Willow (1988 film)/YMMV

• Main
• Trivia
• YMMV
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Funny
  • Heartwarming
  • Nightmare Fuel
  • Tear Jerker
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

These things about Willow (1988 film) are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

• Awesome Ego: Madmartigan frequently brags about being the greatest swordsman who ever lived. He may be right.
• Awesome Music: Great score.
• Crazy Awesome: Madmartigan has plenty of this. Taking on armies single-handedly. Seducing the Big Bad's daughter. And last but not least: launching himself from a catapult in the general direction of a massive two headed dragon.
• Cult Classic: The film didn't do that well at the box office and among critics, but it has developed a cult following among fantasy fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The sequel novels, depending on your mileage, of course.
  • Or you can pick and choose among the novels too. The first is Darker and Edgier but still has the same general feel of adventure and tension as the movie. The following ones follow an Elora Dannon who wobbles between Jerk Sue, Purity Sue, and God Mode Sue and at one point melodramatically recites a story that's basically Braveheart with dragons.
  • The whole trilogy is basically a deconstruction of The Chosen One and fantasy tropes in general: like the movie, several characters are ludicrously powerful with backstories about how super special they are to the setting, but they're all really just support for a relatively weak sorcerer.
• Foe Yay: Madmartigan and Sorsha. So. Much.
• No Problem With Licensed Games:
  • The NES game, although laden with Guide Dang It, is often regarded as a forgotten classic. Plotwise and structure-wise, it has relatively little to do with the movie though: it's been suspected for a long time that it began life as something else and picked up the Willow theming once Capcom secured the license.
  • The arcade game is also very well-made, has very nice graphics for its time, lets you play as Willow and Madmartigan, and unlike the NES game, faithfully recreates some key scenes from the movie.
• Non Sequitur Scene: One that didn't make it to the final cut. At one point, Willow has to cross a river. A strange hairless boy asks him what he's doing, and warns Willow that the water is cursed, just before jumping in himself. Later, as Willow rows across, the boy resurfaces, but this time his teeth are long and sharp, like a carnivorous fish. He resurfaces again a moment later, and now has a fin on his back. Finally, he resurfaces as a monstrous fish and attacks Willow's boat, capsizing it and pursuing Willow through the water. Willow manages to escape by throwing one of his magic acorns at it and turning it to stone (which explains why he was given three acorns, yet only seen using two). The scene was not cut for time, or because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. It was cut because they could never get the fish monster to look right. As it turns out, it lifted easily out of the story because it comes out of nowhere, is never explained, and is never mentioned again.
• Retroactive Recognition: Phil Fondacaro as Vohnkar.
• Special Effect Failure: You can clearly see the blue screen lines on the brownies when Willow is in focus and vise versa when the brownies are in focus. This is especially noticeable in their first scene.

---

Back to Willow (1988 film)