One thing I like to do is try and find answers to obscure facts in movies. For instance, in the Dark Crystal, 10 Skeksis are depicted, with completely different roles from one another, yet we are told that there were once 18 of them.
To try and unearth information about these unknown Skeksis, I browsed through various "making-ofs", fact websites, novelisations, etc, and I looked at the jobs that the Skeksis already occupied, to see which jobs might be missing. My results and notes can be read
here.Another time, I tried to help out some fan sites by compiling a list of all the names of the 101 Dalmatians. This meant searching through the original books, the animated and live-action movies, reading quotes from the TV series, and the odd promotional poster. I found 77 names in the end, and they're all canon! The list exists
here.One less intriguing one concerns the Princes from the movie adaption of Stardust, or rather, their ghosts. There were seven princes to begin with, but throughout the film, they meet their ends in various ways as they attempt to claim the throne. At the start of the film, three are already dead, and little information is given as to how they died. My notes as to how each character died, who killed them, and what order it occured in can be read
here.Lyra's Oxford, a short story in the His Dark Materials series of books, contains at one point a list of various countries in the world, which drastically differs from ours. For one, Italy isn't united; existing as Sardinia, Naples, Venice and Sicily. After researching each of the places listed, to find which historical nations they were based on, as well as comparing this to a map shown in the film "The Golden Compass" resulted in the two following items; one, a "Verbal Map" explaining what each title referred to (to the best of my knowledge at the time), and two, a map made from the information unearthed. Annoyingly, vast sections of the world were not described at all (Most of Africa, Southern Asia & France), meaning I had to leave the map incomplete. The Verbal Map can be read
here, and the actual map can be seen
here.The latest theory of mine (at the moment, at least) concerns the Talisman from the movie "9", and how it may work, as well as a few notes regarding the "stitchpunks". One thing to note about this theory is that after I initially analysed the film, I believed that the stitchpunks did not have mechanical bodies, and that the "soul" basically acted as an animating force for their bodies, mainly because I couldn't see how the bodies could move in such a way. Eventually, I found a diagram showing several of the mechanical muscles that would do just that, so I guess that they are mechanical to some degree. But I still think some of what I wrote has merit, so here it
is.And come to think of it, while I'm on the subject of "9", I attempted to figure out where the film takes place, based on the vague references given in the film, in the director's commentary, and some online websites. In the end, I concluded that the film took place some time around 1939, in a world where the Central Powers won World War I, making the German Empire (or a Fascist state somehow later derived from it) the main setting of the film. I drew a map to go with it, showing what the world might have looked like if the Central Powers had won World War I; it can be seen
here.
