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WATCH: The end of the How To Train Your Dragon era
Toothless might be flying out of sight forever after How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, but not before SYFY WIRE got a chance to sit down with director Dean DeBlois along with the stars behind two intrepid dragon riders and the guy who's so much more than the village blacksmith.
"The trilogy allows you, as a storyteller, to tell a story in three acts… they are interconnected in one larger transformational journey," DeBlois said.
He compared the generation that grew up with the How to Train Your Dragon films to kids who might have followed Harry, Ron and Hermione in the Harry Potter series as they went from awkward 11-year-olds who just learned levitation to young adults shouldering the fate of the wizarding world. The themes mature along with the characters in both cases. Hiccup went from gawky runt to Viking chief, and Toothless definitely wasn't ready to mate in the first movie.
Jay Baruchel (Hiccup) and America Ferrera (Astrid) both agree that their characters have gone through a sort of metamorphosis throughout the trilogy. Would you ever really expect someone like Hiccup to inherit the crown?
"Everything he has been fighting for is kind of tested," Baruchel said. While Hiccup faced challenges that would take him from zero to hero by the time he was twenty (kind of a stretch, but hey), Astrid wasn't left behind. She was always way ahead of Hiccup in the past two movies, and even though she still is the take-charge type, she can now also see on Hiccup's level — "that partner who’s gently nudging him to realize what his true role and destiny is," as Ferreira put it.
Craig Ferguson (Gobber) is still in denial that his time as a blacksmith-turned-dragon-dentist is over. He would even be up for a spinoff.
"Gobber in space. Viking goes to space, why not?" Ferguson asked. "Gobber gets bitten by a radioactive spider. You know where it's going."
If a Spider-Viking ever appears in the Spiderverse, we know who to thank.
This article was contributed to by Elizabeth Rayne.
