Lothic

If the relatively small Titan Weapons of this set felt cumbersome to you then how much worse would "full-sized" Titan Weapons have been? I totally understand the whole "Buster sword" thing is a classic fan favorite but I for one have never been fascinated by the idea of having characters wielding swords the size of diving boards. To each their own I guess.

I think if I do ever get around to using this set I'd do it with a tiny sized character so that the weapons look that much bigger compared to the character. If I'm accepting the concept I might as well make the size difference as silly as possible.

Ironically this is the perfect time to be "pessimistic" about it. Until this movie has a firm plot and a fixed cast to change our minds I'm safely categorizing this in the standard "remakes tend to suck more than not" category. There's nothing really all that funny about that time-tested rule of thumb. In this particular case this movie is going to have to be pretty good to surpass the original.

Sophia was a cute little innocent girl who didn't deserve to be zombified and put down.
Did you have to have that "explained" to you?
Her character was simplicity itself.

She served as a living (then undead) symbol of everything bad about the ZA.
It was a very important and climactic purpose and the show didn't have to "explain" her inner workings as a person to accomplish that.

That's all I'm using here. Better luck with your next argument...

I still have the first season on my TiVo so I could bother to skim back though it if you'd like.

Regardless I already agreed she effectively says nothing that I can recall, but there might have been a few times when she acknowledged someone with a quick "yes" or "no" or the like. I just for the life of me can't understand why effectively no dialogue from a relatively minor character had to become a question of muteness or not. If you want to harp on this show there are probably dozens of different ways to rip it apart better than this.

Eh, maybe I just think people should hate thing for substantive reasons, not semi-silly nit-picky one. One more time I'm willing to accept when the two stories (comic and TV) do both good things and bad things. I suppose it's just very hard for me to think of one version being 100% bad and the other being 100% good. *shrugs*

I honestly don't understand why this is such a sticking point with you. It's pretty safe to say she was talking at least to Carl on the show. The fact that we didn't see her enough to have her deliver Shakespeare-like soliloquies directly to the audience didn't automatically make me jump to the conclusion that she must be mute or had to have her silence explained to me.

Clearly the TV show never really intended her to be much more of a character beyond being a tragic symbol that was going eventually be put down by Rick in a tragically climactic scene. That kind of character doesn't really have to be "Chatty Cathy" to serve their purpose.

It's not really pure "speculation" when we directly know her father was a nasty guy and it's very common for children in abusive situations to have social problems of one kind or another. Her being an untalkative introvert didn't seem "out of character" at all for her.

You realize you just answered your own question with this don't you? Yes perhaps in the comic we see Sophia at a point where she's gotten past being influenced by her bad father and has become more social. But in the TV show we still have her father around to keep her shut down. With her abusive father right there of course she's going to be more repressed - exactly the way we saw her. Why is this so mysterious to you?

And as far as "preserving storytelling strength" goes I would actually argue that by showing her abusive father (instead of just hinting about it like the comic did) the TV show actually did a BETTER job of defining the Sophia character and giving her a solid justification for acting the way she did.

I think the point that the TV show did not bring up any overt "communication problems" pretty much proves she was not mute and was never supposed to be.

I would think based on how much of a P.O.S. the husband was in the TV show it would have been painfully obvious to all the other characters (and should have it to the audience as well) that Sophia was in a sad family situation to begin with. I don't think it would have been a shock to anyone to understand (especially in light of the ZA) why she would likely be fairly unresponsive and extremely introverted toward nearly everyone. It's also completely understandable why such a girl might be more willing to be open with another child like Carl because like her Carl is not an "evil adult" so she could more easily relate to Carl than any other adult in that situation.

I understand (based on some of the things you've written) that you might be upset that the Sophia character was significantly changed when they ported her from the comic book to the TV show. But just because you don't like what happened to her does not mean that they did not adequately establish the background of the TV version of the character on the TV show.

You've got to remember that the creators of the TV show (which include's Kirkman) has firmly established that the comic book is -not- canon for the TV show. Again I can understand liking one version of a character more than another, but there was absolutly no reason why TV Sophia had to be anything like comic book Sophia. To be honest the TV version of Sophia seemed far more realistic to me than the comic book version because based on everything that's happened to the character it made a lot more sense for her to have been withdrawn and untalkative than to be almost blissfully flirty with Carl like she was.

As I Furio and I just pointed out I don't think there was a "missed opportunity" here at all. I believe the TV show laid adequate groundwork to explain why Sophia probably had a long history (even before the ZA) of being like she was. *shrugs*

Yes that was basically my point here. Sophia was probably already a bit on the withdrawn/introverted side even before the ZA because of her family situation. That aspect of her backstory (abusive father) was more a TV show detail than a comic book detail. That's why her character appears to be more "normal" in the comic book than she did on the TV show.

I guess I don't really follow your idea on this. *shrugs*

Sure if the character doesn't really say anything anyway you could go ahead and declare that she was mute. But having her character be specifically mute in this story doesn't really serve any purpose. In fact as I suggested that might have made her character less impact-fully tragic because if she were mute she'd have an excuse for not talking. It makes it more dramatic to think she's not talking because the ZA has scrambled her head than it would if she wasn't going to be talking regardless of the ZA.

To be honest I don't really remember her saying much of anything. But I think they did show her and Carl playing together once or twice while they were in that camp outside Atlanta. Also I don't recall anyone using sign language with her or doing anything unusual around her as far as language goes.

I suppose the only reason -not- to just say she was mute was again to play up the idea that she was withdrawn and shell shocked. If her character was meant to be mute then she'd have an "excuse" not to talk - the idea that she technically could talk but chose not to drives home the idea that the ZA was messing with her head and making her too disturbed to openly interact with people.

I don't think she's supposed to be deaf or mute. I sort of got the impression that she was always just a bit timid and/or "shell shocked" in general. I could imagine all the horror and chaos of a ZA would make a lot of kids withdrawn and unresponsive like that.

While it might be interesting to learn that some of the zombies might still have a tiny portion of their humanity intact I'm not really sure that's going to turn out to be the case here.

For example I think you could easily explain Sophia's late emergence from the barn with the simple idea that she might have been way in the back of the barn and it just took her the longest to shuffle out towards the door. Also as far her being a relatively "timid zombie" I think you have to consider what the zombie virus had to work with in her case. Let's put it this way: I think if you made a zombie out of a 6'4" pro-football linebacker you'd probably have something far more inherently scary and aggressive than making a zombie out of a frail little girl. I figure (based on what Dr. Jenner said) the zombie virus probably manages to activate the primitive "lizard brain" portion of the brain to get the bodies up and moving. I think that alone means you're going to have some zombies that are more capable of being overtly successful as zombies than others. Sophia's little child body simply was not designed to be a terribly effective/aggressive zombie.

Along with the idea that they didn't want Sophia to look very monster-ish they probably directed her to not act very monster-ish either. The less aggressive and non-growly she was the more "alive" she would appear, thus adding to the tragic effect that Rick was having to shoot an innocent girl instead of a dangerous zombie.

The guys in the Talking Dead show were actually hinting/suggesting that they should do a "webisode" to explain exactly what happened to Sophia when she got zombified. While that would be cool I think the explaination Chyll came up with seems reasonable enough given what Kirkman already revealed about it in that show.

Well let's put it this way: There are good reasons why they chose to remake this particular anime as opposed to just about any other title out there so far.

The 1988 movie still surpasses most other anime in terms of visual quality and dubbing even by today's standards. And it probably also has amongst the highest built-in "name recognition" for Americans. What I mean by that is if you were to ask the average American to list off anime titles the ones who could actually name -any- titles would probably be able to at least give you Akira as one of the few they were aware of. That alone makes it viable as something that average American audiences might want to see a remake of.

Now I'm still dubious whether this remake will be any good but at least I understand why they chose Akira for this attempt at it.

Yeah I mentioned that I got the first compendium (Issues 1-48) the other day but I'm only about maybe half-way through it. Just been busy doing too many things IRL to finish it yet.

I figure I've already been spoiled enough just by reading this thread so it's no big deal. Besides even the cover artwork on the compendium gives away that Rick becomes mono-handed at some point.

I haven't read all the comics yet but I suspect I know what you're talking about with my unintentional pun. It's possible that as far as the TV show goes Merle has already served the purpose of being someone who's become single-handed.

That's too bad. With the current quality of cutting-edge CGI a remake of a movie like Akira has the potential to be mind-blowingly awesome (at least from a visual standpoint) as long as someone is willing to spend the money on it. This is the kind of movie that needs to be a top-tier priority as far as studio support goes. I'd hate to think we're going to get the cheapo "SyFy treatment" on this.

Despite some of the "weirdness" of the story the Akira movie was fairly groundbreaking for its time. I haven't seen it in years but when/if this remake actually happens I'll probably re-watch it again just so that it'll be fresh on my mind to compare/contrast to the new one.

To be more precise that is the EXCUSE of a Dev.

I realize that the use of that word might be seen as a nit-pick on my part, but I think it's important to realize that Posi is simply using that doom-n-gloom rationale as an excuse to avoid having to do some extra work to give us an option that apparently many people still want.

I'm willing to grant that Posi's fears may have a small portion of validity. I'm quite sure there would be at least a -few- idiots who would abuse this. But I honestly believe he's oversold the negatives simply to serve his real inclination to avoid doing a bunch of extra work he otherwise doesn't feel is justified. I think he'd rather have us think "his hands are tied" in this situation rather than to have to tell us he's just arbitrarily decided he doesn't want to do it. *shrugs*