Talk:King Kong

Object lesson in "from the real world" articles

I just wanted to highlight a little mistake that is commonly made by our editors. All too often, we rush to correct the writers of the DWU, as was done in this original phrasing:

In fact, Mighty Joe Young was a semi-remake of King Kong, and the correct answer (not mentioned in Happy Endings at all, which suggests an error on the part of Paul Cornell) is Son of Kong; or King Kong Lives at a pinch.

We need to learn to moderate our language when dealing with something from the real world. In the first place, this language belongs only in a "behind the scenes" section, so that it's clear what sentences are describing the source material, and which are offering commentary. In the second place, it's not accurate to say that something "suggests an error on the part of Paul Cornell". Happy Endings has multiple chapters devoted to a cricket match between an entirely alien team and a human team. It's fiction. Like the rest of the DWU, there's no guarantee whatsoever that things which appear to be from the real world actually work in the same way as they do in the real world. From the start, there has been a tendency for the DWU to not follow the real world closely. Yes, there was a real life Marco Polo but the dates of his life are different in the DWU than they are in the real world. Yes there is a British space programme (of a kind!), but it's quite different to the one described in The Ambassadors of Death. Yes, there was a man named Winston Churchill, but, as far as we know, he never had a Silurian as a physician, nor lived in a world where time didn't exist.

It's fine to point out the differences between the DWU and real world versions of things, but these differences should not be described as "errors". They are what the writer/production team came up with after a heck of a lot of thought.

Relatedly, it's precisely because of the many differences between the DWU and the real world that we should avoid using wikipedia, or our own knowledge, to provide basic background for things "from the real world". The DWU is not the real world — something we should have figured out the first time we were shown people from 100,000BC who definitively possessed a fully syntactical language, but were still looking for the secret to making fire.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 20:19: Mon 05 Mar 2012 

I generally consider the same. When something "doesn't fit" with the "Real World", in whatever settings, I imagine it's another Universe, and thus, thought-out or not, it makes sense that some things should be different, unless the author states that it's historically accurate, at which point he's digging himself in for making a mistake rather than a lot of thinking. --Anime Addict ☎ 15:02, October 29, 2012 (UTC)