Tuesday, January 08, 2008

"For The Honor Of R'lyeh!"

You know Larry DiTillio, right?

Okay, maybe not personally. But if you're a big nerd, you might know that Larry DiTillio has written a lot of TV. Babylon 5 stands out, and rightly so, but check this -- he's also written a lot of cartoons.

Seems dude had a stint with Filmation back in the day (by which I mean "in the 1980s"), for one, so chances are, if you watched He-Man or She-Ra or Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, you might've seen his name in the opening title screen.

But you're reading this and thinking, "So what". Chill, baby, I'm on the way. Just a quick trip through Tangentsville:

For Xmas, we bought my daughter a She-Ra DVD set. It's a"best of" type thing, with the movie on one disc and 5 fan-fave episodes on the other. She's enjoying it, and we're glad.

Daddy is glad that the second disc has a big ol' documentary about the show, because Daddy (me) is (am) a goober for that stuff. I love to look at these people talking -usually quite humbly, in the case of Filmation people- about working on whatever movie or show the DVD features. I especially enjoy the Filmation staff interviews for...no reason that I can fathom. I just kinda do. They're neat.

So there I am, watching the documentary, and PING! There's J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 don't you know, and he's talking about how he and Larry DiTillio were working on creating She-Ra. And Straczynski says (and I paraphrase): "Larry brought a role-play gamer's sensibility to the character".

Huh-whaaaa'? She-Ra, RPGs, come again?

A bit of a shock -- unless you are a big nerd who knows that Larry DiTillio, the man who gave She-Ra her name, incidentally, is also the author of Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call Of Cthulhu.

WE'RE EVERYWHERE!