Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray
Excalibur (1981)
Directed by John Boorman. Starring Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne.
One land! One king! 1080 lines of resolution!
Did you know that there is a re-make of Excalibur is in pre-production? Apparently, the lawyers at Legendary Pictures have forgotten that Le Morte d’Arthur and its associated characters are in the public domain and have been since the bleeding Dark Ages. No more about the re-make (for now).
The original, Once and Future Excalibur, is a crowning piece of high fantasy from the 1980s. It is also my favorite film version of the Arthurian legends. (Apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Most movies about King Arthur, especially those before Excalibur upped the ante, are tatty costume dramas lacking magic, either cinematic or literal, and which feel like they were adapted from children’s editions of the story. (Apologies to Howard Pyle.) None of these movies connect to the sensations that the original telling of the legends, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, to Chrétein de Troyes, to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, create in me when I read them. A sense of dark mysticism pervades through the oldest versions of King Arthur’s myth: a mixture of paganism and early Christianity, a connection to Faerie, the eternal struggle between chaos and civilization. Excalibur, ignoring attempts to either look “realistic” or to resemble the generic expectation of a Hollywood costume drama, drives into the spiritual heart of King Arthur and emerges with something fantastic and often breathtaking.
What a TRIP…
Jhereg
There are indeed urban legends at work in the Collector’s market. For example, the entire print order of George Alec Effinger’s first novel, What Entropy Means to Me (Doubleday, 1972) was supposedly pulped before publication (almost certainly untrue).
How cool is this? Wizards of the Coast has released an updated version of Gary Gygax’s 1979 classic The Village of Hommlet, one of the most celebrated AD&D adventures and the first part of the notoriously difficult 
Yesterday’s deliveries here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters yielded — among the usual bills, magazines, and spare parts for the plutonium-powered signal beacon — a review copy of Detour to Otherness, by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore.
Collector prices are not always rational, as I think most collectors know. They can be fueled by hysteria. As many collectors have noticed, Clive Barker futures are very soft these days. Only the first British hardcovers of the Books of Blood and the British first of The Damnation Game have retained their value. There was a time, within a year or so of publication, when the advance galley of the American edition of Weaveworld could easily bring a hundred dollars. The last time I sold one, I bought it for $1.00 and got $10.00; but that was years ago. Nowadays you would be lucky to get five dollars for a copy. American firsts of Barker, or even galleys of same, are virtually worthless.
Role-playing games have always interested me because, at heart, they’re about stories. They’re ways to tell stories that you don’t know in advance, ways to bring people together to create something unpredictable but still structured in a narrative form. Now, that said, the question is: how do you go about doing that? If you’re writing a module, an adventure, that referees are going to pick up off a store shelf (or download from a web site), what do you give them to help create that story with their players?
