Overall, author George RR Martin is very pleased with the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones . His active casting process found many ideal unknowns, the show handled some of his signature moments flawlessly (“The death of Ned Stark couldn’t have been better,” says Martin), and the show’s host David Benioff and Dan Weiss managed to add new layers to certain characters (such as Cersei Lannister, as she saw with Robert Baratheon talking about their ruined marriage) like that).
However, in the first season of 2011, there are two scenes that upset the best-selling author— — and both as a result of the production’s attempt to make the most epic TV series ever on a budget that was considered sizable at the time ($6 million per episode), but fell far short of the writer’s vision.
The scene that annoyed him the most was just being “fixed” by his Thrones‘ prequel
Dragon House . In the first season of GoT, King Robert embarks on an ill-fated jungle hunt with several others when he is stabbed by a wild boar.
“Where we really fail budget-wise in the entire show is my least favorite scene, in all eight seasons: King Robert goes hunting,” Martin said in It is explained in the book that fire cannot kill dragons . “Four men walking through the woods with spears and Robert was shitting Renly. In the book, Robert goes hunting and we learn he was stabbed by a wild boar and they brought him back and he died. So I’ve never [written a hunting scene]. But I know what a royal hunting party is like. There will be a hundred people. There will be pavilions. There will be hunters. There will be dogs. There would have been horns— That’s how the king hunts! He’s not going to walk through the woods with his three friends with a spear hoping to see a wild boar.”
Martin’s extensive description is exactly what Dragon records King Viserys hunting in episode 3 Depicted at a party.
Interestingly, another scene in season 1 of Powers frustrated Martin with budget constraints, also gained
Dragon Reworked: Competitive matches. While the sequence in Thrones was very effective at staging some dramatic action with practical effect and introducing some key King’s Landing intrigue, Martin’s original vision for the sequence was more Like Super Bowl Westeros.
“We had to cut some points,” Martin said of the original fight scene. “Equestrian competitions are one of them. Medieval tournaments sponsored by kings and capitals are a big deal. [Co-executive producer Brian Cogman] wrote a faithful version [in the original script]. There are dozens of Knights, you see eight different fights, you have a sense of spectacle, competitors rise and fall, commoners bet. We should be at least as good as A Knights Tale Big, but we can’t even do that. The only matchup we see is critical to the plot. I think it works pretty well, though.”
Once again, Dragon staged his own version of the competition in the first episode of the series, and played in a large group of The (albeit CG-enhanced) extended sequence is performed in front of the audience. Apparently, Dragon’s budget approaching 20 million dollars per episode helped make the production a success bigger.
The Dragon House airs Sunday night on HBO.
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