The CannibalRabbit bites back
By now, some of you must be beginning to wonder if there is something wrong with CannibalRabbit. It seems that tortured teddies are appearing everywhere at the moment!
Apparently this poor hand-crafted creature is a test lab rabbit, and you could buy they from the craft website etsy.com [^]. He has had so many brain experiments conducted upon him that his brain just pops out! Some days I know how he feels!
For those of you who think that CannibalRabbit is a bit bizarre or warped, then check-out the Kent Rogowski website [^]. Kent has unstitched a series of stuffed toys, turned them inside-out and re-stuffed them.
“They are at once hideous yet cuddly, disturbing yet endearing, absurd yet adorable…”
I don’t think that there is anything else that I can say! Head over to the website to see more.
On Sunday, the CannibalRabbits went to see “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Musical”. I must say that I really didn’t know what to expect. How do you translate Australia’s biggest road-trip movie into a stage production? You pack it full of big, well-known songs, like: Don’t Leave Me this Way, I Love the Nightlife, I Will Survive, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Go West and I Say A Little Prayer. This isn’t a slavish adaptation, and this version is all the better for that, there is plenty of new material and new twists in the plot.
The costume designers for the original movie, Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner, have been involved in this production and bring some the movies “style” with them. This gives us some really memorable moments like the Gumbys, the dancing cupcakes, and the Minties costumes in the mad, quick-change scene just before the end. After seeing that you could definitely see the cast saying: “Its moments like these you need Minties!”
If this were to happen in any other workplace, having a bus rolling about on stage and some of the footwear would have WorkCover Victoria in an absolute pink fit. Oh, apparently 750,000 ping pong balls had to be ordered in from China for the production. One thing is certain, we both had a toe-tapping good time and spent most of the two and a half hours laughing.
There is no doubt about it, this is definitely Terry Pratchett. “Making Money” is the second novel in the Moist von Lipwig series, and as expected Moist gets fleshed out a bit more, and in the process is groomed for more roles in the future. But there is something missing, I just can’t put my finger on what. The gut-wrenchingly funny, laugh out-loud moments are just not there. The surreal as been replaced by rational logic, and the clever wordplay almost non-existent.
So what? It’s still Terry Pratchett, almost every page has an absolute gem. Lord Vetenari – the scheming totalitarian ruler of Ankh-Morpork – and it is an absolute joy to see him in action. However some of the some of the “Watch” series characters are there solely as “generics” – Captain Carrot and Commander Vimes come across a being particularly flat. However some old favourites like Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and Mrs Cake appear in glorious technicolor; and of course what would Discworld be without DEATH making “his” obligatory appearance.
The focus seems to have shifted from the madcap invention of the early books. Terry, through Vetenari, now seems intent on a modernisation program for the city and takes us along for the the ride, uncovering snippets of previously unguessed detail in the process. All in all, I will still be hanging-out for the next Discworld instalment.
L-Space is one of the Terry Pratchett fan-sites and contains some useful odds and ends Discworld related. The one thing that I occasionally need to go looking for is the Terry Pratchett Reading Order Guide [^]. It gives an idea of the chronology of each series and some of the overlaps between them.