Re the He-Man/She-Ra Christmas Special: Peter Murray (stalwart keeper of the YW Timeline) says, “According to IMDB, Bob Forward and Don Heckman wrote it. But is that reliable? I don’t know.”
Sounds so to me. Bob would have just been getting started in writing at that point: and this would have been happening just before Filmation (lamentably) shut down. Bob quickly established himself as a writer / story editor of great skill — I watched with great pleasure what he did with X-Men: Evolution and Kong: the Animated Series. After a while, one story editor can start to hear another’s “tone of voice” even through other writers’ scripts. Bob’s voice is very sure. …Don’s is a name I don’t recognize: his work at Filmation seems to be kind of occasional.
Serge says: “There’s one thing I was wondering about… Why was a decision made to go for what was the source of Wagner’s Ring Cycle? I seem to remember that there had once been talk about Wolfgang Petersen wanting to adapt Wagner’s tale for a TV mini-series.”
And indeed he was involved in the early stages of the project — but he then became very busy with “Perfect Storm” and then bowed out entirely to devote his attention to “Troy”. When that happened, the project wound up getting restructured to suit another studio (Columbia).
But the German networks had long wanted to see a TV version of what has for many years been considered to be the greatest of the German epics. I admit that it took me by surprise when they hired a Northern Irish guy and an American woman to write it. But we were standing at the right place at the right time with our intentions to do the work clearly declared. The rest just sort of … followed … though there were many strange and sometimes hysterical episodes in between. Either way, the thing won the German TV industry’s DIVA award for best TV movie of 2004…and we pulled down a 30+ share (i.e., nearly one out of every three Germans watched the series: the ratings were even higher elsewhere in central Europe) … so we must have done something right.
Peter and I are of course both clear that what we did isn’t the pure Nibelungenlied… even if you could figure out what that was, as there are about six different versions of the story, and a number of ancillary but not-really-part-of-the-poem myths. Any version of this epic brought to the screen is going to be the result of a long, long series of compromises. We made the best compromises we could, under the circumstances. (And, by the way, nothing positive enough can possibly be said about our friends and production partners at Tandem Communications, who were a solid support to us and a never-ending help in times of craziness all through the five years we worked together on this thing.)
Jenny says: “Dear God, is there a special department that comes up with dodgy sounding names for this series?”
(grin) Each local market comes up with the one it likes the best. We think of it as The Ring of the Nibelungs, and who cares what anyone says? 🙂 But there are many many markets — something like ninety — who will be airing it in the next year or so, and I’d bet there must be fifty names. As for Channel Four, I have no idea what was on their minds. (Sometimes we had cause to wonder about this particularly hard, when the “notes” on a given draft came in…) Whatever: they aired it, finally. (Only fair, since they helped finance it.)
