I just checked dates on my oldest Discworld books and discovered that I've probably been reading them for close to or over 20 years. So, to finally actually see a place I've been religiously reading about for 20 years--almost two thirds of my life--that's like seeing one of my books as a movie. I can't explain it any other way.

I grew up with Discworld. Discworld is my fallback; my failsafe. I've never picked up a book by Terry Pratchett that I didn't like, if not love.

Watching the Hogfather tonight was almost beyond words. Sure, there were a couple of places (very, very few places) that I thought were a bit twee, as it were, but for the most part, it was wonderful. I seriously can't believe I didn't know about it already.

It was a perfect Solstice movie. It would have been really neat to see it at a theatre, or at least on a bigger screen than the one I have. There were so many details! So much stuff to look at while the movie was going on.

And Hex! Oh, boy. They couldn't have made Hex any more fabulous. Ponder Stibbons was exactly like I envisioned him, too--I mean, perfect. And so was Susan. The only character I was slightly not okay about was Nobby Nobbs, and that was because I thought he should be shorter and darker. (He seemed a bit too clean.) Teatime's little laugh sounded like Johnny Depp's Willie Wonka's little laugh. It was quite amusing.

And they are evidently doing The Colour of Magic next. How cool is that?

My only quibble is that I'm not sure someone who isn't already a fan of the Discworld series will 'get' everything. They may; I'm going to watch it again with my family on Christmas Day (or at least the first part) and we'll see.

And I cried, too. Because it was so good. Because I finally got to see something that I love on screen without wincing at the bad parts. There weren't any bad parts. (Although I think they could have cut out Bilious all together; he seemed a bit redundant in the movie.)

I would like to see Maskerade as a movie, and maybe even Lords and Ladies, too. And I really think Going Postal would make a great movie, but I respect the fact that they wanted to do the first book second. The Hogfather was a wonderful movie to start off with.

(And the Tiffany Aching series! Oh. And The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents!)

They need to make more miniseries like this one. I don't know what their budget was (in the interview on the DVD, Terry Pratchett said they had a small budget; you can't tell at all) but they used every single cent (or pound?) wisely.

Borders is the only store that has this DVD at the moment; they have an exclusive. It's not available online, unless you want to pay the Ebay scalpers, but it's worth a trip to the bookstore to watch what will be (for me, at least) a perennial Christmas movie.

I am so glad that I found out this existed.

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