Time Bandits

[HStorm]

Lord Fear usually reminds me of Blackadder with his sharp-witted, jeering dialogue. But today I watched the 1982 movie Time Bandits for the first time in years, and I realised that the character of Evil is even more like Lord F than Blackadder. Not only does Evil have a similar gruelling sense of humour and grisly relationship with his subordinates, but also he's a sorcerer who's absolutely obsessed with technology, and wants to re-recreate the world as a mechanical dystopia; Evil is essentially a prediction of the rise of the technocrats in the late '80's, just as Lord F is a contemporary parody of them. David Warner's performance as Evil has a tone of petty calmness and sudden explosions of short temper that very much recalls Mark Knight's spyglass sequences.

If you've watched the film, do you reckon Fear was consciously cut from the same cloth as Evil?

[stevejd]

Well he's surely evil... perhaps there was a bit of that black evil stuff left over, and Lord Fear was born!

[EvelynMason]

I couldn't find any mention of it in previous threads for this and sorry if duplicated anything not read but a few days ago watched Time Bandits for the first time. A very critically acclaimed film with names from the Monty Python team behind it but point being there were certain similarities with the Knightmare series.

For one (spoilers alert) there's a spyglass effect with the main villain (with one of two adversaries) keeping watch on the heroes or team trying to prevail with a water effect in a pool. Reminded me of Lord Fear straight away. Secondly a ghostly head that appears speaking out and warning the team that was very similar to Mogdred in the earlier episodes. A knight on horseback appears at the near beginning in a woodland setting that also offered intrigue. It's obviously set in the past hence the film title with various surroundings taking place in bygone eras.

I wondered if Tim Child or one of the producers took notice of the film and developed a concept on what I had watched. It was about six years before Knightmare actually started it's run on TV but wouldn't they have had to ask for the rights to go ahead with it or find consent from the makers of the film itself.

I'll give it another watch when able but the more I sat through it the more I accepted there were clear similarities between the film and the series itself.