So about Stargate (the original movie) and, a little, the Mummy movies
There was a cheerful maniac of a PhD lecturing at University of Memphis yesterday afternoon. Apparently, large quantities of his grad school debts were paid off by consultant work on Stargate (the movie, not the series) and more later by the Mummy movies. He started out with a quick overview of Hollywood's love affair with Egyptian history and the savage/sensuous East; he also detoured through rough detailing on how hieroglyphics work and some lovely sidelines into linguistics and comparative writings.
Mostly, however, he told stories on Stargate with sidenotes on the two Mummy movies. (He spent half the filming of Stargate on the sets; he wasn't around nearly as much on the Mummy or the Mummy Returns.) The lecture was great fun, and the more so for things he told us he'd snuck into the Egyptian dialogue which, shall we say, did not appear in the footnotes. For the curious: in Stargate, when Sha'uri is reading the hieroglyphs for the other Abydans to reassure them that they beat Ra once and can do it again, apparently the last line is not really 'and they defeated Ra.' It's more like 'And Ra ate shit.' Other 'slight' variations, in The Mummy Returns: When Anck Su Namon and Nefertiri finish the fight, Anck does not say 'You have improved, my princess.' It's a lot more like 'Go fuck a donkey.'
::amused:: And then there was the unintentional slash that almost snuck into Stargate. When Daniel's been resurrected in the sarcophagus and is asking Ra on the ship about 'I was killed?', they had to go back and redo that scene, or at least redub it. The original Old Egyptian was 'Yo wani-me toni?' They were so busy filming, they never heard how it sounded. The people watching the dailies, however, caught it. Not quite the standard slash pairing there, I gotta say, and also? Ewwww!
Fun, fun lecture though, given by Dr Stuart Tyson Smith, Anthropology Dept at UC Santa Barbara. If you ever get a chance to listen to him, go. He's very entertaining. I'm still sorry I didn't get a chance to make his lecture on the Nubians and the Egyptians Friday night.
Mostly, however, he told stories on Stargate with sidenotes on the two Mummy movies. (He spent half the filming of Stargate on the sets; he wasn't around nearly as much on the Mummy or the Mummy Returns.) The lecture was great fun, and the more so for things he told us he'd snuck into the Egyptian dialogue which, shall we say, did not appear in the footnotes. For the curious: in Stargate, when Sha'uri is reading the hieroglyphs for the other Abydans to reassure them that they beat Ra once and can do it again, apparently the last line is not really 'and they defeated Ra.' It's more like 'And Ra ate shit.' Other 'slight' variations, in The Mummy Returns: When Anck Su Namon and Nefertiri finish the fight, Anck does not say 'You have improved, my princess.' It's a lot more like 'Go fuck a donkey.'
::amused:: And then there was the unintentional slash that almost snuck into Stargate. When Daniel's been resurrected in the sarcophagus and is asking Ra on the ship about 'I was killed?', they had to go back and redo that scene, or at least redub it. The original Old Egyptian was 'Yo wani-me toni?' They were so busy filming, they never heard how it sounded. The people watching the dailies, however, caught it. Not quite the standard slash pairing there, I gotta say, and also? Ewwww!
Fun, fun lecture though, given by Dr Stuart Tyson Smith, Anthropology Dept at UC Santa Barbara. If you ever get a chance to listen to him, go. He's very entertaining. I'm still sorry I didn't get a chance to make his lecture on the Nubians and the Egyptians Friday night.