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It looked like Time Bandits should have been set up for success. A well-loved original source material. What We Do In The Shadows creators Jermaine Clement, Taika Waititi, and Iain Morris running the show. One of the Friends in a leading role.
Then, just as soon as it arrived on Apple TV, the show was abruptly cancelled.
Time Bandits followed an 11-year-old history geek named Kevin, played by Kal-El Tuck, as he journeyed through the centuries with a ragtag group of thieves. It failed to break Nielsen’s top streaming list, and reviews were not kind.
One thing critics pointed to was the complete absence of dwarves, all of whom were key characters in Terry Gilliam’s acclaimed 1983 original.
So what happened? In an interview with La Repubblica, Gilliam said he wasn’t consulted on, or even told about, this change:
“They kept it from me for months that there were no dwarves in the series – something I consider structural to that story. When I found out, it was too late, and that’s why the series failed.
They brought me in as a non-writing executive producer, and I thought I had a bit of control, but when I read the scripts, I didn’t like them. Taika Waititi, the director whose ‘Jojo Rabbit’ I loved and to whom I thought I was handing the project, wasn’t really involved; his subsequent films were disappointing.”
Hollywood has a problem with dwarves. Thousands of… differently heighted… actors who rely on these sorts of roles are no longer being cast due to some studio idiocy. Disney’s recent Snow White adaption replaced dwarves with “magical creatures” and then had to row this back and insert CGI horrors which failed to save that doomed project.
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