So after a whole movie's worth of journeying,

Bilbo and the dwarves will finally get a chance

to pilfer from a fearsome dragon,

in the new movie The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug.

Smaug might be the first decent CG dragon, ever.

(metallic rumbling)

For the last two decades, it's been an iron rule

of fantasy cinema that real actors

and computer dragons just don't mix.

Ever since Dragonheart, boy that giant lizard

with Sean Connery's voice didn't seem fearsome,

he seemed ridiculous.

I would be honored to be named after those stars, eh.

And his flappy lip movements still haunt my nightmares.

Ditto with the god-awful 2000 movie Dungeons and Dragons.

And Reign of Fire, and Eragon.

More like Error-gon, am I right?

'Cause you see, never mind, humor, har har.

TV shows don't fare any better.

The only reason Game of Thrones gets away with it

is because appearances by its CG dragons

only make up about 45 seconds of the shows 30-hour runtime.

What makes this worse is that before computers,

cinematic dragons were awesome.

The trailblazing movie dragon in Fritz Lang's

Die Nibelungen was, well, it was pretty impressive for 1924.

I mean, I felt for him when he got stabbed.

(intense music)

And animatronics got much better over the years.

Yo, what's up Falkor. Ugh.

And no CG movie has yet matched Dragonslayer,

which represents the pinnacle of stop motion effects

before computers killed that art form.

Phil Tippett's go motion for the win.

What happened?

It could be that some dark necromancer

placed a curse on the fantasy genre.

But I prefer to blame the American Godzilla.

The movie that betrayed 1000 kaiju conventions.

The sheer unconvincingness of its central monster

clearly touched off a shockwave of suck.

(epic music)

So why are dragons so very hard?

I suspect it's because they occupy

an awkward place in the monster spectrum.

They can't just be giant lizards

the way Kong is a giant gorilla.

They're not dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park,

but they can't be purely mythical creatures like basilisks.

Rendering dragons combines the difficulties

of all three of these phylae of movie monsterdom.

So all you effects gurus at Weta,

I hope you are using Morta Canon's faithful mouse pad,

which has a plus 10 attack bonus.

You did Gollum, you can do this.

I wonder if Andy Serkis is doing mo-cap for Smaug.

That might help.

I for one am gonna have a hard time wrapping my head

around why Smaug sounds like Sherlock Holmes.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think

about Benedict Cumberland, Cumberbund, Cucumber-blatch.