How Did I Miss This?

[liadnan]

I'm just back from seeing A Series of Unfortunate Events with Steph (I wouldn't bother, a poor substitute for LotR and/or HP as a pre-Christmas escape: despite reasonable to good performances by the kids and Carrey the film just doesn't work at all, largely because they've hacked three books into one movie) and two of the trailers caught my eye. The first was for Spielberg's War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, which looks godawful. Far, far, more important is... the film of The Magic Roundabout.

With Ian McKellen as Zebedee, Joanna Lumley as Ermintrude, Bill Nighy as Dylan, and, er, Robbie Williams (yes, Robbie, not Robin) as Dougal and, I really can't believe this, Kylie as Florence.

Fantastic.

Incidentally, after a bit of googling I came up with this BBC story. I love the way they skate from The Magic Roundabout was a television hit for years after it was first created in the mid-Sixties for French TV by Serge Danot to actress Emma Thompson's father Eric created the programme's storylines and characterisation when the programme was broadcast on the BBC. Why not just come out and say it: well, we had this incomprehensible tape which was all in Foreign so we made up a plot that seemed to fit.

In other news, Bambi has been "restored so that it's better than it was in the first place". This is obviously some novel use of the word "restored" of which I was previously unaware.