could be made out of this incident.
ME: In all seriousness, I think you’re oversimplifying. At a certain point, doesn’t “handmade” lose attractiveness? I mean, this isn’t me endorsing slave labour, you understand. I avoid buying chocolate if I can’t be sure it isn’t the product of child labour, which discounts a lot of chocolate. But there’s nothing wrong with machine-produced goods so long as the machine operators get a fair wage and the goods are decent, and nowadays that is a fair amount of stuff.
FLAPJACKS: And I assume a fair wage is “whatever you think is reasonable” in this context?
ME: You’re being awfully judgemental today, you know that?
FLAPJACKS: I blame the clay goblin guy. When we passed his stall he was complaining that all the shoppers were buying the gourmet food things rather than clay goblins. What did you expect, clay goblin guy? The gourmet food items aren’t that much more expensive than regular food, and they give out free samples! Where is my free sample-size clay goblin?
ME: I’m pretty sure that business model doesn’t work, like, ever. Also I note your “whatever I think is reasonable” sarcasm is now coming back to bite you in the ass.
FLAPJACKS: Well, I think it’s time to re-evaluate the “artisan” business model. If you want to see things on the basis that you made them and this makes them intrinsically better than, I dunno, mass-produced clay goblins, then you have to come up with a way to sell more of them, and that means lowering your price at least a little.
ME: But isn’t this the “Henry Ford was wrong” scenario? That the only solution is for all of us to lower the cost of our labour until only a few can profit?
FLAPJACKS: I’ve already got that covered, Mr. Occupy Whatever. I plan to become a plutocrat.
ME: But you have no appreciable skills beyond a capability to borrow woks and not return them.
FLAPJACKS: Metaphorically, is that not more or less the entire premise of the financial industry at this point?
ME: …you make a reasonable point.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Yes, I have been off in the desert. I have been contemplating the universal truths, eating nothing but locusts and honey, letting the poisonous snakes nibble on my tender bits and hallucinating from their venom, letting my beard grow out as I became sunburned and progressively insane. And now, having become wise in the ways of the universe, I return to you to speak…of Muppets.

Let’s get the least-important part out of the way first. No, the voices aren’t as good. Kermit and Miss Piggy are a reasonable approximation of their old selves, mainly because it’s difficult to tell whether Kermit is reedy and hesitant on purpose or by accident, but Fozzie’s voice has lost that braying quality that was so distinctive, and Rowlf sounds so off and has so little dialogue that they’d have been smarter to write him out entirely. But that’s miniscule stuff. The voices were always going to change someday, because that’s what happens with puppets and cartoons. Someday they will bring back Homer Simpson and he will not be voiced by Dan Castellaneta. It’s the way of the world. The question is, how’s the movie?

The answer: It takes a while to get going, but it has fun when it gets there. The first act is really flat; the screenwriter knows that he’s remaking ‘The Blues Brothers’ with Muppets, and he knows that the audience knows it. The deranged, inexplicable response to this problem is to treat the material with perfunctory disdain; the scene that sets up the dilemma (the Muppets need to come up with ten million dollars or an evil oilman will demolish their old theater!) is played with such utter disinterest that it would have been more exciting if they’d just filmed the story conference. The writer obviously loses interest in the “getting the band back together” material about halfway through, and has the characters openly admit how boring it’s becoming (“let’s do the rest of this as a montage!”) It’s a movie that is fully aware of what a lazy, slapdash premise it has, and just openly asks, “Could you do us both a favor and not care?”

Which is a shame, because I think there’s a lot of depth to the central premise that I think they ignored in an effort to keep things light and frothy. Because let’s face it, the Muppets didn’t stop becoming relevant as a cultural phenomenon because the world got harsh and cynical and the Muppets were too sweet for that kind of a world, as the film asserts. (For one thing, a TV show that put Alice Cooper on, singing “School’s Out” in an era when a lot of radio stations wouldn’t play it, is not a series that should be considered “too sweet”. The Muppets have always had a fairly twisted core to their comedy, something that this film thankfully captures in a lot of its best moments.) The Muppets “broke up” because Jim Henson died. The film makes a conscious decision to ignore this because it’s kind of a downer to talk about, but really, a film that doesn’t acknowledge that on at least a metatextual level is a movie without an emotional center, and that shows in all of the scenes that actually deal with the plot.

Luckily, there are a lot of scenes that don’t bother. The movie is at its best in the third act, where it stops trying to have a plot and starts becoming a really wonderful updating of the old Muppet Show with Jack Black as their Very Special Guest Star and slightly-more-recent pop culture references. The Muppet Telethon is like a demo reel for what the series would be like if it were brought back tomorrow, saying, “Look, all the weirdness, all the monsters, all the corny gags and the celebrity comedians and the charming self-deprecation and the throwing bowling balls through the air…yes, this still works. It is still funny. Chickens clucking out the melody of popular songs is never going to stop being funny. Here, have some more.” And that’s when I really loved the movie.

And the ending (not the actual “ending” ending, but the climax of the film) is letter-perfect, an acknowledgment of what Henson had in mind all along: Laughter and hope and family and love are not possessions. They cannot be taken away from you by anyone unless you let them. That’s a message Henson would have been proud of.

So, in short: Worth watching? Yeah, but after the first viewing you’ll probably find yourself fast forwarding to the halfway point. The important thing is that we need a new Muppet Show, dammit.

I’ve been meaning to do a lengthy post about train boardgames for some time, but never quite get around to it. Partially it’s because novice boardgamers equate train games to Ticket To Ride. Now, don’t get me wrong: Ticket to Ride is a fine game. But it is barely a train game. Ticket to Ride is actually just a variant on rummy: you collect sets of cards, which you turn into sets of tracks, and the right sets of tracks earn you points. There’s a small amount of route-competition to Ticket to Ride, which makes it at least slightly a train game. But it’s a train game like, say, Carcassonne is a civilization-building game: only in the loosest and most tangential sense.

So what qualifies a train game? I think the fundamentals of a true train game are as follows:

1.) They are about building routes. In a train game, part of the strategy should be making sure you can lay your track to where you need it to go. You will have destinations you need to reach – either forced upon you by game fiat (as in Ticket to Ride) or as a result of your own strategies.

2.) They are about making money. Proper train games are primarily economic games, because everything that is really interesting about trains is as follows: they go places and they carry cargo. That’s really all that is interesting about trains in an abstract sense. (Maybe you like train-spotting, but that’s a specific sort of thing.)

2a.) Part of the way train games are about money should be about delivery of cargo. Because, again, this is what trains do.

2b.) Part of the way train games are about money should be about the fact that they were corporations. Again: train games are economic games. The pick-up-and-deliver aspect of train games should matter, but there should be more to them than simply “go here, drop off that, do it again.”

3.) They are about improvement. The expansion of trains led to economic development not only of the train networks themselves but of the regions to which they laid track. Therefore, in a sense, a good train game also has aspects of civilization-building and/or exploration to them.

The granddaddy of modern train games is 1830, designed by Francois Tresham (who also designed the original Civilization board game that Sid Meier took inspiration from when designing his same-name video game, which in turn has spawned not one but two boardgame spinoffs – the second of which is honestly pretty good in its own right). 1830 is a meaty, meaty, meaty game, by which I mean it takes fucking forever to play: with people who really know what they’re doing, a good game of 1830 lasts at least four hours and usually goes into the five-hour mark. With people who don’t quite know what they’re doing, it can go six or more. 1830 is a cruel, unforgiving mistress: you have to know it to truly appreciate it, and it’s always been a bit of a niche within the boardgaming community because most people aren’t willing to take on a six-hour learning game to decide if they like something – not even nerds, generally.

(Experienced 1830 players can tell you that a big timesaver is replacing the paper money that comes with the game with poker chips. Really, this is a good idea for any game where players make a lot of money transactions, because chips handle so much faster than tiny paper bills. But in 1830, it is essential.)

Luckily, the new and gorgeous edition of 1830 published by Mayfair Games (which finally showed up a month or so ago after being promised for literally the better part of a decade) includes rules for a “starter game” which lasts about sixty to ninety minutes. The starter game teaches players the basics of 1830: how to lay and upgrade track, how to upgrade trains, how to manage a company. It’s actually pretty interesting in its own right, but it’s like true 1830 as a Coles Notes reader is to a novel.

This is because the genius of 1830 isn’t laying and upgrading track: it is the buying and selling of stock. See, in the “true” version of 1830, you don’t own a company: instead, you are a money-man who invests in numerous rail companies, and the bulk of the game’s strategy lies not in laying down track but in buying and selling stock at the right time. Expand that company you just made extremely profitable and which you control the majority of stock, dividend out all of its stockpiled earnings to the shareholders (e.g. mostly you), then sell the shares? That’s a basic stock strategy in 1830. But the game can get more complex than that quickly, because there’s usually two or three times as many railways on the board as players, and with that many railroads come more options. Use that small railroad you own a majority share in but is never going to be profitable to block out that potentially profitable railway you don’t have a stake in, watch as other players shed their stocks – then buy the shares on the cheap and rebuild the railway to profitability.

You see how this can get addictive, inasmuch as anything that takes four to six hours for a single play can get addictive.

What’s more, 1830 is just the tip of the iceberg. There is an entire family of “18XX” games out there, published by numerous different companies (many of them print-and-play games or self-published). I myself own three: 1830, 1856 (set in Ontario) and 2038 (set in the asteroid belt of our solar system and applying the train mechanics to space-liners). But there are many more, and most offer their own tweaks on the basic formula established by 1830.

“But I’m not sure if I want to devote that much time to a game,” you say. Well, fine.

Esteemed game designer Martin Wallace has designed not one but three train games for those looking for a less intense experience than 1830: Age of Steam, Steam, and Railways of the World. (Railways of the World, pictured above, was formerly marketed as “Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame” before the publisher lost that license and was subsequently rereleased.)

All three of these games have the same basic set of rules, which is one where money is streamlined and players are trying to accumulate victory points rather than simply having the most cash at the end (well, the VPs are sort of like money, but…). However, the core of what a train game should be remains intact. You’re still trying to expand your line, competing for space, generating money (well, victory points, but whatever) by performing cargo deliveries, and upgrading your line capacity. And the neat trick that all of Wallace’s train games have in common is that you’re financing your train company with debt: you start the game with exactly zero dollars and you initially have to pay for things by issuing shares. Only later in the game – if you don’t screw up and take on too much debt – will you actually start earning a profit based on your line’s operating capacity.

Of the three, Age of Steam is the least forgiving (you can go bankrupt and be eliminated). Railways of the World and Steam are remarkably close to one another in gameplay: Steam is more complex but I actually like ROTW’s pace as a game much more. (That having been said, ROTW has gigantic enormous boards that often do not fit on many tables.) All of the games have expansions. In Age of Steam’s case, lots and lots of expansions. However, ROTW and Steam have both been expanded to create a different game out of their component rules (ROTW by Railways of England and Wales and Steam by Steam Barons) wherein instead of owning a single rail company, you…

…wait for it…

…are a rich mega-money-man who invests in rail companies. Yes, ROTW and Steam now both give you the option to convert them into a sort of faux-1830. It’s not quite the same thing as 1830, to be sure – it’s not as rewardingly deep – but it gives newer players a taste of that delicious 1830 experience without the full initial commitment. And that’s something.

I know some were concerned that Unseen Academicals was Terry Pratchett straying away from the tried-and-true elements that make the Discworld books click (I was not one of them, mind you, but more than a few expressed misgivings). Well, Snuff is very much a return to form, as one would expect from a Vimes novel, and in more ways than one since, as opposed to the last few Vimes novels, the primary villain isn’t made clear within the first quarter of the book and then a continuing presence. Well, not unless you want to get all lit’ry and say that “racist society” is the villain, but as good a villain as racist society can be, it’s never the one in the knife fight with Vimes, except metaphorically.

Now, granted, this is not the first time that Pratchett has used his books to touch upon issues of race – really, they’ve been omnipresent throughout most of the Watch books (and I would suggest that, correspondingly, the Moist von Lipwig books thus far are about class, the second divisive social element of a modern society, while the Witches books are about gender; this is not to say that each series doesn’t touch on all of them, of course, because Pratchett doesn’t min-max out his themes, but some books emphasize things more than others), and I’ve seen a few reviewers complain to the effect of “how many times can Terry Pratchett explain to us that racism is bad?” Which is a relatively silly complaint, because the answer is “as many times as there are ways for racism to be bad,” whether it’s using dwarf/troll conflict to discuss interethnic strife in Thud! or exploring propaganda and stereotype-as-weapon in Jingo or the utilization of dehumanization of differing races and [something I won’t spoil] in Snuff.

In terms of entertainment value, it’s pretty high. Putting Vimes out in a polite country setting lets Pratchett play with some new tropes, and fans of super-prepared butlers will be glad to see Willikins take a major role in this book. In terms of technique, the pacing is a bit uneven and the occasional aside flounders, but far more often than not Pratchett hits his beats. Snuff is a solid B+ on Pratchett’s grading curve, which is just fine, if a bit of a comedown from the last couple of Vimes books (Night Watch and Thud! are both generally considered among his best).

—

On the other hand, we have Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which has been getting some good press from nerds. This is not shocking, because Ready Player One is the biggest nerd-pander I think I have ever read in my entire life. If you are wondering how big a nerd-pander we are talking about here: this is literally a novel about how a shut-in loser person becomes a megabillionaire superstar because he is good at video games and knows a lot of pop-culture trivia.

And I’m not even spoiling the ending for you because Cline (who writes the entire novel in the hero’s first-person) lets you know, at the very start of the book, that the hero wins and gets to be a megabillionaire superstar. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that the ending of this sort of book is more or less predetermined, but when I read that bit of the book not ten pages in I just put the book down and went “oh, fuck off” because it absolutely kills the suspense for me.

Not that there is a lot of suspense to be had, frankly. Cline’s narrative is engaging enough in a trash-fiction sort of way, but it’s for the most part very straightforward: hero does A, hero does B, hero does C, SETBACK, TRIUMPH, roll credits. The villain of the piece – an evil corporate person, because of course a near-future/cyberspace narrative will have an evil corporate person as the villain – is so ridiculously evil he does everything but twirl a moustache. The love interest turns out to be attractive in real life and just thinks she’s ugly because of an unusual birthmark. (Cline repeatedly does an exceptional job of teasing potential conflict and then dissolving it so quickly that the entire affair seems pointless: there’s actual story in a cyber-affair where one person genuinely has issues that prevent them from having a real-world relationship, but that would get in the way of the by-rote happy ending, I suppose. And he does this more than once.)

But ultimately, the silliness of the story – and the lack of artistry with which it’s written, or if you prefer “its workmanlike prose” – does it in for me. As exceptional a programmer as Programmer MacGuffin might be, I can’t believe that programming would get so easy that this guy would just go ahead and program literal lifetimes’ worth of cyber-quest material all by himself, or that some supa-mega-visionary would just create a decades-long-contest which was masturbating to all the things he liked about his hobbies and nobody would find this weird. And on top of that, said supa-mega-visionary’s hardon for 80’s culture would completely envelop the modern popular culture of the time, so that in 2045 or whatever people would still be talking about how awesome Thundercats was. (This is roughly equivalent to everybody right now deciding that zoot suits are the way to dress for the foreseeable future and excitedly collecting Glenn Miller albums like they were Lady Gaga singles.)

It’s a pity because there are some flourishes of real creativity right at the beginning: Cline’s description of the “stacks,” which are literally vertical towers of RVs and trailers surrounding cities because gas shortages led to people crowding around population centres, is evocative and more creative than most of the rest of his book, and the protagonist’s brief forays into the real world are honestly quite interesting – far moreso than the cyber-worlds he discusses, because all of the virtual realities where the book spends the bulk of its time are warmed-over genre-skinned rehashes of World of Warcraft or EVE Online or both at once. There’s no there there. When Cory Doctorow decided to write a novel about MMORPG gaming, he wrote For The Win, which is really a novel about collectivization of labour and class struggle – you may not like it or its message, but it’s a book with real heft. Ernest Cline, on the other hand, has written a novel with a plotline as thin as the old Atari 2600 Adventure games he references multiple times. It’s a book that decides that the future will entirely be about looking backwards from where we are right now, and isn’t that kind of sad?

(Source.) (Unrelated.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Almost entirely everything I hoped it would be – which includes the fact that the kidlets in the theatre I was in were just as entertained as I was.

The Toronto Police shut down the Occupy Toronto encampment in St. James Park this morning, and from 3 AM through to about 8 I was onsite liveblogging it for Torontoist.

I have to say, I feel vaguely robbed by the lack of a riot. Dear police and protestors: next time I have to get up at 3 AM to cover your potential clash, please have at least a small riot or something, okay? Not a big one, just… something? This was so painfully civil it felt like somebody’s idea of a parody, “Canadian Protest Riot” or something. The police were respectful and helpful, the protesters were largely polite and cooperative (okay, there was one guy who was barefoot and half-dressed who kept taunting the cops and getting up in their faces, and honestly I don’t think it would have been controversial if the police had arrested him, but they didn’t), and the media were all over the place basically ensuring that both sides were as amiable as possible and kibbitzing with both sides.

I mean, nice to get back to that after the G20, don’t get me wrong. But why couldn’t we do this at, like, noon or something so we could all sleep in?

“‘And a time to every purpose under heaven,'” Robinton murmured, his throat almost too tight for him to speak. He felt incredibly tired, overwhelmingly sleepy. “Yes, very true. How splendidly true. And what a wonderful time it has been!”

She was more than a bit homophobic and her books were uneven at best, but I loved them when I was a kid and I can’t but be sad at her passing – the first woman to ever win a Hugo or a Nebula, the first woman to have a sci-fi book on the New York Times Bestseller List. She was, simply, a giant.

SCENE: A STUDIO BIGWIG and his three JUNIOR EXECUTIVES sit at a table.

BIGWIG: We have had an excellent run this year, gentlemen. One, I was certain we had drained the Adam Sandler well dry, but your bottomless pit of imagination showed us that there is still much more for Adam Sandler to do.
FIRST JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: He can be a man and a lady! I have plans for him to show up in a romantic comedy next as the girl!
THIRD JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: That is a terrible idea.
BIGWIG: But potentially profitable, and therefore not entirely terrible. Two, you too have used Adam Sandler to best advantage with the success of Just Go With It.
SECOND JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: I liked it better with my original title, Let’s Both Lie So I Can Get Sex.
THIRD: Two fun facts: firstly, you bastardized a movie called Cactus Flower that actually won Oscars in order to make that movie, and second, you are a terrible person.
SECOND: Hey! I did not steal the plot from that cactus movie! I never even saw whatever it is you’re talking about!
BIGWIG: But it made a lot of money. And Three – I have to admit, even I wasn’t expecting a lot out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and now we’re going to be able to sequelize it. And you even managed to do it without Adam Sandler.
FIRST: I think it would have made double the money if Adam Sandler had been the chimpanzee leader and thrown poop at James Franco. People love it when monkeys throw poop! Especially at James Franco.
BIGWIG: In any case, we must look ahead to 2012. Gentlemen, I want us to consider the public domain. I am tired of paying six dollars and ninety-five cents for the rights to a toy marketed in the 1980s that has kitsch collector value. That is six dollars and ninety-five cents that could be going in my pocket instead. What ideas do you have, crack junior executives?
SECOND: Where?
THIRD: He used “crack” as an adjective.
SECOND: I knew that! We all knew that! Nobody can prove anything!
FIRST: I vote we do The Three Bears, starring Kevin James as Papa Bear, Melissa McCarthy as Mama Bear, and that weird guy who is thirty-two but looks like he is fifteen and has a TV show as Baby Bear.
BIGWIG: Fairy tales? Do go on.
FIRST: Or we could do a movie where the hero is Aspirin and he’s fighting the evil Gingivitis.
THIRD: I don’t think that quite works.
FIRST: Maybe they’re heroic dragons in human form! Except for Gingivitis, who is an evil dragon sorcerer.
BIGWIG: This interests me.
THIRD: Think of the CGI budget.
BIGWIG: You have a point, Three. I am less interested now. Let’s talk about the bears one again.
SECOND: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Look: fairy tales are bloody and dirty and about unpleasant human urges put into story form to make them slightly more palatable to children. The bears thing is destined to flop because it is about none of those things. There need to be tits and murder.
BIGWIG: That is an uncannily astute observation coming from you, Two.
THIRD: He said the same thing about the Teletubbies last week.
BIGWIG: Stopped clocks, Three. So, what fairy tale can we make both sexy and violent?
THIRD: Well, the obvious choice is “Snow White,” which has generational mother-daughter competitive jealousy, a huntsman who does some violent things, and a handsome prince. There’s probably a solid “adult” version to be made there – a little more fantastic than Ever After, the Cinderella retelling, and a little more grounded than Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
FIRST: No, no, you’re going about it all wrong! The Queen should be grumpy and funny! And the charming prince should be all dorky so he is lovable! Like Adam Sandler! Except maybe better looking, because Adam Sandler is kinda ugly. And the dwarves should be all wacky! And they should have catchphrases and talk like rappers do!
THIRD: Well, I think –
SECOND: No, no, no. First off, the Queen should be played by a total bombshell, like Charlize Theron. And then we get Kristen Stewart to play Snow White because teenagers love Kristen Stewart, and we get the guy who was Thor to be, like, Thor. Except we can’t call him Thor.
THIRD: But the entire point of “Snow White” is that it’s about maternal jealousy of the daughter. Charlize Theron is beautiful. How are we supposed to believe that she envies Kristen Stewart? I mean, Kristen Stewart is good looking, but she’s not your classic supermodel type and Charlize Theron, well, is.
FIRST: This is exactly why we need to have the Queen be played by Julia Roberts with a fake nose so she is ugly.
THIRD: And we’re back going too far in the other direction again.
SECOND: Look, if we do it my way we can have awesome swordfights.
FIRST: Well, I say we can have awesome swordfights too! With puns and fencing and so on!
SECOND: No, this needs to be less Princess Bride and more Braveheart. Snow White can lead an army of soldiers against the evil Queen, who… I dunno, is a vampire or something? And then Thor can help kill her.
THIRD: Why do we need Thor in this movie again, which is supposed to be about a female protagonist?
SECOND: I’m sorry, I thought we were in the business of making hit movies, which are predominantly watched by teenaged boys.
BIGWIG: Well said, Two.
SECOND: Besides, we’ll need him for the eventual threeway sex scene with Snow White and the Queen.
BIGWIG: Less well said, Two, and this comes from someone only slightly concerned with traditional narrative.
SECOND: Does this mean my all-dwarf gangbang is out?
BIGWIG: Need I remind you that we do not make pornography at this studio?
SECOND: No.
BIGWIG: And why don’t we make pornography at this studio?
SECOND: “Because the internet has killed off pornography’s profitability for the foreseeable future.”
BIGWIG: Thank you.
FIRST: It doesn’t matter because my idea is much, much better. I think we need love potions. And a dance sequence. And pop culture references! And Nathan Lane turning into a cockroach!
THIRD: But none of that makes any sense –
FIRST: It doesn’t have to make sense because it’s magic!
BIGWIG: He has a point there. Therefore, we will make One’s Snow White movie. We will get Julia Roberts and Nathan Lane and one of those actors we’re currently trying to convince America is the next Tom Cruise. I don’t know which one and it doesn’t matter. Pick somebody off last year’s GQ covers and tell him to be charming.
THIRD: Armie Hammer?
BIGWIG: He’ll do. And we’ll use actual little people for the dwarves. We will use every famous dwarf and midget in Hollywood.
THIRD: Peter Dinklage?
BIGWIG: No, he would cost actual money. I meant the famous dwarves that nobody really cares about.
SECOND: I think this is a mistake. We’ve already done kiddie, family-friendly versions of fairy tales before. We’ve done them over and over again. We even did meta already. Remember Enchanted? That sucked.
THIRD: It was critically acclaimed and made over three hundred million dollars worldwide.
SECOND: But we didn’t see Amy Adams’ tits even once. I consider that a failure for all humanity.
BIGWIG: Two also has a point – about the film, not Amy Adams. Therefore, I have decided that we will also make Two’s Snow White movie. It will have battle scenes and be sort of Gothy in the way that teen films sometimes try to pretend that they are rebellious and experimental, but will ultimately have a safe core to it. And, to make the critics happy, we’ll cast good actors to be the seven dwarves. Probably British ones.
THIRD: I assume we’re not making three Snow White movies.
BIGWIG: Don’t be ridiculous.

This is only one of the many times he has met his death (an experience which he does not hesitate strongly to recommend).