Nope. Writing for sketch comedy is totally different from writing for feature film. A recognizable sketch comedy character is defined within a context that works within a very short time-frame. It’s not going to scale up.
Making The Blues Brothers into a feature film, the writers had the freedom to create rich characters that developed in a way that is satisfying in a feature length narrative, without being limited by trying to artificially expand something developed for a short routine.
You might as well say that it’s easier to make a mural out of a postage stamp design.
If Jake and Elwood were developed for sketch comedy, they would necessarily be much different characters - in broader strokes, with less-nuanced personalities, and no backgrounds or details of their everyday lives.
As for the Geico thing… I think this sentence from that aintitcool article is the cruelest thing ever written:
…but I think it’s off the mark. I think if you had to make an analogy like that it would make more sense to put it in the same category as the Atari 2600 E.T. game. Maybe (optimistically) remembered by some as a spectacular failure. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the bandit copies to be traded by geeks.
I don’t disagree with this at all. That’s why so many movies/shows based on short vignettes fail, and if the concept was fairly weak to being with (like the Night at the Roxbury guys), the result is often even worse.
My argument was that this process of building characters from scratch can be a realllly slippery slope. It’s not an automatic thing to build a bit part into a full characterization that works. The success relies largely upon the creativity and talent of the writers and actors, as I mentioned above with the caveman series. Less talented staff can write themselves into corners if they’re not careful. At least with sketches you can occasionally pull minor details from the skits nand have something to expand upon when fleshing out the plot; Wayne’s World did this with the rock music appreciation angle from the skits, with good results. That’s not the same as a direct translation of the sketch to a longer format.
I think a good analogy is television spin-off series. How much of the character from the spun-off show do you want to preserve? How much do you want to create anew? How is the new show going to be different from the old? If the right ingredients come together, you can have a Laverne & Shirley. If not, you get a Lone Gunmen.
Interestingly, there are a series of murals in my town of various subjects, and one of them is based on old postage stamps
Again, this all depends on the talent and aims of the people involved. Deeper characterization is essential when translating a vignette character to a longer-format medium. Leaving sketch characters solely as they are seen in the sketches is obviously going to limit what you can do with them in other media. For example, pretty much every comic book movie that has come out in the past few years has featured deeper, more nuanced characters than those in the original source material, because in many cases leaving the characters as is might not have translated well to the big screen. There’s no reason to leave a broad-strokes character that way when putting them on a different stage. The real question is: will the deeper, more complex character be convincing, or will he/she be a glorified charicature? That all depends on who is involved.
As someone mentioned above, one of the reasons the caveman commercials work is the actors’ deliveries of their characters. If you subtract those actors from the equation and start with a whole new cast, right away you might be losing something. Delivery from an actor recruited specifically to make the gimmick work in a series might be okay, or it might seem forced and watered-down, so even if the written characterization is top-notch, it might not be convincing in the finished product. We shall see.
