Author: David Benedict

Size: 12M   Duration: 25:56

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Welcome to part three, the final chapter of our 2001 Dragon*Con performance of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, adapted for audio by David Benedict, featuring John Rhys-Davies as Lupine Wonse.

I hope everyone has been enjoying hearing this as much as I enjoyed adapting it.  Being able to share it with a mass audience has brought back a lot of the enthusiasm I had when I was working on the project originally.  I occasionally felt as though I were summoning dragons myself as I constructed them out of pure sound.

As part of this production, ARTC made a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the orangutan and its natural habitat.

Size: 11.5M Duration: 24:33

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Welcome to part two of our 2001 Dragon*Con performance of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, adapted for audio by David Benedict, featuring John Rhys-Davies as Lupine Wonse.

As I mentioned last week, the adaptation for this production was particularly difficult.  It is a full-length novel, rich with character development, humor, plots and subplots, and is considered by many to be a fine starting point for those wishing to get into the Discworld series.  When compressing it down into an hour, most of that stuff had to go out the window.  When we read the first draft it took over two hours and we didn’t finish.  That’s when I knew I had my work cut out for me.

For those of you who have read the original book, I agonized over the scene with the prospective dragon hunters who were all complaining about how you don’t get respect from monsters anymore and how one monster’s mother actually came round to complain after he was killed and his head put up over the door.  For those of you who haven’t, don’t think this adaptation even begins to cover the depth of this book.  Read it.

Size: 11.2M Duration: 23:57

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Wow.  It’s hard to believe we’ve been podcasting now for one full year.  Fifty two podcasts have come and gone and now we’re starting on year two, and we’re starting it with a really special one.

Back in 2001 we received permission to perform Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett at Dragon*Con.  Furthermore, we were very priveleged to have John Rhys-Davies play the role of Lupine Wonse  When the performance was over we thought that was it…a copy of the recording was sent to Mr. Pratchett, but other than that we thought it would remain locked in the vast, cavernous ARTC archive vault.

But then we started podcasting.  And so I wrote to Mr. Pratchett and asked permission to distribute the recording and happily he agreed.

What you are about to hear, in three parts, is something I will always be proud of.  I worked very hard on the adaptation, and believe me, cutting a novel-length book down to an hour is hard work, especially when you have an attachment to the material like I did.

I’d like to thank Mr. Terry Pratchett for permission to do the adaptation, performance, and the podcast.  I’d also like to thank the late Thomas E. Fuller for his assistance with the adaptation.  And I’d like to thank all of you for helping us reach one full year of podcasting, with hopefully many more to come.