Hogswatch Filk by Daibhid Chienedelh

Hogswatch Filk

Have yourself a happy little Hogswatch,
Let your heart be light
From now on, Old Man Trouble will be out of sight
Have yourself a happy little Hogswatch,
Don't be cruel or mean,
Just make sure your meal doesn't contain a bean...

Here were are as in early days,
Nasty, churly days of old.
When the pigs would be sacrificed,
To eradicate the cold..

(Take it away, Big D!)

THROUGH THE YEARS YOU MAY ALL BE TOGETHER,
ONLY I CAN KNOW.
EVERY YEAR THROUGH FASCINATING WORLDS YOU GO
SO HAVE YOURSELF A HAPPY LITTLE HOGSWATCH...
HO. HO. HO.
--Daibhid Chienedelh
(backed up by The Librarian, with an amusing mistletoe-on-a-spring headband, on organ, Imp, in ceremonial Bardic robes, on guitar and Death-as-Hogfather on drums)

Peter and I happened on the made-for-TV-movie/miniseries The Hogfather on TV Sunday night (one of our channels regularly plays made-for-TV-movies/miniseries in single sittings on the weekends). We're both Terry Pratchett fans, so we decided to watch it.

The production values seemed pretty high in that the sets, costumes, casting and special effects were all as good or better than I could have hoped from such a piece, but I'm sorry to say that we were, on the whole, disappointed. It seemed to follow the structure and plot of the book almost slavishly, which you might think is a good thing, since Terry Pratchett is a comic genius, but instead, made the movie terribly slow and plodding. People making movies out of books ought to realize that books and movies are different, and what works for one does not necessarily work in the other. In a book, you can present a series of seemingly unrelated amusing incidents, and then slowly weave them together till you get to a whirlwind climax. In a movie, the whole needs to be more coherent from the beginning if you want to keep your audience from wandering off thinking you've forgotten what your movie is about.

The tone of the book also got lost somewhere. Almost all of the silliness disappeared. Characters or situations would appear on the screen, and you'd think, "Oh, I like this bit, that guy is always good for a laugh." Then the character would provide a bit of exposition and disappear without doing any of the silly things they're known for. The silly things that were left in were played so VERY straight, that they weren't funny either. All we were left with an ominous sense of doom throughout the whole thing. Sure, the ominous sense of doom is there in most of the Discworld books, but it's just one more absurd thing that the hero has to deal with, and not the main tone of the piece.

If I had been making the movie, I would have condensed the plot, cut the running time in half, and thrown in a lot more jokes.

I got this poem from the L-space filks page which has archived and indexed posts from the old alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup. It isn't especially great poetry, but it was the best of the ones that mentioned Hogswatch.