{"id":31324,"date":"2016-02-03T06:36:03","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T17:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=31324"},"modified":"2016-02-03T00:06:42","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T11:06:42","slug":"big-worlds-on-small-screens-fantasy-films-from-the-eighties-that-werent-that-bad-rebecca-fisher-discusses-willow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/02\/03\/big-worlds-on-small-screens-fantasy-films-from-the-eighties-that-werent-that-bad-rebecca-fisher-discusses-willow\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Worlds On Small Screens & \u201cFantasy Films From the Eighties That Weren\u2019t That Bad\u201d\u2014Rebecca Fisher Discusses “Willow”"},"content":{"rendered":"

~ by Rebecca Fisher<\/em><\/p>\n

If you were to cherry-pick your favourite parts of Star Wars<\/strong> and The Lord of the Rings<\/strong> and stir them together in a large melting pot, you would eventually end up with Willow<\/strong>, the 1988 collaborative effort between writer George Lucas and director Ron Howard.<\/p>\n

\"Willow1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The land is ruled by the tyrannical Queen Bavmorda, whose power is threatened by a prophecy that states a baby girl will be born that will one day bring about Bavmorda’s downfall. Desperate to avert this fate, Bavmorda seizes all the pregnant women in the realm in order to kill the child while still in her infancy.<\/p>\n

But thanks to a wily nursemaid, the prophesied baby escapes and is floated downstream to a small Nelwyn village. There she’s found by Willow Ulfgood (Warwick Davis) a farmer and family man who is subsequently tasked by his village to take the child back to her own people.<\/p>\n

\"Willow2\"<\/a>Willow and his son watch over Elora Danan<\/em><\/p>\n

Along the way he discovers the true identity of Elora Danan, and gradually accumulates a band of loyal followers: the swordsman Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), the sorceress Fin Raziel, and a couple of mischievous Brownies. Together they attempt to take Elora to Tir Aisleen, where a great army is said to await her, hunted all the while by Bavmorda’s daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whalley).<\/p>\n

Rumoured to have been built on the leftover ideas Lucas had amassed for Star Wars<\/strong>, and following the familiar path of the hero’s journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell, the similarities between Willow<\/strong> and its fantasy\/science-fiction predecessors is almost funny. Nearly every single character and situation is an amalgamation of material from Star Wars<\/strong> and The Lord of the Rings<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Willow Ulfgood is a farmer (like Luke Skywalker) and a little person (like Frodo Baggins), assisted by Madmartigan (a cross between Aragon’s swordsman and Han Solo’s scoundrel) and the wise old sorceress Fin Raziel (a gender-flipped Gandalf\/Obi-Wan), with comic relief supplied by the bickering Brownies (essentially C3PO and R2D2).<\/p>\n

\"Willow3\"<\/a>Madmartigan and Sorcha in a very Han\/Leia-esque romance<\/em><\/p>\n

We get an Evil Queen instead of a Dark Lord, but Bavmorda’s daughter Sorcha has the feistiness of Princess Leia and the battle prowess of Eowyn (though admittedly, Sorcha’s decision to switch sides halfway through the movie is unique to her character). In place of the One Ring we have a magical baby McGuffin, which leads to lots of cute baby reaction shots \u2013 though Elora doesn’t actually achieve <\/em>anything for all the talk of how amazing and important she is.<\/p>\n

Okay, so I’m being really snarky, but the truth is I love this movie. Heck, I grew up with it! It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how heavily it was based on older material, but one thing it did <\/em>do first was film on location in New Zealand, several years before Peter Jackson co-opted the country for Middle Earth.<\/p>\n

\"Willow4\"<\/a>The Evil Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh)<\/em><\/p>\n

Today Willow<\/strong> is considered a cult classic, and for good reason. Like a bingo card of fantasy tropes, it contains nearly every staple of the genre: a castle under seige, a wizards’ duel, a two-headed dragon, a skull-faced warrior, dozens of people saying: “so the prophecy is true…”<\/em> and dozens more.<\/p>\n

Yet there’s real charm here as well, and plenty of humour, and surprisingly good world-building, and a movie that has (so far) stood the test of time as a quintessential family classic.
\n.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next Time: The Princess Bride<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

There’s no way I could write a series on fantasy movies from the Eighties without including The Princess Bride, so \u2013 as you wish.<\/em><\/span>
\n.<\/span><\/p>\n

About The Reviewer:<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com<\/a>, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com<\/a> and her They\u2019re All Fictional<\/a> blog.<\/p>\n

To read Rebecca\u2019s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:<\/p>\n

Big Worlds On Small Screens<\/a><\/h3>\n

Rebecca won the 2015 Sir Julius Vogel Award<\/a> for Best Fan Writer, for writing that included Big Worlds On Small Screens<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

~ by Rebecca Fisher If you were to cherry-pick your favourite parts of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings and stir them together in a large melting pot, you would eventually end up with Willow, the 1988 collaborative effort between writer George Lucas and director Ron Howard. The land is ruled by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-worlds-on-small-screens-with-rebecca-fisher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31324"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31336,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31324\/revisions\/31336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}