I'm no fan of "padding", and I didn't mean any of it as a "defense". I simply found its shortcomings to be amusingly familiar as "rookie mistakes" of an aspiring author.

She's ideally cast as an angel, Tolkien elf, or other beautiful but not-altogether-human creature.

It actually, amusingly enough, reminded me of the detailed backstories of supporting characters in Tom Clancy novels, but while Clancy's sketches are efficient, and serve to make his plot twists convincing, Shelley's are much more extensive and digressive, and really read like unrelated story outlines she plugged in…

Definitely a "modern" theme, but quite understandable coming from someone who hung out with Byron, Shelly, and the Romantic poets — about the last people to tell anyone they shouldn't "play God".

I suspect that what you're doing is cooking up your own "steampunk" adventure movie with an abrasive genius protagonist and his sidekick to rip off the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes franchise.

I posted elsewhere here my impression about the more "cosmic" theme I think Mary was shooting for. What you describe here probably very much contributed to her feelings while writing the book — and clearly both her father and Byron were influences on the character of Victor Frankenstein.

I got a bit more vivid impression of Shelly's creative process than E. Buzz did. I think it's amusingly more than the "summer distraction of a teenager" — I think it's the summer project of a teenager whose friends told her "This is a really good story, you should expand it into a book", and who then dutifully raided…

That seemed pretty clear to me on first viewing — that going with Greedo was certain death, so "shooting first" was a kind of "law of the jungle" self-defense at worst.

I guess repeat theatrical viewings aren't completely unheard of even today — I know Inception got more than a few — but they're certainly much rarer. I don't know of anything in the past 20 years that seems likely to have reached the levels of your Pulp Fiction story.

Things like novelizations and comic book adaptations were popular because there was simply no better way to hold on to movies once they passed out of first-run theaters… if you were a kid who loved Star Wars and wanted to relive the story on your own, it was really the only game in town.

Plus, I'll see Krull's Lysette Anthony, and raise you one Kathleen Beller.

I believe she also dated Bryan Adams for awhile in the late '80s, and thus pops up in some of his videos from the time.

A saw after posting this that Shadow_play had already reminded everyone of the boost that the villainous Richard Dawson gave to The Running Man, so just imagine how awful it would have been without him.

I also found the death toll among the hero's band of merry followers to be kind of heavy, and their demises kind of nasty, for a swashbuckling PG action-adventure film.

That's usually enough to sustain me too, and Wizards is a damn short movie. But I just found myself just looking at my watch and thinking I couldn't bear another 45 minutes of this.

High-ecto. Get with the marketing campaign already!

..it should be no challenge for a smartan oversexed guy like han solo

I agree with pretty much all of this. I have to assume that Bakshi is his own worst enemy when it comes to the budget problems, though. Practically everything he's ever worked on seems to come with a disclaimer of "We were working on a shoestring, with practically no time". Either he's under a gypsy curse worse than…

I always thought he answered the question: "What if SCTVs Guy Caballero became a superhero?"

(It should be noted that basically every man in this movie who isn’t one of our heroes is a predatory rapist as well as a gullible idiot, which complicates the “goofy fun” aspect a bit.)