Anoria: Good, I'm here before the thread turns spoilery.

I am HYPE about this but cannot watch tonight. HBO really could have done a better job of promoting it; even my chat channel which is full of people who got to be friends on an HDM forum 10-20 years ago didn't know it was coming out today until... today.

I'll be back in a couple of days, after this thread closes no doubt, full of breathless enthusiasm and commentary.

Subby here, in the same boat. Got home late and the premiere was already ½ over so I plan on watching it on DVR or a rerun.

As usual with HBO, there's a bunch of reruns.scheduled all week, including later tonight (but I watch the late night talk shows).

BrianGriffin: This series is so much better than the abomination which was the film release with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. That sucked more balls than exist in any universe. The film version belongs in the Hall of Shame with other shiatty adaptations such as The Black Cauldron, A Wizard of Earthsea, and A Wrinkle in Time. Ender's Game is only slightly better and avoids the Hall of Shame by a whisker.

All of those are trumped by The Last Airbender. How does someone take visual source material that's that awesome and make it suck that badly?

One adaptation that's beloved but still an extreme travesty to the source material is The Secret of N.I.M.H. At least they had the decency to change the title (book: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H.). They didn't just change major story elements and characterizations. They changed the whole genre of the story! The original was science fiction for kids. The movie has a freakin' magic gemstone!

It'd be like if Peter Jackson, at the climax of The Lord of the Rings III: The Return of the King, instead of Gollum biting off Frodo's ring finger and falling into the Cracks of Doom, instead Frodo fights him off and throws Gollum in, completes his own corruption, then the Nazgûl arrive (they had turned from the battle and flown full-speed towards Orodruin aka Mount Doom when Frodo put on the Ring there and Sauron finally saw him as a result and realized his danger, but in the book were caught in the conflagration after Gollum fell in and Sauron was destroyed), take the Ring away from Frodo and capture both Frodo and Sam and take them to Barad-dûr, then Sauron himself takes the Ring from the Nazgûl second-in-command (since the Witch-King of Angmar had recently been slain by Meriodoc wielding the elf-sword, along with Éowyn), and now can command the armies more fully and drain all hope from the armies of the West. But then, just as all seems lost, the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701E warps into orbit around Middle Earth and phasers Barad-dûr into atoms, destroying Sauron and the Ring.