Hacker Cinema
Sherlock Holmes
1984 · TV series · 52 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by John Hawkesworth
Sherlock Holmes, along with his friend Dr. Watson, uses his abilities to take on cases by private clients and those that the Scotland Yard are unable to solve.
5 positive3 neutralfrom 8 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
11 comments on Hacker News
I have put up a thread about Soviet Sherlock Holmes with a link to the subtitles episodes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377242
Not completely. The Soviet Union did adapt a lot of classic literature alongside the more obvious Communist propaganda you'd expect. I think they used the old town of Riga in Latvia to film the London scenes. I have heard that the Russians still show these films every Christmas.
There are subtitled versions available online. Here is a short clip (with Sarabande over it)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Flnlb5ITNQ
I am a great fan of Brett's version, which I think is the best ever made. But I think the Soviet version is fantastic, considering it was made behind the Iron Curtain. There have, of course, been some awful Sherlock Holmes films but that's another matter.
I grew up with Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, by far, in my opinion, the most accurate representation of the stories.
Only in my adult life did I read the stories, finding large chunks of the dialog in the TV show being word for word taken from the stories. And when not word for word, the tone and feel of the scenes so well portrayed on screen.
I just wanted to mention at this opportunity that some British TV series from the late 70s, early 80s are absolutely brilliant and some of the best stuff I have ever watched. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley's People, Danger UXB, Sandbaggers and Sherlock Holmes are some of my favorites.
My intuition says that that is truly a film that portrays mankind's potential for humanity, not the depravity of BV.
Ironically, from IMDB's storyline for TEM, it says,
> Brutish Bytes, his "owner", only wants whatever he can get economically by presenting Merrick as a freak.
which is precisely what DL did in BV, but for drug-induced violent rape.
Side note: I loved Freddie Jones in Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes' "Wisteria Lodge", though, ironically, that is the one episode with rape. Of course, it was in no way gratuitous, as it was TV, but obvious nonetheless. As well, she had deliberately risked herself on purpose in order to catch her husband's murderer.
It is truly amazing the depth and breadth of human evil encompassed by that Sherlock Holmes' TV series. I'd dare say they've got it all, by their mostly accurately following 130ish year old books. Doyle really understood human nature. I heartily recommend all 41 episodes, if only for Jeremy Brett's Holmes, but, really, it is outstanding in every aspect.
Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating.
Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers.
Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy.
The question is, "Why?"
First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others.
Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car).
We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent.
And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight.
My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit.
The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them.
I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot.
My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations".
They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect.
They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves.
So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about.
Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake.
"There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven
And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied,
"She fucked him before she fucked him."
I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.
Modern TV shows and movies.
We watch some older movies, occasionally, but no TV, except for the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 80's and 90's.
They haven't been inundated with adult shows with their sexy content/jokes and/or violence and bad folks of various degrees. They have gotten the flavor of the kinds of bad people can be from the Sherlock Holmes bad guys and women. They don't need Hannibal Lecter or his ilk and those kinds of movies that I grew up with.
Our daughter works on her crafts and our son on his chess. And we watch European football (soccer) highlights, where they get plenty of over-acting from those guys ;-) We also watch some select YouTube videos from time-to-time.
> but placing something to public domain is easily interpreted as explicit "please plagiarize"
I've never heard of anyone interpreting public domain as any such thing. Whenever I get an idea from the SQLite source code for example, I have never for even a single moment ever considered plagiarizing it.
If public domain were really treated as you say, then movies and TV shows about Sherlock Holmes wouldn't begin (or end) with "Based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." They'd just say, "Sherlock Holmes was conceived, written and created by Foo Johnson." But of course nobody does that, because plagiarism is unethical.
Scale, rate, and levels of achievable detail matter.
In 1896, a small handfull of people could conceivably alter film in a time-consuming process to achieve then-believable (and now generally laughable) results.
In 2020, billions of computers worldwide can alter video streams to levels requiring extremely good detection methods, or defeating even those, in realtime.
"Photographic evidence" was at one point in time a gold standard.
The era of analogue recordings -- that is, analagous to the ground truth -- created a period of high-detail, high-fidelity records of facts, in the original sense of events.
Rather than relying on testimony, witnesses, hearsay, or small fragments of physical evidence, there were records of still or moving images, audio, and more.
But with that came increasing capabilities to edit those records, general perception of which generally strongly trailed capabilities. It was the creator of uber-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was taken in by fabricated "fairie" photographs:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/559519/cottingley-fairy-photos-fooled-arthur-conan-doyle-sold
What's changed though is the level of skill required to doctor content (none, with available software), the speed at which the alterations can be accomplished (realtime), and the detail and convincingness of the alterations (high).
A hydrogen bomb does the same thing that Greek Fire does, at scale.
The gas turbine does the same thing the ox does, at scale.
Mustard gas does the same thing a bee does, at scale.
Scale matters.
I have several in-progress.
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling [5] (Kindle edition)
2012-06 issue of "Analog Science Fiction and Fact". I'm so far behind the current issue because I switched to an electronic subscription when a few years ago. At the time, it was only available from Barnes & Noble. The Nook app on iPad was pretty terrible, and I don't like reading on iPad in bed, so I fell behind. When it became available for Kindle [6], I switched my subscription to that, and converted my Nook issues with Calibre, and am now working my way through the backlog at a casual pace.
"Logical Chess Move by Move" by Irving Chernev [1].
"Build Up Your Chess 1: The Fundamentals" by Artur Yusupov [2].
"Understanding Copyright Law" by Marshall A. Leaffer [3] (Kindle edition).
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond [4] (Kindle edition, via Kindle Owner's Lending Library)
I've also been re-reading "Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories" by Arthur Conan Doyle [7] (Kindle). Generally what has been happening is that a PBS station here has been showing the 1984 British "Sherlock Holmes" TV series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes [8]. I'll watch that, and then often will re-read the corresponding Doyle story.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Chess-Explained-Algebraic-Edition/dp/0713484640
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Build-Up-Your-Chess-Fundamentals/dp/1906552010/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Copyright-Law-Marshall-Leaffer-ebook/dp/B008O84N12
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies-ebook/dp/B000VDUWMC/
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Book-ebook/dp/B00728DYEM/
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Analog-Science-Fiction-and-Fact/dp/B000N8V3EQ/
[7] http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Stories-Volumes-ebook/dp/B000QCS8YM/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_(1984_TV_series)
One of the Sherlock Holmes episodes claimed he knew of a unknown Roman temple chamber hidden in one of the lost tunnels. His explanation cited pretty much everything in this article. I wonder if there is any truth to that.