WATERSHIP DOWN
(As abridged by Em: The Adventures of Hazel & Co.)
SPOILER WARNING!!!
Disclaimer
Watership Down Is an excellent book by Richard Addams! Go read! Now!
This abridgement is for people who have read the book, and so can appreciate it. It is written in the style of a script, as one would animate or draw in cartoon style, but is actually written to be read this way.
All of the wonderful characters are not duly represented in this work, especially Blackberry, Silver and Dandelion. All of the wonderful aspects of rabbit psychology are also not present, neither are Fiver’s weird visions, or any of the El-ahrairah stories, or the wonderful Lapine language. A lot of creative license has been taken with who said what, and other such small details.
PART 1: THE JOURNEY
Fiver: We’re all gonna die.
Hazel: Says who?
Fiver: Says me.
Thearah: Halloo?
Fiver: We’re all gonna die.
Thearah: That’s nice.
Fiver: No, I’m being serious. Bad things will happen to us.
Thearah: Maybe if I ignore them, they’ll go away.
Hazel: We’ll just have to leave by ourselves then.
Co.: Yay! We’re coming with you!
Captain Holly*: No you’re not! Badbadbad! No abandoning the warren for you!
Bigwig: Fightfightfight!
Hazel & Co.: Runrunrun!
Hazel & Co: Ohgoshlookit! River!
Hazel: Everybody swim!
Fiver & Pipkin: We are the weaklings. Fear us.
Hazel: Dang it, we can’t leave the weaklings behind, now can we?
Bigwig: Ohgoshlookit! Big scary dog! We’ll have to leave them!
Hazel: But we might need them later.
Blackberry: Being the smart bunny, I just came up with a clever plan.
Bigwig: I don’t understand it, therefore it won’t work.
Fiver: Being the psychic bunny, I do.
Bigwig: Ooooooh! It worked! You’re all so smart!
Hazel: Foreshadowing…
Hawbit, Speedwell & Acorn: We shall be jerks and rebel!
Bigwig: Badbadbad!
Hazel & Co.: Scary dark marshy place!
Fiver: Which of course means we shall have to cross it.
Co.: Darn.
Hazel: Do it anyway.
Hazel: Augh foggy…
Co.: Yeah, we made it! You are so smart, Hazel!
Fiver: Hello? Doesn’t anyone ever give me any credit?
Co.: Nice place, we shall stay here.
Fiver: No, we have to keep going.
Freakishly Weird Bunnies: We are freakishly weird and unnatural! Come be freakishly weird with us!
Hazel & Co.: Funfunfun!
Fiver: Argh! No! Runaway!
Hazel & Bigwig: No, you must come be weird with us.
Fiver: Darn.
Bigwig: Augh! Rabbit trap!
Freakishly Weird Bunnies: Oh yeah, and we forgot to mention that you might get killed unexpectedly at any moment. But it’s a small price to pay for our wonderful lifestyle.
Hazel & Co.: Runaway!
Fiver: Next time we listen to me.
Bigwig: Dead.
Hazel & Co.: No! Poor Bigwig!
Bigwig: Alive now.
Hazel & Co.: Yayness!
Hazel & Co.: Now we go.
Strawberry: I comes too.
End of Part One.
*The male rabbit captain of the Sandleford Owsla. Not the female elf captain of the LEP.
PAR TWO: ON WATERSHIP DOWN
Hazel: Well, we came all this way… I can’t read this, it’s all smudged…* blah blah… Okay, Now what do we do?
Fiver: We go up, of course.
Hazel: Up?
Fiver: Yes, up. It’s our destiny.
Hazel: But…
Fiver: JUST DO IT!!!!!
Hazel: Wowee. What a froody place!
Fiver: I told you so.
Hazel: Peoples! Dig a warren!
Co.: Digdigdig!
Co.: Chiz chiz! We shall live here forever and so will our prosperity and our young shall frolick and our does… Uh oh.
Fiver: Yup.
Co.: Alas! In our male stupidity we forgot the women!
Hazel: Ack! We so stoopid! Don’t worry, I have a plan!
Rabbit: Look Hazel, birdy!
Hazel: Quick, feed it!
Co.: Why?
Hazel: JUST DO IT!!!!!
Kehaar: (the bird) Me Kehaar, me helps you find mudders! *flies away*
Mysterious Voice: Zorn! Zorn! Zorn! All Zorn!
Bigwig: Scream, panic, and run helplessly around in circles!** It’s the Black Rabbit of Inle!
Bluebell: ‘Ello chaps!
Mysterious Voice: *reveals himself to be Capt Holly who we met in part 1* They all died!
Fiver: Big surprise.
Holly: It was!
Fiver: Well, I did try to warn you.
Kehaar: Big warren with lotsa mudders thataway, small farmhouse with hutch buns thataway.
Hazel: Righto, Holly, you take some bunnies and talk that other warren out of some does, ‘k?
Holly: You really think it will be that easy?
Hazel: Oh sure! I’m positive that all of these other pages detail our happy successful lives breeding and eating and frolicking etcetera.
Holly: Hokay. *leaves*
Hazel: And whilst they are gone, we will sit here and twiddle our thumbs… except that we don’t have thumbs! Aha!
Fiver: Oh no! I know what you’re thinking!
Hazel: You do?
Fiver: D’oh. I’n psychic.
Hazel: Oh yeah. Well anyways, I can’t look weak and lazy while the others are out saving our hides! We must go get those other bunnies!
Fiver: 
Hazel: Let us go see about these hutch bunnies.
Hazel: Erm…kitty…doggie…hutch bunnies! Hello bunnies!
Hutch Buns: Um..ok.
Hazel: Come with us!
Hutch Buns: ‘K.
Car: ROOOOAAARRR!
Dandelion: Run!
Dude(human): Oh dang it! How did the bunnies get out?
Other Dude: Look woild ones!
Dude; *shoots hazel*
Hazel: Ouch.
Other Bunnies: Where’s Hazel?
Dandelion:…
Dandelion: He fell behind.
Co.:…
Co.: We’ll keep to the code.
*all go back with ¾ hutch buns, but the 4th was a buck, so he so he doesn’t matter*
Co: Hazel-
Fiver: Je sais***.
Holly&Co.: *come back, looking worse for wear. Everyone is generally depressed*
Fiver: *has a really strange vision*
Fiver: He was just resting!
Blackberry:
Meanwhile…
Holly; We went to the warren, they called themselves Efrafa, they were weird, they were probably a metaphor for some country or political ideal back in 1972, they didn’t like us, we barely escaped with our lives.
Blackberry: Hazel’s alive!
Co: W00T!!!
Fiver: And from now on, everyone shall listen to me when I say I have a bad feeling, capiche?
Hazel and Co: *meekly* Yes mother.
Hazel: 15 males and 2 females… yeah, this is gonna work real well. We need to go back to Efrafa.
Holly: Did you not just hear me?
Hazel: Don’t worry, you’re not coming. I have a plan. dunh dunh dunh…
Fiver: Hey, it’s mostly my plan!
Hazel: Shaddup, you’re ruining my dramatic moment.
End of Part Two
*Yesh, Em cannot read her notes
**©Ebethy
***Trans: ‘I know’
PART THREE: EFRAFA
Hey, is this the first post?
Oh, I left the ‘part three: efrafa’ thing in. sorry. There’s no actual part three written yet.
Is this new or old?
But Efrafa is the most important part! Or, at least, my favorite.
Part one is old, part two is new.
3- Well, the first one is old and the second is new.
YAY! PART TWO! Whee! I love it, Em!
I noticed the lack of does even before they left the Sandleford Warren. And it’s not like it was a really cliche plot twist, either.
I read that last year. I actually rather despised it. Your script is 1000x better than the actual book.
HMMMMMM. Interesting.
lol love it!
7 – Yes, I too must admit that I found this summary more entertaining than the actual book. Very nice!
I ♥ the book and the condension both.
:idea:TNÖ:idea:
the movie is scary. i remember watching it when i was very small and all the killings and dyings and Black Bunnies of DOOMs scared me. i freaked out and never watched it again.
11- I movie? How dare they?!? I refuse to watch it. There isn’t actually a whole lot of death, after the Sandleford Warren, that is. Who else dies?
SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hazel dies in the end, and Nildro-han (sp?) dies.
What? A movie? I want to see it.
you finished it!@ i was waiting… it does not disappoint.
Qool. That reminds me of the ultracondensed books on Rinkworks.com. Which I learned about from Muse, yippee!
This is the 900th thread on MuseBlog!!!!!!!!!!! See??????????
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=900
That is sweet. And HILARIOUS. LAWL.
Wow. The second part’s just as good as the first one.
I like the book and this, but I can’t say which I prefer. For humor, you definitely want this, but for the un-killed story you want to read the book. Maybe the GAPAs would make me one of these threads if I finished shortening His Dark Materials.
Glassboro (18): It is VERY likely that we’ll make a thread for your “His Dark Materials” abridgement.
Kiki and Glassboro have already posted a couple of condensations of “The Golden Compass”:
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=887#comment-44 and
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=887#comment-61 .
16-True, but sometimes the GAPAs don’t put a thread on a number for some reason. check out 901. Nothing. Then “Dreams” on 902. Strange.
Anyway, this was off-topic…
[A skipped number usually shows that we’ve deleted a “temporary” thread, such as a short-term announcement that MBers don’t need to answer. –Robert]
(21) We don’t assign the numbers, RtH, the software does. Missing numbers usually result from announcements that were removed when no longer applicable.
22-Ah, I see. Thanks!
Thanks 2 Robert!
Well, it seems like we need some El-ahrairah stories. Unfortunately, I’m not in the mood to condense any of them right now, so you’ll have to wait. They would be super short anyways.
My favorite line is, “Oh sure! I’m positive that all of these other pages detail our happy successful lives breeding and eating and frolicking etcetera.” And a close runner up is, “We shall live here forever and so will our prosperity and our young shall frolick and our does… Uh oh.”
I take it that this will also serve as a WD thread? Yay!
My favorite character is Blackberry.
how big is WD in England? My dad said it can be compared to LOTR, but he didn’t grow up threr so I’m not trusting him. It deserves to be as big here too, but none of my friends would listen after I said something about all the characters being rabbits.
26- Rabbits are great! That doesn’t make any sense.
(12) (spoiler) He dies in the book too. In the wonderful epilogue which I’m not going to abridge because it’s just too beautiful to touch.(end spoiler)
(25) Yay! Blackberry pwnth all! He’s the only intelligent bunny who’s not emo. There’s a great line coming up by th’doewi’thelongname. Remember? The “I’m a doe” line.
(26) It’s because everyone automatically assumes that any book about animals is another Redwall.
28- I know it was the book. I’ve never seen the movie.
Do you mean Hyzenthlay?
(29) *headbang* Was it her? I thought it was the other one… oh it was her. Silly me.
I can’t remember all the does. They have unpronounceable unspellable names, except for Hyzenthlay, who actually has a super-cool-while-still-being-pronounceable name.
19- Yay! I still need to finish them, though. To do that, I’ll need to remember more about The Subtle Knife, so don’t expect them soon. I might look up a summary on the internet, though, to refresh my memory.
I was probably the only person in my humanities class who liked Watership Down when we read it in 5th grade. Everyone else thought it was a pointless book about bunnies killing bunnies.
33- Well, fifth grade might be a bit young for Watership Down.
34- Are you joking? Our teacher read Watership Down to us in first grade.
35- No, you are joking! I tried to read Watership Down when I was eight, because I adored Redwall and had read on the back of Mariel of Redwall (one of my favorites) that it was written in the style of Watership Down. I was so creeped out, because I only got to the page where Fiver was talking about how the setting sun looked like blood (or something along those lines.) I decided that my parents were right and it was “heavy” and didn’t pick it up again until a couple of weeks ago, by which time I had changed “heavy” into “depressing”, which is why I had never read it before.
These were supposed to be the “smart” 5th graders (humanities is one of our honors classes at my middle school). I’m not sure how they decide though. They weren’t going to get the 7th grade humanities teacher to do Watership Down, because he told our Language Arts class that he hated it.
Ah, the world is in love-hate relationship with Watership Down. And Redwall is definitely not written in the style of WD. Close maybe. Watership Down could be a combination of Redwall and The Call of the Wild. Which, by the way, makes WD look like a pretty butterfly. So what did your humanities class talk about in regard to Watership Down?
But Call of the Wild is such a good book!
39- Well, you think that Efrafa is the best part, and want to kill off the characters in the RRR, so we can’t really judge by you, can we?
J/k… Sort of.
Call of the wild was a good book, but I hated it. Efrafa is the second best part.
41- What was the best?
I think I liked On Watership Down best.
I watched the movie when I was… 5, I think. All I remembered about it was that “everyone died,” “the beginning was like a sunrise” and “there was a fox.” In 7th grade I read the book and liked it a whole lot.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy to read it again, but none of the nearby libraries have it.
I love this abridgment. My favorite parts are the Fiver lines.
I think that making the movie is sacrilege. That is all.
42) you said it.
hey, I’m working on part three! should I send the whole document when I’m done, or should I just send the third part?
*poke* oh well, I’ll just be annoying and send the whole thing.
45- Cool! *can’t wait*
Just wondering, I wasn’t on MB when the whole Watership Down/Chuck Norris *gasp* thing started, so can SOMEONE explain it to me?
This should be fun. Explanations on MuseBlog are always amusing and rarely comprehensible.
Oh boy. I don’t think I’ll be the one to do that task…
48- Well, it all started when the GAPAs created a Watership Down thread. Then the topic slipped to other books, to movies, and then to Chuck Norris. The Watershippers protested, the Norrisers cheered, tensions came to a head. Then someone threw a virtual pie, which kicked off a Pie War and four subsequent threads of carnage and splattered filling. Thus, Chuck Norris and Watership Down are like sodium and water: harmless enough when discussed separately, but explosive when combined.
Make sense?
51-To a certain extent… thanks
Does anyone else care to explain?
I was, fortunately/unfortunately not present for that event… But I do know that if I ever get a rabbit for a pet I shall call it General Woundwort (sp?).
And this is incredibly amusing.
51- I know that I’m not the one qualified to correct you, as I wasn’t involved in the war, but I have skimmed the thread enough to know that it was very different. It was more like this:
• GAPAs create a Chuck Norris thread
• No one posts
• Someone decides to pretend it’s a Watership down thread
• Other people get mad
• Pie war ensues
I think. I didn’t really read the whole thing, maybe you’re right.
I thought it was originally a Watership Down thread, but I could be wrong. I haven’t visited it in a long time.
It started out as a Chuck Norris thread. See for yourself. The fun starts around comment 88. Rosanne and I were in the thick of the action for a while.
56- Oh.
Have you or other GAPAs participated in any Pie Wars since then?
it was jedi master vader. he should be praised and exalted for his idea. PIE WAR! ahahaha!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hey, has anyone seen Em lately?
59- Nope. I haven’t.
Argh roar.
*is exactly one year since thread started* Haven’t seen em.
All right, then, who has her email?
63- Not me. *is no help at all*