Spring! Games, gardens and chocolate.

[several_bees]

Spring! It's nice. Here are some nice things about spring so far, though I see that miss_newham has covered most of them already...

GAMES AT THE V&A

Comments

[mockduck]

Wow, those games do sound amazing. Plieby just made me laugh a lot.

[q_pheevr]

JUDY has left a shop, but oh no, it's raining! Fortunately SECONDARY MALE LEAD is nearby, and falls for her instantly based on her hat, and there's an umbrella nearby which he grabs, allowing him to sing that he is "A Fella With An Umbrella" while walking Judy to her next appointment.

That sounds... remarkably familiar, actually. Were the screenwriters ripping off Leave it to Psmith?

[several_bees]

I'm pretty sure there wasn't enough wiggle room in the script for them to rip off anyone at all. They just needed to get from "song about Michigan" to "song about a hat" to "song about an umbrella" to "song about a piano" etc as quickly as they possibly could...

[q_pheevr]

Well, perhaps lifting a little from Wodehouse was the quickest way to get from "song about a hat" to "song about an umbrella." On the other hand, perhaps "man falls in love at first sight with woman wearing elegant hat who is about to get rained on and steals an umbrella for her" is just one of those universal, archetypal plot points floating about in the collective unconscious of all romantic comedians.

[several_bees]

He doesn't technically steal it, in this one! Just... buys it quite forcefully. And it's very, very large (from a fruit cart), unlike Psmith's - but on the other hand that might just be because it's pretty hard to film two people under a small umbrella.

[ashfae]

WOW that V&A Late sounds like the most amazing thing ever!!

[several_bees]

Thanks - it was pretty great! And good fun going home afterwards and recognising people who had been there by the paper moustaches they were wearing...

[ravenblack]

I don't understand how this bun-on-a-string game works; when is it considered over? What's to stop you eating it down to the point at which it begins to get unstable and then taking the remainder in a single bite so as to score zero grams?

[kevandotorg]

I don't know the actual rules, but we played it as a race to eat the entire bun, with the weight of the remaining, fallen bun just being a tie-breaker if nobody managed to eat the whole thing.

[several_bees]

Another important point is of course that hands were not allowed.

[ravenblack]

Mm, no-hands was clear, the speed-race makes the gram-measure tiebreaker on failure make sense. So you didn't really win, you just lost least!

[robert_jones]

So what is the happiest musical ever made?

[several_bees]

I haven't watched all the world's musicals, so I'm not sure which is happiest, but we concluded that at the very least, Singin' in the Rain is happier. Though I suppose Easter Parade is earlier, so that doesn't prove that its tagline was wrong at the time of release.

[miss_newham]

I was going to say Singin' in the Rain, but they are quite cruel to the actress with the unrefined accent.

[several_bees]

Oh, yes, whereas in this one they are mostly quite nice about the Rival For Our Hero's Affections. Mary Poppins is mostly quite happy, if I remember correctly, but she does leave at the end. Hmm.