Prometheus
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2008
- Messages
- 9,472
I'm sure that all British folks of a certain age remember when Look and Read: Through the Dragon's Eye was first broadcast. And re-broadcast over the course of many years afterwards. (For those unfamiliar with it, it was an educational TV series in the form of an epic fantasy tale done on a shoestring budget, that was split into ten twenty-minute parts, and which is fondly remembered by the vast majority of those who saw it. It's so well-remembered partly because it took a different approach to previous Look and Read series, and removed the somewhat heavy-handedly-handled blatantly educational segments, and took a far more subtle - and, as a result, infinitely more effective - approach to teaching the importance of reading.)
I re-watched it yesterday wondering if it was going to be as good as I remembered it being (though I suspected it would be, as I generally don't seem to run into this issue of things I liked when I was younger not holding up as well now), and lo and behold, it was. It's still a fun story to watch through as an adult. At a total running time of 200 minutes (a bit over three hours) if watched in one go, it clocks in at more than even the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (178 minutes), or The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (143 minutes), but it's well worth it.
The premise is that three kids are taken to the land depicted in a mural that they have just finished painting on a wall in their school playground, and discover that, there, the ability to read has been lost over time, which is now presenting massive problems, because a device (the Veetacore) that provides the life-force of the world has exploded, and nobody knows how to repair it because they can't read the book that provides instructions on its care and maintenance. Moreover, it causes issues when some members of the search party sent to retrieve some of the missing pieces of the Veetacore are unable to read warning signs about dangerous terrain.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v9MXx9xej10?feature=oembed
The funny thing is, what I noticed most of all, is how prophetic it was!
For one thing, the show features video-phones that are shockingly similar in size and form-factor to today's large-screened mobile telephones that feature few to no buttons, along with a home equivalent that could almost be considered roughly analoguous to today's tablet computers, all connected together over a network that seems to be rather like the internet (bearing in mind that there was really no concept of the internet in the collective consciousness of the majority of the British public-at-large at the time). Moreover, a number of the non-reading characters are grown adults, and they complain a number of times about having to read - with one even going so far as to remark, at one point, "What? A message without sound and pictures?". All this in a programme from 1989!
Taken in the context of the failings of current literacy efforts and the fact that the latter point is now not uncommon to encounter in the real world, it's clear that the authors of the story well understood the potential dangers of declining literacy standards!
It's also notable in this day and age, because unlike modern productions, they were allowed to use words like "death", "dying", "killed", and so on (as well as a bit of visual punnery on the phrase "fading fast", in the context of dying), and have a genuinely scary villain - a skull-faced bloke with an exposed rib-cage and guts, who had electric claws that could kill almost anyone with just one zap. Moreover, nothing was dumbed down, and nor did anything underestimate the intelligence of the audience. These sorts of things have all but disappeared nowadays, through a combination of over-regulation, and unspoken "rules" about not ever offending or frightening people, and it's very refreshing to see them again (I felt the same way when recently watching The Secret of NIMH, too).
At any rate, Through the Dragon's Eye was clearly a lot better for its target audience than current programming aimed in part at some of the same age-group.
Does anyone else remember Through the Dragon's Eye fondly? Did any of the other Look and Read series have such a prophetic viewpoint on educational issues?
I re-watched it yesterday wondering if it was going to be as good as I remembered it being (though I suspected it would be, as I generally don't seem to run into this issue of things I liked when I was younger not holding up as well now), and lo and behold, it was. It's still a fun story to watch through as an adult. At a total running time of 200 minutes (a bit over three hours) if watched in one go, it clocks in at more than even the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (178 minutes), or The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (143 minutes), but it's well worth it.
The premise is that three kids are taken to the land depicted in a mural that they have just finished painting on a wall in their school playground, and discover that, there, the ability to read has been lost over time, which is now presenting massive problems, because a device (the Veetacore) that provides the life-force of the world has exploded, and nobody knows how to repair it because they can't read the book that provides instructions on its care and maintenance. Moreover, it causes issues when some members of the search party sent to retrieve some of the missing pieces of the Veetacore are unable to read warning signs about dangerous terrain.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v9MXx9xej10?feature=oembed
The funny thing is, what I noticed most of all, is how prophetic it was!
For one thing, the show features video-phones that are shockingly similar in size and form-factor to today's large-screened mobile telephones that feature few to no buttons, along with a home equivalent that could almost be considered roughly analoguous to today's tablet computers, all connected together over a network that seems to be rather like the internet (bearing in mind that there was really no concept of the internet in the collective consciousness of the majority of the British public-at-large at the time). Moreover, a number of the non-reading characters are grown adults, and they complain a number of times about having to read - with one even going so far as to remark, at one point, "What? A message without sound and pictures?". All this in a programme from 1989!
Taken in the context of the failings of current literacy efforts and the fact that the latter point is now not uncommon to encounter in the real world, it's clear that the authors of the story well understood the potential dangers of declining literacy standards!
It's also notable in this day and age, because unlike modern productions, they were allowed to use words like "death", "dying", "killed", and so on (as well as a bit of visual punnery on the phrase "fading fast", in the context of dying), and have a genuinely scary villain - a skull-faced bloke with an exposed rib-cage and guts, who had electric claws that could kill almost anyone with just one zap. Moreover, nothing was dumbed down, and nor did anything underestimate the intelligence of the audience. These sorts of things have all but disappeared nowadays, through a combination of over-regulation, and unspoken "rules" about not ever offending or frightening people, and it's very refreshing to see them again (I felt the same way when recently watching The Secret of NIMH, too).
At any rate, Through the Dragon's Eye was clearly a lot better for its target audience than current programming aimed in part at some of the same age-group.
Does anyone else remember Through the Dragon's Eye fondly? Did any of the other Look and Read series have such a prophetic viewpoint on educational issues?
Last edited by a moderator:
