I just read the novel The Lost Ones, a circa 1960 “Lost World” novel about a closed society of Vikings living on a Canadian island. The novel was made into a movie by Disney in 1974 as The Island at the Top of the World, but with the change of time from a contemporary story to a Victorian era one, with a Verne-esque balloon substituting for the airplane and/or helicopter in the initial story.
This got me thinking about other cases where they changed the time and setting between the original incarnation of something (before its release to a wider audience, or to any audience at all).
I’m not talking about something like those versions of Shakespeare plays transposed to a different time, like the 1995 Ian McKellen Richard II, with its setting changed to 1930s England, or countless stage versions I’ve seen. Or even like Kurasawa’s Ran or Throne of Blood, changing the setting of King Lear or Macbeth to feudal Japan. In all those cases they took a familiar play by Shakespear and re-set it for interest value.
No, I’m talking about cases where a relatively obscure book or play, or, better still, an unreleased one, gets its setting changed before it become widely known. Besides
the above example, there’s:
– ** The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz** – One of the few times Verne and H. G. Wells handled the very same theme. This was Verne’s “Invisible Man” story, written after Wells’ was published. It’s not well known, having not seen much publication in English, but was translated in 1960, and again recently. The version translated in 1960 is based on the version as originally released by his son, Michel Verne. But Michel made significant changes, and the more recent version is Verne’s original. It can be seen that his son changed the tiome period, shifting it backward in time by a century, and making this an uncharacteristic “period” piece for Verne, who almost never set anything before his own lifetime. It also does violence to the plot, because it effectively removes a steamship voyage (since steamships hadn’t yet been invented in the new time setting). Exactly why the younger Verne did this, I don’t know, but I suspect it could be to distance his father’s work from that of Wells.
–Fantastic Voyage – I can find no references to it now, but I had read that Otto Klement’s original screenplay for the c1966 film set it further back in the past, and that one of the things Jerome Boxby’s rewriote did was to shift it to the present day.
Any other examples?