Tumgik
#Anansi Boys
fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 hours
Text
Oi anyone at Heathrow! :) Signing Ninja Neil is at it again! :) ❤
Tumblr media
168 notes · View notes
theniftycat · 7 months
Text
What other Neil Gaiman work might you like?
The biggest thing to know about Neil Gaiman is that each work of his is a mixture of horror, fantasy, and subtle comedy.
That being said, each of his projects is pretty distinct from one another and there might be some that are more up to your tastes than others.
I haven't read some of his newer stuff (because I largely stopped reading as much since the early 2010s), but I'll do my best to remember what matters in other works.
Horror
The Sandman is a great work for horror fans. It's also great for mythology fans and other nerds, but horror is a major push and pull factors.
Tumblr media
The comic is probably the greatest body of work Gaiman produced and it's recommended if you're a goth at heart and are comfortable with themes of death and humans being gods' toys.
The Sandman (TV) is a great adaptation, but it's very short so far and doesn't cover the best stories.
Coraline is a horror story for children. It doesn't have anything that's not suitable for kids, but it can be viscerally scary to some people. Both the book and the film are great.
Tumblr media
Mirrormask is my personal favourite, it's a low budget film with mindblowing surreal imagery and one of the best soundtracks ever.
Tumblr media
It's about a teenage girl who has troubles with her parents (who run a circus, btw) and who gets swiped up by her imagination into a bizarre world that is being eaten by her depression. Not a scary film, per se, but it's disturbing. However, it's a very warm film and it always makes me feel better.
Fantasy
Neverwhere is set in a dimension of twisted London Underground where everything that's straightforward in our world becomes weird and too real.
Tumblr media
It really tickled my imagination, I highly recommend the book.
Stardust is set in a more high fantasy setting.
Tumblr media
It features kings, witches, ghosts, and a star that fell to the Earth. It has a young protagonist who's not exactly the best or the brightest person, so if you hate such things, stick to the adaptation. In my opinion, the book is just lovely.
American Gods is a darker fantasy that asks the questions: "What if every god people ever believed in became real through the power of their worship? And then what if that worship started fading?"
Tumblr media
It's set in the USA and because that country is such a melting pot, there are many gods. And not all of them are happy. This is the book that gave Neil Gaiman his reputation of a writer who loves weird sex scenes.
Humour
Stardust the film is often compared to Princess Bride. It's lighthearted, funny, full of imaginative adventures.
Tumblr media
Just a very nice film with an all-star cast.
Anansi Boys is a spin off of American Gods, but it's a lot more lighthearted.
Tumblr media
Anansi is a trickster god, so you know things will get funky.
I haven't read The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane yet, but I hear they're very good as well.
Also, short story collections or Norse Mythology might be a good place to start if you want to get a feel of Neil Gaiman as an author first.
6K notes · View notes
thenightling · 5 months
Text
For those keeping score here are all the TV shows based on the work of Neil Gaiman from the last ten years. Lucifer - Loosely based on the version of Lucifer who quits ruling Hell and opens a piano bar, from The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. Originally aired on Fox and then moved to Netflix for seasons 4 through 6. Neil Gaiman also got to play God in a bonus episode for season 3. The full series can be watched on Netflix. And is available on DVD. The plot deals with Lucifer, the ruler of Hell, up and quitting and moving to Earth where he opens a night club called Lux and takes up playing piano. In the TV series he befriends (and eventually falls in love with) a woman homicide detective named Chloe Decker.
Tumblr media
_______________________ American Gods - Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Aired on Starz. The plot deals with a man called Shadow Moon who gets dragged into the strange world of Old and New Gods vying for power.
Tumblr media
________________ Anansi Boys - Originally written by Neil Gaiman as a spin-off of American Gods, the TV series version was filmed for Amazon Prime and is currently in post-production (Not yet released.) The plot deals with the sons of Anansi, the African trickster Spider-God.
Tumblr media
__________________ Good Omens - Showrun by Neil Gaiman and based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Also Neil Gaiman has a small cameo in the first season. Available now on Amazon Prime. Seasons 1 and 2 are complete. Season 3 has not yet started filming and will very likely be the final season. Season 1 is currently available on DVD. The plot deals with two "differently competent" entities, an Angel and a Demon, who have come to love life on Earth and each other. And now must work together to prevent the apocalypse.
Tumblr media
______________________________ The Sandman - First episode was co-written by Neil Gaiman, based on the stories and original characters created by Neil Gaiman with a few borrowed DC comics characters. Currently on Netflix. Season 2 is in production now. Neil Gaiman also voiced a ghostly bird in the bonus episode segment Dream of a Thousand Cats. Season 1 will be available on DVD and Blu Ray at the end of this month. The plot deals with Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who accidentally gets summoned and captured by occultists who had been trying to capture The Grim Reaper. After over a hundred and six years in captivity Morpheus finally escapes and has to track down his tools which had been taken from him when he was captured. He also comes to realize he had made many terrible mistakes in the past and struggles to set those wrongs right.
Tumblr media
_________________________________________ The Dead Boy Detectives - First official spin-off of The Sandman. The Dead Boy Detectives were originally planned as an HBO Max series (now just Max) but moved to Netflix after the success of the first season of The Sandman. Based on characters who first appeared in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman is involved in the production. The plot is a pair of ghost teenagers decide to become detectives and are really bad at it. These two characters made a previous appearance in Doom Patrol on Max (Formerly HBO Max) but had been played by different actors.
Tumblr media
2K notes · View notes
Text
Please reblog if you want others to vote. I'll make polls with other female characters (co)-written by Neil Gaiman, don't hesitate to mention your favorites if you don't find them here.
3K notes · View notes
Tumblr media
6K notes · View notes
wheresbenni · 1 year
Text
Jacob Anderson sings his own specially composed Anansi Boys song
Source credit: jacobandaily on twitter
1K notes · View notes
wednesdayshadow · 8 days
Text
Tumblr media
Such sweet trauma. But, victimization may be too severe, as I am an all to- willing victim.
142 notes · View notes
whim-prone-pirate · 1 year
Text
how many times does neil gaiman have to specifically refuse to Word-Of-God anything before y'all take the hint—
he is the biggest supporter of fandom that there is, his own and in the broadest of senses. "is [x] canon?" is such an easily answerable question given that he has answered it twenty five times on one tumblr account. so, to reiterate, again, on his behalf:
book canon is stated in the book. tv canon is shown on screen.
anything that neil has said about his own characters outside of that specific and clearly laid out guideline is considered his own headcanon and opinion. there is no wrong or right version of aziraphale or dream or coraline. however you have decided to personalize these characters to help you love them does not make them any less real. Your Crowley is yours, and he is just as real as Neil's Crowley.
stop worrying. genuinely. you don't have to go searching for canon in the various gaimanverses because it's all been laid out in front of you since inception. you're all fine.
in neil's own words (possibly paraphrased as i don't have the post in front of me): "your characters are safe, and no one is going to take them away from you." not even neil.
693 notes · View notes
albertonykus · 9 months
Text
Works That Mention Birds Being Dinosaurs Where You Wouldn’t Expect It to Come Up
Feel free to reblog with any examples that you know of!
Note that my own selection follows these two requirements:
The work must explicitly use the wording that “birds are dinosaurs” (or an approximate equivalent), not only that “birds are descended from dinosaurs” or similar.
The work is not primarily intended to teach or reference topics in the natural sciences. xkcd and Dinosaur Train are great, but they don’t qualify under this requirement. (More general educational works that don’t specialize in science might count, however.)
Anansi Boys (2005) by Neil Gaiman:
“Birds,” Spider said, “are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they’re vicious.”
The Order of the Stick, “Bird Brained” (2011):
Tumblr media
Sesame Street, “When Dinosaurs Walked Sesame Street” (2016):
Tumblr media
Doraemon, “雪と恐竜” (2017):
(I haven’t found English subtitles for this episode, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)
Tumblr media
Over the Hedge for December 1, 2019:
Tumblr media
328 notes · View notes
raggedy-spaceman · 5 months
Text
The worst thing about tumblr possibly shutting down is losing @neil-gaiman's blog. Where else can we go that has such a direct link with a major author like this? Not to mention losing all the replies he gave over the years! I don't even want to think about it...
80 notes · View notes
fangirl-muse · 7 months
Text
aaaaahhh was just looking to see which if Neil Gaiman's works have been adapted to film and saw this:
Tumblr media
Are you kidding me?? Anansi Boys is one of my FAVORITES
138 notes · View notes
fuckyeahgoodomens · 3 months
Text
SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON
WORDS: DAVE GOLDER
Tumblr media
Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.
“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”
Tumblr media Tumblr media
GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”
But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”
For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.
But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.
“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.
“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”
Tumblr media
Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.
“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.
“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop to everybody that was in it, all the time.
“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”
Tumblr media Tumblr media
(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a book or something.
“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set the same respect it deserves.
“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics on the walls.
“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”
Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.
Tumblr media
The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.
“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”
4K notes · View notes
randimason · 1 year
Text
Damn. Charlie / Spider is (are) cute.
225 notes · View notes
artverso · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
Denys Cowan - Anansi Boys
25 notes · View notes
Text
Yes, some characters are still missing. You can only have 10 options per poll. I'll make others, please keep mentioning female characters you'll like to see (yes, I noted Death already).
1K notes · View notes
neil-gaiman · 2 years
Note
hi Neil! I've been lurking on your tumblr for a while now, more avidly the last few months, and have loved how you answer questions and reply to comments with fans. I read them and think "that's so nice! wish I had something to say to him tho :)" and then I realized this morning! I literally do. I read your Anansi Boys when I was a kid and just seeing a book about an African folktale I grew up with in a Western, respectful, context was absolutely everything to me. I loved the book and am planning a re-read to bring myself back into the universe. so thanks! thanks for seeing value in African myth. it really meant a lot 😊
I'm so glad. I encountered the Anansi stories as a boy, in our local library, and loved them, and so back in 1996, when Lenny Henry asked me to write something for him to star in, and I was determined to make it something that needed a Caribbean-British actor, and which couldn't be recast to a white actor, the idea of a story about Anansi and his sons seemed perfect.
(Lenny narrates the audiobook of Anansi Boys, and is amazing. He also wrote Episode 5 of the Anansi Boys TV series.)
1K notes · View notes