The Seventh Dwarf: Horseflesh

Me: I’m trying to decide whether to make one of my characters absent for the first book
Arkem: Well if you can do without him, you might as well kill —
Me: No, not non-existent just… not there. The rumour on the edge of sight. The seventh dwarf. Horseflesh.

I’m not entirely sure why, but whenever I say things like this to people they look at me funny. It’s a lot like the way they look at me when I say the seven dwarfs are called Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally, Vermin and Horseflesh (only he’s dead, probably). This leads me to believe that there are a lot of folks out there who are watching the wrong movies. Well, for certain values of ‘wrong’ that means ‘not slightly obscure flicks from the eighties starring people you would not expect to be in the same movie together’.

To be fair, I’ve had those beliefs about the seven dwarfs* practically since birth (and there’s no real proof it wasn’t from birth, I just don’t remember back past age two). And it’s not, as you might think, because I saw the movie at a young age. I think I first saw it when I was… I don’t know, vaguely adolescent? But my parents own a lot of books. And for reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain, one of them is a shooting script for Time Bandits.

This is a truly excellent document. It includes a number of asides both about and possibly to the dwarfs, delightful phrases like ‘and Sean Connery smiles as only Sean Connery can smile’ with a followup note that they can stop sucking up now because he’s agreed to do the film… you know, the sort of added charm you find in Buffy shooting scripts, but they didn’t come along until much later.

Basically, at age six, I thought it was fabulous. I still do, actually. I must remember to try to steal it from my parents next time I’m over there.

Also the movie is good. It’s like a cross between Bill and Ted and something out of Terry Pratchett’s head, told from the perspective of someone who’s about four foot tall (which is how tall you are if you’re dwarf ex-employees of the Supreme Being, or, you know, eleven).

Basically, you should watch it so I can make Horseflesh jokes that don’t cause you to check my temperature and ask if I’m sure I’m feeling quite all right.

 

* Writing this post has brought to my attention that I have some strange opinions about how one spells the plural of ‘dwarf’. The reality is that there’s some debate. But the language centres of my brain seem fairly confident that when we’re talking about any group or race of dwarf-type creatures ‘dwarves’ is correct. Except if there are seven of them. And then suddenly there are ‘f’s. I don’t know why. Perhaps there’s a bit of fluff on the part that’s meant to connect the logic circuits in there.