I don’t have a lot to say about this book. Someone else said it’s a good time-waster and that’s true. Not very deep or anything but quite entertaining.
I actually thought this was the worst Discworld book. The satire was labored and not particularly sharp. And there was little more than satire: whereas in the Shakespeare and other parodies, he concentrated on the story, in this, he concentrated on the parallels.
When I first read it, I thought Pratchett had finally run out of steam. Luckily, the next few books were progressively better as he began to throw in more serious themes into the mix.
O.K. This is a bump but I would rather not start a new thread just to ask a simple question:
What do the “1000 Elephants” refer to?
Thousand Elephants is from Moving Pictures.
Spoiler, since we’re mot discussing that book.
CMOT wants to make the biggest film ever. So he decides to include 1000 elephants…which don’t arrive until after his company’s gone defunct and he’s back to selling sausages on the street. And they arrive at Ankh Morpork.
Um… this is the Moving Pictures thread.
I know what Dibbler was up to. What I want to know is where “1000 Elephants” comes from IRL.
I want to know what happens to the elephants. Do they all just spontaneously vanish or what?
Maybe Dibbler has an extra-large batch of new sausages now…
I think it was a generic “big movie spectacular” finale, not a particular RL reference. THrowing a thousand elephants into a movie certainly sounds like something Cecil B. DeMille would do, at any rate.
Yeah, that’s all it was. You have to remember that CMOT was bitten by the Moving Pictures bug, and was getting ideas that were not his…channeled, as it was, by the Spirit of Moving Pictures or some such.