For the good of mankind. George Lucas is at the head of the list, of course. Gene Roddenberry places #2. Who else out there, written, visual, musical, whatever has so shit on what they created, or has so perverted it as to commit a sin against humanity? Who else will populate this new circle of DanteWorld™, and why?
Well, Roddenberry’s dead, so whatever can be taken from him, has.
Overall, though, I’d guess the number of times the original creator of a work has failed to adapt it to his changing audience (i.e. Star Wars was a kid’s movie, Phantom Menace was a kid’s movie - it’s not Lucas’s fault the kids who saw the first grew up to become adults who’d be disappointed with the second) is vastly outweighed by the number of times some corporate types got hold of a work and fucked it up.
Well, Roddenberry died, so it doesn’t need to be taken away, because it de-facto was.
Then it went through the Berman-Braga spin cycle and came out much the worse for wear.
The reboot was fine for what it was, but it still fell back onto (pretend I spewed foul language for about 8 days here) TIME TRAVEL. Geez, enough is (another 3 days of foul language) enough already.
I’m glad Alan Moore’s work was taken away. I loved the movies of V For Vendetta and The Watchmen.
Dave Sim, for literally going insane for the last 180 issues of Cerebus the Aardvark.
He was basically a figurehead by, at the latest, the 2nd season of TNG-a rather bloodless coup, but a coup nonetheless. I also don’t think he had much to do with any of the movies post III.
Todd McFarlane and Spawn.
Just checked: Roddenberry was deposed when TWOK went into pre-production. What I said about TNG was essentially true.
Kinda, although the neutered federation of idiots and pansies that most of TNG fell into was definitely his idea.
This will be a controversial choice, perhaps, but I’d say Robert Jordan - another one who’s died and already had his work taken over. It’s very fashionable to sneer at the Wheel of Time, and there are certainly swathes of it that deserve to be sneered at, but in the first four or five books, there was a lot of brilliance mixed in that should have been treated better.
Tim Kring and Heroes.
Ron Moore. Let’s just say those last 3-4 hours of Battlestar Galactica never happened, and let someone write a real series finale.
Jesus, in the name of all that is holy, please make Jim Davis stop Garfield.
The Wachowski Brothers, for the last two Matrix movies.
Spider Robinson should have his Callahan’s writing privileges revoked.
Matt Groening. He refused to have his name associated with A Star is Burns, yet he implicitly endorses the crap that came in seasons eleven to …? WTF
That’s ironic, because Ron Moore was a lot of what made Deep Space 9 good.
Word. I’ve been hoping for the equivalent of a palace coup on this score since S2 as the best hope of salvaging that show. As a bonus to his wrongheaded ideas, dialogue that sounds as if the scripts were written in crayon, I have never heard anything to counter the assertion that he’s a total dickhead as a person to wotk with.