Yes, You are aware that the author of “The modern Prometheus” was the child of two radical philosophers, and that running off with a married man was inline with a deliberate (if somewhat naive) rejection of the norms of patriarchal society? Because that gives you a an idea of the kind of book she wrote that you’ll not get from seeing one of the film versions.
Flowers in the Attic. If ever a movie was made that was begging for sequels, this was it.
Instead, the made-for-TV movie stank big time, and did not follow the book. Even changed the poisoned donuts to cookies. WHY?
That wasn’t made-for-TV…that was theatrical. My sister and I saw it in the theater when I was a teenager and she was about twenty.
They DID make a series of made-for-Lifetime movies fairly recently, based on those books.
Gandalf could have done it. He wasn’t a man, remember.
Not everybody LIKES donuts…
The Dark Tower has already been mentioned and I have to say that I haven’t been able to come up with a better suggestion. It dumped on the original book(s) in ways that I could not previously have imagined. What’s worse, it ended up sucking as a movie even if you knew nothing about King’s work.
I think that’s a question worthy of its own thread.
Tolkien certainly wouldn’t have written that, but could Gandalf have killed the Witch King?
Considering the variety of beings running around Middle-Earth, not “falling by the hand of man” didn’t seem like all that much of a protection, especially since elves were among his major enemies.
It’s a bit unclear to me whether the Witch-King was actually protected by such a spell.
After the battle of Fornost, Glorfindel says this:
“Do not pursue him! He will not return to these lands. Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man shall he fall.”
But this seems more like a foretelling than a knowledge of some protection.
When confronting Eowyn, he says:
“Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!”
So I guess he at least believes he is protected.
In any case, Tolkien was relying on semantics to get around any protective spell, just like Shakespeare did with the witches’ predictions for MacBeth. Eowyn was certainly a “Man” as a class of being distinct from Elves or Dwarves, and Hobbits were also a kind of “Man” to a first approximation. So if Tolkien had decided Gandalf wasn’t a “Man” for the purposes of the story, he could have killed the Witch-King.
My reasoning for thinking Tolkien would not have written it that way is that I’ve read that his inspiration for the ‘not by the hand of man’ bit was being disappointed by Shakespeare’s ‘no man of woman born’ semantic trickery as a kid; he was expecting a woman, or a freak accident involving a badger or something, not an ‘Ah, but technically…’. Given that, letting Gandalf fit the prophecy would feel like a cop out.
It had to be someone unexpected and overlooked.
I get that Tolkien was going for the unexpected in having a woman and a halfling being the ones to defeat the Witch-King, but it was still a technicality that to me immediately recalled Shakespeare’s. (Also, the march of the Huorns at the Battle of Helm’s Deep recalls the witches’ prophecy about Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.)
And not coincidentally:
He was in the body of one, and he didnt have a bane dagger.
He wasn’t in the body of a man. He had the appearance of an old man. He didn’t need a blade, of any kind, to kill.
Visit to a Small Planet started out as a teleplay by Gore Vidal. He expanded it into a Broadway show. Cyril Ritchard starred in both, playing the alien Kreton as a war-happy enfant terrible who disdains non-military earth culture. When they made it into a movie they jettisoned Vidal’s script and made it into a vehicle for ---- Jerry Lewis!
Putting up with that was probably good practice for when Bob Guccione took his script for Caligula and turned it into a porn epic.
The point being- minor difference from the source material is not “dumping on the source”.
Totally changing the theme is.
The SciFry Channel and Ghibli Studios both managed to mangle Ursula K. LeGuin’s EARTHSEA stories, as in “drove a tank over them”.
I saw 'em both. The Ghibli one was interesting, but it wasn’t leGuin.
Syfy also managed to mangle Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld.
Twice.