Post by GRWelsh on May 22, 2023 10:57:27 GMT -5
I just re-watched this because I wanted to see how it held up against THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE... TIME BANDITS is much better, and holds up well. There was a time in the mid 80's when I would have said this was my favorite movie. I remember seeing it at both theatrical releases, once with my Dad in late 1981 and once with friends at the small theater in downtown Butler in late 1982. At the time, I felt almost like it was a movie made just for me since it was so fantastic and quirky... It was so different from anything coming out of Hollywood.
I recently found the solution to a mystery surrounding TIME BANDITS that I was wondering about for over forty years...
At a certain point in the movie, the Time Bandits are arguing with each other saying something like "Horseflesh wouldn't have got us into this!" and "Horseflesh is dead!" and that is all there is to it, we never get any more information about this character... except, in the end credits there is a listing for Horseflesh as a character played by the actor Marcus Powell. This implied that either the character really was in the movie and I simply missed it, or it was an editorial oversight with the end credits. For decades I assumed the latter with scenes being filmed but later cut for the theatrical version. It turns out there were earlier drafts of the movie with a seventh dwarf named Horseflesh who was actually cast with Marcus Powell, and he was going to betray the others and give the Evil Genius the map. But the makers of the movie were worried that having a seventh dwarf would prompt legal action from Disney, so they changed the script to only have six dwarves but left in the reference to Horseflesh as if he was their former leader who had died. To make the situation even more odd, Marcus Powell actually does appear in the movie as the dwarf who is one of Evil's minions... It is an unspeaking part, but he is credited in the end as Horseflesh.
Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown wrote a script for a planned sequel named TIME BANDITS II in 1996 but David Rappaport and Tiny Ross had died and Jack Purvis was paralyzed from a terrible accident, so it never got made.
I also just read that there is a planned TIME BANDITS TV series to be released on Apple TV and directed and co-written by Taika Waititi with Terry Gilliam getting a producer credit... I'm not so sure how I feel about this...
I recently found the solution to a mystery surrounding TIME BANDITS that I was wondering about for over forty years...
At a certain point in the movie, the Time Bandits are arguing with each other saying something like "Horseflesh wouldn't have got us into this!" and "Horseflesh is dead!" and that is all there is to it, we never get any more information about this character... except, in the end credits there is a listing for Horseflesh as a character played by the actor Marcus Powell. This implied that either the character really was in the movie and I simply missed it, or it was an editorial oversight with the end credits. For decades I assumed the latter with scenes being filmed but later cut for the theatrical version. It turns out there were earlier drafts of the movie with a seventh dwarf named Horseflesh who was actually cast with Marcus Powell, and he was going to betray the others and give the Evil Genius the map. But the makers of the movie were worried that having a seventh dwarf would prompt legal action from Disney, so they changed the script to only have six dwarves but left in the reference to Horseflesh as if he was their former leader who had died. To make the situation even more odd, Marcus Powell actually does appear in the movie as the dwarf who is one of Evil's minions... It is an unspeaking part, but he is credited in the end as Horseflesh.
Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown wrote a script for a planned sequel named TIME BANDITS II in 1996 but David Rappaport and Tiny Ross had died and Jack Purvis was paralyzed from a terrible accident, so it never got made.
I also just read that there is a planned TIME BANDITS TV series to be released on Apple TV and directed and co-written by Taika Waititi with Terry Gilliam getting a producer credit... I'm not so sure how I feel about this...