I’d say that the larger take-over was the introduction of electricity as the modus of life giving.
The book, effectively, gives zero details on how Frankenstein was made past being sowed together. It could have been chemical, electrical, or by drawing a pentagram on the floor and offering up a prayer to Cthulhu.
One early movie adaptation showed Dr. Frankenstein mixing potions together to make the creature; a theme surprisingly resurrected in as unlikely a venue as the cartoon Milton the Monster.
Not in the BBC Jekyll series. Hyde, as portrayed by James Nesbit, had a definite charisma and swagger.
I saw that and his performance was amazing, in how he portrayed Hyde effectively without a makeup job.
Beth Harmon is a photogenic redhead in the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, but she’s described as a plain-looking brunette in the novel it’s based on.
He was like two completely different people. One with confidence, one without. Almost bipolar. And the rest of the cast was great too.
There was also another BBC adaptation from 1980 where Hyde was the more attractive one. But they’re both notable because the movies have taught us to expect otherwise.
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I suppose I’m not a hardcore fan (especially compared to some here) but I never had a problem cutting Bombadil. He never really fits into the world for one. And as for adapting, Fellowship starts very herky-jerky, with the Party, then 17 years of elided living for Frodo, then the slow move to sell Bag End and move, and then finally it starts to ramp up with one of the Nine nearby. And in that is also a dinner with the Cottons, a dinner with some elves, and finally the rescue from the barrows by Bombadil. Which brings the whole narrative to a stop again.
Now, all these things are fine on the page, but when the writer and director have three hours to get through all of Fellowship, that really slow start and interludes like Bombadil are the obvious things to cut.
I recall a play within a movie, where the actor on stage playing Jekyll transformed into Hyde by somehow contorting his face as he emitted a prototypical evil laugh, for over a minute. The audience was suitably horrified. Cannot recall the film’s name tho for the life of me (one of those caught the scene while cable surfing thangs).
A weirder example of something overtaking the film version, but I’ve seen people legitimately think online Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964) was a short but stout guy, when in reality he was about 6 feet tall (he was a professional wrestler prior to his film role).
This entire misunderstanding in current pop culture resides entirely on people who played GoldenEye 007 on N64 (1998) where Oddjob is indeed portrayed as a short guy.
I think that was a movie about the Jack the Ripper case, where the investigator thought the actor was a possible suspect.
This topic probably includea a lot of kid’s books that have been turned into popular movies. How to Train Your Dragon, for instance.
I could rant extensively about how little Home resembles The True Meaning of Smeckday, but I think (deservedly) Home sank with barely a ripple and doesn’t much count as “remembered”…
I am hardcore reader, and sure- Bombadil would have been nice, but geez- Jackson had to cut something, and the Scouring and Tom are some of the best parts to cut.
Maybe the two sequels(?) might cover Bombadil.
There is Scylla.
True, but the film Holes is just about as true to the award winning book as a film could be.
Yeah, but Scylla doesn’t show up in the movie. The kraken does.
In the Reuben Mamoulian version, starring Fredric March (to my mind, by far the best version), I swear that Mr. Hyde looks like a slightly hairier version of Jeff Goldblum.
There’s also a tendency (maybe influenced by the Hulk) to make Hyde bigger and physically stronger than Jekyll, sometimes even superhumanly strong. Stevenson specifically said that Hyde was smaller than Jekyll, and there’s nothing in the novella to indicate that he’s any stronger than a normal man. When he beats Sir Danvers Carew to death, for example, he uses a cane, not his fists.
Alan Moore, in The League of Extraordinary Gentelmen comic, even gave him super senses, allowing him to see the Invisible Man. There’s no precedent in Stevenson for anything like that. He’s mean, conniving, and savage, but that’s it.
A very excellent point, and one I frequently make. Granted, Shelley herself sort of got the ball rolling by mentioning electricity in the foreword, and you’d have to be uneducated not to think of Galvani’s experiments. But the novel proper gives no idea how the animation was achieved, and virtually everybody has used electricity in some form, since it’s so damned photogenic. Kenneth Strickfaden gets some of the blame for his showy electrical devices *which he was showing off long before the Frankenstein movie. The bio of Strickfaden is subtitled “Frankenstein’s Electrician”) Even the Braunagh version uses electricity, albeit in the form of electric eelse(!)
I’d add that another addition of the movies was the idea that the monster was stitched together from pieces of corpses. Shelley never even hints at this. Frankenstein got his raw material from cemeteries and butcher’s (even using animal parts), but since reading her book I’ve viewed this as rendering down those biological materials to their essentials and creating practically from scratch, nit from using corpse bodies. I mean, if you’re going to do that, why not just get one good body and re-animate that? I’ll add that, if my idea is right, there was never a Good Brain/Bad Brain issue. The monster’s brain would be created de novo, the way Dr. Pretorius makes the Bride’s brain.
Alan Moore is the one who started this one, with his larger-than-life Hyde. He knew what he was doing, too, re-creating Hyde as a sort of Victorian-era Hulk. He explains himself in the two first volumes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
But the idea got wings first from the movie adaptation of League, and then from the movie Van Helsing, which blatantly ripped off the idea from Moore. What can we say? An oversized Hyde is much more dramatic and photogenic than the dwarf Stevenson describes.
Moore explicitly acknowledges and justifies the discrepencies between his Hyde and the original - his Hyde remarks at one point that he used to be shorter than Jekyll (as he was in the book) but continued abuse of the drug that caused the split made Hyde bigger and stronger each time he took it, until he’s basically a Victorian Incredible Hulk.