Fantasy Gathering A dash of wizardry and dragons

I was flipping through the channels and saw that this movie was about to air soon so I decided to sit down and watch it. I had seen this before but didn’t really remember much from it except apartments turning into forests. The movie starts out with a boy named Harry Potter – No, really! The Potters move into an apartment building where for some reason a wizard named Torok kidnaps the daughter and uses her form to get around and slowly take over each apartment to build his little fairy realms.

The scene above has to be the most disturbing scene out of the whole movie. Basically Torok is turning all the residents into trolls and faeries and whatever else…  A woman tells Harry Jr. all about Torok being cursed to be a troll for eternity and blah blah blah… She explains that Torok needs to transform each apartment to complete his universe that would burst into this world. Harry rushes into one of the fairy realms to go rescue his sister and the end. I think.

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Finally watched “How To Train Your Dragon”. I absolutely loved it. It’s about a young boy named Hiccup who wants to be a dragon slayer just like his father and the rest of the vikings at Berk. One of his little contraptions work too well and sets him on an adventure where he befriends a dragon that he names Toothless. He quickly learns that everything they know about dragons is wrong. It isn’t long before they discover why the dragons constantly attack Berk as well. Pretty scary! hehe. Totally loved it.

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Wow. This is downright awesome…

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I tuned in with a friend and we sat through Destination Truth. A quick summary: Ghosts of Truk Lagoon (Fun Underwater EVP!) and Japanese Kappa Monster. I think Destination Truth has developed a formula to draw us in with a ghost story and then get to a monster. I remember when it was just only monsters that they were tracking down but their ratings must’ve went up when they started including ghost hunts. Now they always start their episodes with a good ol’ ghost hunt.

I was expecting to see Beast Legends on after – since the schedule informed me that it would be about a Winged Lion. I know I didn’t say a thing about last week’s episode (Dakuwaqa – Shark God) but it didn’t interest me all that much. Imagine my surprise to see Ghost Hunters on. I visited SyFy’s site and discovered that Beast Legends already aired at one in the morning.

When did they announce the change? I visited the forums on SyFy and pretty much wasn’t surprised to see all the negative comments. I guess the show did end up flopping afterall. It looks like people were expecting a show where the cast would look for evidence or something to support mythological beasts. When it turned out to be a show where the cast were just making movie-monsters, it just made a lot of people lose interest after.

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Not quite October just yet but since when does that matter? I gave this movie a chance when I found out that Anna Paquin was in it (TrueBlood, anyone? Good series!)

This movie was pretty darn cool. It had that whole Creepshow feeling to it except the stories mingled a bit. It was fun and definitely captured that halloween spirit that I remember fondly from the 80’s.

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You know, I didn’t really intend on making a comment on every episode but with this episode focused on the development of a fire breathing dragon, I just had to say something! This episode, the team decided to focus on a story in Poland about a dragon named Smok that was killed and his bones hung on the outside of a church.

I told a friend, “Watch – they’re going to take pictures and have them identified.” but nope, they pretty much figured it out on the spot. “That looks like the jaw of a whale, skull of a rhino…” They popped the dimensions in and the end result was a huge overweight blimp dragon.

To keep developing their dragon, they looked at gators, snakes, bats, dinosaur prints, Gar Fish – Funny thing about that. When they caught a little gator to understand the scales on the back, they realized the stomach was soft and vulnerable. My friend suggested that they look at Gar Fish for that. She was disappointed when they also had the same idea shortly later…

In the end, their dragon was done and I didn’t care much for it. Don’t get me wrong. I like it. It’s just not a dragon. It looks like a komodo dragon and a sugar glider got together one night and the end result was… whatever they created.

SyFy’s site isn’t really reliable but you can see the gallery of it here: Fire Lizard Beast Evolution
The reason the first sketch is so weird is because they were trying to recreate the dragon as the people saw it. The jaw bone of the whale was supposedly the rib of the dragon – hence why it’s so blimpy. The fourth image is the dragon they decided on, some sort of sugar glider komodo dragon descendant. Komodo Glider?

Side note: Overweight blimp dragons are awesome.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started watching the episode. I think it was a little more special this time because I got to watch it with a friend and we just spent the entire time making comments about what they were doing. Some of it was neat, some of it was surprising, some of it was downright silly.

I guess I figured that maybe it was a twist on Destination Truth where they’d run around and try to disprove the legend but the only thing they accomplish is that they end up bothering the wildlife in the area. Well, okay, they did bother wildlife (they scooped up this nifty looking octopus) but instead of trying to prove or disprove anything, they were trying to develop their own vision of the beast.

The series premiere was about the Kraken. It was pretty neat to see how they looked at octopuses (or.. octopodes!) and squids to develop their kraken. During their collaboration, one guy wanted to add ‘armor’ and they very briefly experimented with the idea before it got dismissed. Smart move.

Can’t wait to see next week’s episode.

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