What were Gary's later influences?

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There's been plenty of discussions of Gary Gygax's influences in the lead up to D&D (the famous Appendix N), but I'm curious if he picked up any other notable influences in his later gaming career.

Were there books, movies, games, etc. from the 90s onward that notably affected his tastes, ideas, scenarios, descriptions and so on? Does anyone know?
 
Cyborg the movie came out in 1989, 3 years after CC. Bzzt...try again...

To answer the question seriously, I'm not sure Gary was influenced as much from newer items in the 1990s, at least in terms of contemporary Fantasy--I think there were one or two things but I'd have to look them up. He liked some pop culture stuff. Notably he liked to watch Beavis and Butthead in the 1990s. (Insert your own joke here).

One thing he kept on doing though was he was fascinated with nature documentaries. A lot of the Giant whatever stuff came from his sincere appreciation for something he'd watch on TV. For instance, something called the Cone Snail really fascinated him, so he had created a version of that creature in Lejendary Adventures.

Stuff like the Ladybugs in LA--which were a pun as they were a monster that could shapeshift from a beautiful woman to a hideous giant bug or larvae--were inspired by the Asian Ladybugs that bit him on his porch in Lake Geneva.

In short, he seemed more inspired by reality and history than fiction in his later years.
 
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He consistently mentioned Glen Cook's Black Company series, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and Piers Anthony's Split Infinity series as the only post-1979 fantasy fiction he really liked (not counting later books by some of the "Appendix N" series like Jack Vance and Sterling Lanier). He also mentioned liking the first Harry Potter movie (don't know how he felt about the later installments, or the books) and the Fellowship of the Ring movie (mildly surprising given his often-expressed disdain for Tolkien's book, but maybe he felt it worked better as a movie?).
 
Gygax posted a lot on a few boards during his final years. ENWorld in particular has a several hundred page Q&A thread with Gygax. If you don't mind wading through a lot of inane chit chat and stupid questions there's some good stuff in there. From what I remember of the thread T Foster and JRT pretty much nailed it.
 
Yeah, I would have mentioned Black Company but that started in the 80s (I remember his plug in one of his later Sorcerer's Scrolls), as did the other two mentioned by Mr. Foster. I honestly don't recall him ever plugging a new novel series from the 1990s or 2000s.

Something tells me the years of reading and writing for the fantasy genre may have made him less wanting to read such stories. I think they say -- when your hobby becomes your job, find a new hobby.
 
Yeah, I would have mentioned Black Company but that started in the 80s (I remember his plug in one of his later Sorcerer's Scrolls)...

I distinctly remember that review. Gygax's effusive praise for it made me pick up the original trilogy, which I enjoyed thoroughly in the late 1980s.
(It made me forgive him -- almost! -- for his harsh review of the original Conan the Barbarian movie.)
 
If you have a copy of Dragon 63, the review is in his column. The largest excerpt I can find of that online is here:


I'll post the excerpt here:

"Conan Meets The Flower Children of Set” might have been a better name for the film —and if there is any resemblance between the cinema version of CONAN THE BARBARIAN and that of Robert E. Howard, it is purely coincidental. The disappointment which began to grow inside me about one-quarter of the way into the film was not mitigated by anything which happened later on. In fact, bad became worse. I refuse to become involved in even a brief synopsis of the movie’s story line. The armor was good; the weapons less so, but passable. The muscular Arnold Schwarzennegger made a fine Conan, except —as all Conan fans know — the Cimmerian has black hair, not brown. More important, Conan can take out any opponent, even a muscular dude with a huge wooden maul. He doesn’t need to resort to cheap mechanical traps versus anything less than the incarnation of a god, demon, or worse. If you like special effects, the film is passable. If you have any respect for Conan as presented by Howard, then I suggest that you stay away from the theater or else be prepared for great disappointment. Pointless, excessive violence and gratuitous helpings of sex certainly don’t help allay this impression. Director Dino De Laurentiis has a way of screwing up basically good material, as he did with his remake of King Kong. He really did a number on CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and L. Sprague de Camp should have been ashamed to allow his name to appear in the list of credits as “Technical Advisor.”

One thing to remember is that perhaps the #1 influence on Gary's take on Fantasy is REH and his Conan stories, and they were his personal favorite, what he grew up with reading as a kid. So he's likely to be very picky about that subject.
 
Gary was still mad about the Conan movie when I met him in 1988. IIRC his main complaints were: (1) that Arnold has brown hair and brown eyes when EVERYONE knows that Conan has black hair and blue eyes; (2) that the movie was boring - even/especially the orgy scene; and (3) that the giant mallet wielded by one of the main bad guys was a really impractical and dumb weapon.

I'm sure his dissatisfaction came mostly from having a mental image of what a Conan movie should look and feel like from reading the books that the movie didn't capture (I can get this - I felt the same way about the LotR movies), but also I suspect there was an element of jealousy or "sour grapes" involved. The movie was released at the same time that TSR was trying hard (and, ultimately, unsuccessfully) to get a D&D movie made and it wouldn't be surprising if Universal passed on the D&D movie and said they already had that niche filled with their Conan movie, so Gary had a grudge and wanted to point out all the flaws and errors of that movie as a way of proving that they should've gone with the D&D movie instead. The irony here is, of course, that at least based on the excerpts and summary shared by Jon Peterson the D&D script TSR was shopping around Hollywood at that time was really terrible, and if a movie had been made of it would almost certainly have been much, much worse than the Conan movie, brown hair and all.
 
Did Gygax ever do a review of the D&D movies or the cartoons? I'm curious how he felt they held up to the written content they were based on.
Gary was a producer on the D&D cartoon and had some involvement in the scripts (he didn't write any of them, but he at least theoretically read and approved them, and likely provided some feedback and notes) so I assume he felt pretty positively about it, and at very least saw it as a good way to introduce the D&D brand and some of its IP (classes, monsters, etc.) to kids too young to play the actual game, in the same manner as TSR's "Endless Quest" choose-your-own-adventure books. In later years he said that if the show had gone into a third season that the intent was to mature its tone a bit, to de-emphasize the special items and cutesy stuff with Bobby and Uni, but who knows whether or not that would have actually happened.
 
To answer the question seriously, I'm not sure Gary was influenced as much from newer items in the 1990s, at least in terms of contemporary Fantasy--I think there were one or two things but I'd have to look them up. He liked some pop culture stuff. Notably he liked to watch Beavis and Butthead in the 1990s. (Insert your own joke here).

Hehhuhehehehuh.
That's cool.
 
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