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Apple TV+ Doing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.

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14 hours ago, Chips O'Toole said:

Well shit. I never once imagined this story could be done justice as a film but it could work as a series. We'll see if they can tell the whole story without a fuckload of exposition.  

They appear to be looking at all of the books - from reading around, looks like they are reaching into some of the other books for either characters or events, so that newcomers are not quite in the dark.  It's been a while since I read them, so I need to look at what they were talking about.  

14 hours ago, Chips O'Toole said:

The obviously forced comparison of Apple to Asimov was gross. Stop that. 

Yep.  It's what somebody would say if they were given their dream project and big bucks to make it happen, but they aren't supposed to say it in a publicity spot for the show.  They can keep that between them and their backers.

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3 hours ago, tokamak said:

Jared Harris alone probably makes this worth a shot.

He can carry the series.  He's got a helluva resume - Mad Men, The Terror, and then Chernobyl.  And those are just the more well-known ones.  But he's got the chops for it.

Apple TV doing Foundation.  Amazon putting over a billion dollars into a Lord of the Rings series.  HBO doing a Game of Thrones prequel series or two.  BBC doing an initial 8-part series based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld.  Netflix doing Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.  Showtime doing a Gormenghast series.  Netflix doing a proper Chronicles of Narnia.  Amazon doing a Conan series (the Barbarian, not the Bog Jumper).  Amazon doing The Dark Tower.

And Amazon is doing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.

Wheel of Time and Foundation are legitimately two series that I thought would never be made.

These next few years are going to be crazy.

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Buzzrock

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He can carry the series.  He's got a helluva resume - Mad Men, The Terror, and then Chernobyl.  And those are just the more well-known ones.  But he's got the chops for it.
Apple TV doing Foundation.  Amazon putting over a billion dollars into a Lord of the Rings series.  HBO doing a Game of Thrones prequel series or two.  BBC doing an initial 8-part series based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld.  Netflix doing Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.  Showtime doing a Gormenghast series.  Netflix doing a proper Chronicles of Narnia.  Amazon doing a Conan series (the Barbarian, not the Bog Jumper).  Amazon doing The Dark Tower.
And Amazon is doing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.
Wheel of Time and Foundation are legitimately two series that I thought would never be made.
These next few years are going to be crazy.


He was good in The Expanse too.
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2 hours ago, Scary Stranger said:

I'd heard that the Amazon Dark Tower and HBO GoT prequels were dead.  Are they back on?

I think they canceled one of the GOT prequels with Naomi Watts so they could focus on another one that is based on House Targaryen.  It’s called House of the Dragon.  HBO bought the full prequel series or something like that.  

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17 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Isn’t there another Dune too?

This guy is one of the biggest Dune nerds on YouTube (some of the new Dune producers/assistants/whatever have talked to him) , and has a lot of stuff

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1rFmaGLYr0Ve_Y_soxZNWQ/videos

He has info on the Dune the Sisterhood TV series as well.  He also likes Foundation and talks a bit about it as well.

It's just.....odd to me how much Hollywood is diving into sci-fi and fantasy, but all hail George R. R. Martin.

I'm half-expecting to see somebody to start doing Clarke's Rama series.

Hell, Netflix picked up the rights to Old Man's War a few years ago.

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18 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Looks awesome. Do I need to buy a new iPhone or something to get Apple TV+ for free? 

Not too free if you're dropping hundreds on a new device (the cheapest device you can get the free 3 months with or whatever is an AppleTV).

If you are in the market, there will be a bunch of new stuff announced next month.

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capnamerca

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That trailer looks nothing like the goddamned books. This is going to be an "inspired by" show, and i hate it already.

 

disclosure - Foundation was the first "grown up" sci-fi I ever read. I read every novel in the series, even the posthumous ones, every 3-4 years. It's going to be very difficult for me to enjoy this. I'll still watch but ... I promise not to Derka these threads, tho.

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3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Not too free if you're dropping hundreds on a new device (the cheapest device you can get the free 3 months with or whatever is an AppleTV).

If you are in the market, there will be a bunch of new stuff announced next month.

And fuck Apple for releasing a new device (Apple TV) with no real upgrades but lying about it anyway. They actually removed “pass through audio” after their third generation and refuse to add it back. Everything else is a better buy, especially now that their app is available on other devices. 
 

*PTA means that Apple will always alerted/compress/decode audio before output no matter what. If you have Tidal HiFi?  Can’t pass through the signal. Movies?  All audio compressed, you get about 80% of the quality vs Blu Ray/UHD DVD

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rage-a-holic

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17 minutes ago, ChickenSandwich said:

And fuck Apple for releasing a new device (Apple TV) with no real upgrades but lying about it anyway. They actually removed “pass through audio” after their third generation and refuse to add it back. Everything else is a better buy, especially now that their app is available on other devices. 
 

*PTA means that Apple will always alerted/compress/decode audio before output no matter what. If you have Tidal HiFi?  Can’t pass through the signal. Movies?  All audio compressed, you get about 80% of the quality vs Blu Ray/UHD DVD

much badness in you speeking, starting with "alerted"

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On 8/19/2021 at 5:13 PM, NeverMarryAStripper said:

It wouldn't be difficult for me to knock out the original trilogy in a couple of weeks

Yeah, they're relatively short books really, around 300 pages.  We're not talking about Tolkein or Donaldson or something here. I'm definitely going to re-read them in the next couple of weeks, to make my body ready.

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Lots of spoilers about how it was adapted for TV.  Heavy focus on characters and the story, which is good, because that's a big part of why it's held up, versus much of the 1950s sci-fi that hasn't held up.

And Goyer recognizes that the time is ripe for TV shows to play out at a novel's pace, rather than cramming it together into movie-sized chunks of action.  And he recognizes that Asimov was writing these novels as full of hope, as in the characters/institutions/etc. were going to see humanity through dark times and come out on the other side.

https://gizmodo.com/foundations-david-s-goyer-on-the-vital-changes-needed-1847682950

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Goyer also hat-tips Game of Thrones when reflecting on why now is the right time for a Foundation series. “I think the medium is caught up to Asimov; I don’t think it could have been done prior to these big, streaming novelistic shows,” he said. “The audience for these streaming shows is OK with something sort of unraveling at a novelistic pace—again, thanks to shows like Game of Thrones with a lot of different characters, a generational saga.”

Spoiler

The first big, important change: diversifying the characters. “Because there are virtually no female characters in the first book, I said to the Asimov estate, ‘How would you how would you feel if we gender-flipped a couple of the characters?’ And they said, ‘We love it. We think Asimov himself would have completely embraced that,’” Goyer said.

Spoiler

One of those characters, Goyer explained, is actually time itself—something that helped shape Foundation’s structure, which viewers should know includes a lot of time shifts. “The book series itself makes these massive leaps forward in time, and particularly the first book is very ontological,” Goyer said. “Very few characters continue from one story to the next. My very first meeting at Apple, I said to them, ‘Guys, time is a character. You’re just going to have to embrace that.’ We do time jumps. We’re going to jump forward. We’re going to jump backwards. Sometimes we’re going to tell two parallel storylines that are operating at different times. We just have to embrace it. It would be insanity not to embrace it. And fortunately, everyone embraced it.”

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Overall, the characters became the anchor point for Foundation’s sprawling story. “It’s impossible to do a line-for-line, word-for-word adaptation of Foundation, especially 70 years later. So you try to make sure that you cleave to the core tenants—but, let’s be honest, people tune in for the characters. So you need to make sure that the characters have fully three-dimensional lives, that we care about their hopes and their dreams. The books are primarily books about ideas. A lot of big events happen off-screen and kind of in-between sentences. We knew that we were going to dramatize some of those events. But the thing that I really tried to dig down into is the characters—so I tried to figure out ways of creating characters that could inhabit the themes and ideas that Asimov was working with.”

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“Whenever I’m adapting something, I read it again or watch it again, and I try to write down what I think the core ideas are, the essential ingredients,” he told io9 over video chat. “In this case, because Asimov wasn’t alive, I was talking to his estate, to his daughter, and I said, I want to make sure that I’ve identified the core ingredients that make Foundation, Foundation. Fortunately, they said, yeah, we feel like you’ve zeroed in on the most important elements. And because we’re adapting it now, over 70 years after Asimov first wrote it—you know, it was a metaphorical story back in the post-World War II environment—some of the events, some of the things that we’re interrogating, we’re going to have to change because we’re speaking to an audience of today and not an audience post-World War II.”

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While Goyer hopes Foundation appeals to the “diehard fans of the books,” he’s also aware that many potential viewers may not have read them, and may not even be familiar with the story. “I count myself as someone who reveres the books,” Goyer said. “But primarily I know that I’m creating [the show] for an audience that hasn’t read the books and may not even count themselves as fans of science fiction, which is a good thing. I think it’s important. So to my writers, my actors, my fellow directors—I said with every scene, with every storyline, we need to be able to strip away the spaceships and the robots and the science fiction elements and make sure that this story works as if it were a contemporary drama. What is the real-world version of this storyline? Do we understand it? Can we ground it? If it doesn’t work without the science fiction trappings, then that’s not a story we’re going to tell. That was our true north for how we approached the show: this needs to be able to appeal to people who would not consider themselves fans of science fiction, in the same way that I think Game of Thrones brought people in who weren’t necessarily fans of fantasy.”

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We were halfway through filming when the pandemic broke out and—well, on one hand, it’s sobering, I would argue that the show is probably more relevant today than even when Asimov first wrote the books,” Goyer said. “The thing that I cling to, that I think is important for the audience as well, is that Asimov was fundamentally a humanist. He believed in science. He believed in rationalism. He believed that it could see us through the dark times. And when I first pitched the show to Apple, that’s what I pitched. I said, I fundamentally want to tell a show that’s got a message of hope. And, you know, I think that’s not a bad message to deliver right now.”

 

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