First off, check out the animated short Saturday Morning Watchmen if you haven’t already. Yes, yes, it’s Newgrounds. I don’t care. It’s quality. Check it out.

The new Watchmen movie is about to be released. I got my midnight IMAX tickets ready. Good or bad, it’s probably realistically the best we would ever get. Lord knows they’ve been trying to make it into a movie for years. It started back in the 80’s with a ridiculous script by Sam Hamm, the guy who gave us the Michael Keaton Batman movie. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I have read enough. The ending in the screenplay puts you in a facepalm frenzy by having Dr. Manhattan save the world by going back in time and negating his own origin. This causes the present to be undone so that Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and Rorschach end up in the real world.

That sounds painful. The movie had remained in limbo for years after. There seemed to be some movement in the mid-00’s, with David “Solid Snake” Hayter’s screenplay. Darren Aronofsky was set to direct. Alan Moore, though disagreeing with the concept of a Watchmen movie, still said that Hayter’s vision was the best and most faithful version he had read. Things were moving forward a bit, even with a Watchmen movie teaser site up for a little while. Then it just went away and the whole thing was scrapped for a couple years until being greenlit with another creative team and another screenplay.

But what of the David Hayter script? Was it any good? I’ve actually read it. A few years back, back when the wheels were still in motion, I got my hands on the script and read through it. Totally legit. I had written a list of all the differences between the book and Hayter’s stuff. With the movie coming out, I figured I’d just dust it off and repost it for you guys.

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Right now I’m getting ready to go see The Dark Knight. As I type this, it’s near 2 am.

Unfortunately, my work schedule this week doesn’t give me many liberties in terms of checking this movie out at a reasonable time. Hell, it’s also the reason I’ve been a bit dry on updates lately. So the other day I went to the nearby IMAX, a one minute walk from work, and asked what the earliest showing was of the movie. The answer? 3 am. Eh, good enough.

Around this time it’s proper to discuss favorite Batman comics and stuff like that. For me, I look towards the Diniverse and the timeless Batman: The Animated Series. When people think of great moments in the Diniverse cartoons, they’re quick to mention the Flash tearing apart the Luthor/Brainiac hybrid or Tim Drake murdering the Joker. All great moments, but still somewhat fresh in the fans’ minds because of being the most recent.

For me, one of my all-time favorite moments is the latter minutes of His Silicon Soul, an episode of Batman’s cartoon that acted as a sequel to a story arc where he fought the evil computer HARDAC. In this episode, despite HARDAC’s destruction, a robot copy of Bruce Wayne/Batman exists. He wakes up and gets shot at by some thugs, quickly revealing that he’s a machine due to all the exposed wires hanging out of his stomach. Even though he truly believes that he’s Batman, it’s explained to him that he only has basic memories.

Luckily, someone made a YouTube video that condenses the episode into about 7 minutes. The final moments is some powerful, chilling shit.

On another note relating to the movie, there’s a Watchmen trailer attached to it. It’s online all over and it rocked my socks off. Shortly after its release to the internet, Entertainment Weekly revealed its Watchmen-oriented cover. I don’t know about you, but something seems a bit familiar about Ozymandias…

We danced on Sprockets 35 minutes ago.