Have to admit I’m not familiar with the earlier ones – they’re quite a bit before my time. But I’m very familiar with the Dell “Four Color” comics.
In the 1960s there were a few cases of Movies turned into comics by printing still with balloon filled with dialog, like The Horror of Party Beach
In the seventies they started adapting Star Trek and some other TV shows as “Fotonovels”
https://denniscooperblog.com/timothyt-presents-the-fotonovels-crappy-life/
Sorry, can’t resist when you bring up that movie.
Yeah, but I knew it LONG before MST3K got their waldoes onto it.
Still sorry I never bought a copy of the magazine.
Darth Vader’s assassination of the Separatist leaders in the Star Wars: Episode III novelization is darkly funny. He keeps throwing Bond One-Liners all over the place.
“We were promised a handsome reward!”
“I am your reward. You don’t find me handsome?”
“Enough! We surrender, don’t you understand? You can’t just kill us!”
“Can’t I?”
“We’re unarmed! We surrender! Please, you’re a Jedi!”
“You fought a war to destroy the Jedi. Congratulations on your success.”
“The war is over-- Lord Sidious promised-- he promised we would be left in peace.”
“The transmission was garbled. He promised you would be left in pieces.”
Speaking of Star Wars, the novelization of A New Hope (credited to Lucas but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster) includes the Tattooine scenes with Biggs Darklighter that were cut from the film, and contained more information about the nature of the galaxy and the rise of the Empire than was depicted in the film (though it differs from what would later be established as canon, such as in depicting Palpatine as a puppet of the Imperial bureaucracy.) The scene with Han and Jabba is also included, although Jabba is described as a humanoid alien.
A few other novelizatioons from my notes:
John Jakes (!) wrote the novelization of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I haven’t read it, but it purportedly adds a scene cut from the movie
Jerry Pournelle (!!) wrote the novelization of Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Again, haven’t read it, but it’s supposed to be pretty good. Possibly better than the film, which wouldn’t have been hard.
I’m sort of amazed that they got so many established writers to do novelizations of the original Planet of the Apes sequels. As noted above, David Gerrold did one, too. Maybe it’s because the original Pierre Boule novel, with its movie tie-in cover, sold so well (and seemed to be inn print forever with that same cover (like Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage).(The isfdb doesn’t give dates for all the Signet reprintings, but they had a different cover in 1989. I suspect they kept that damned cover for twenty years. Same for Fantastic Voyage)
By contrast, the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes was by Michael Avallone, who was known for quick novels based on TV series (LIke The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.).
Dr. Cyclops was novelized twice. Once by SF writer Henry Kuttner for a magazine and once by “Will Garth” (a house name, so we don’t know exactly who it was). I read the latter in a circa 1970 reprint, and it was pretty decent.
Rod Serling apparently really did write the novelizations of stories from both his Twilight Zone and Night Gallery TV series. James Blish (and his wife J.A. Lawrence) wrote the novelizations of the original Star Trek TV series, and wrote some original stuff (including the second Star Trek novel, “Spock must Die!”) and the ubiquitous Alan Dean Foster novelized the animated series (among his first novelizations)
I have mentioned this before on this board -about 20 years ago I was in a thrift store and bought a paperback copy for 50 cents the book Hard Target by Robert Tine. It is a novelization of the Jean Claude van Damme movie of the same name directed by John Woo. It was NOT better than the movie though.
It is probably one of the weirdest movies to have a book adaption I have seen considering Van Damme’s films are almost entirely a visual experience–focused on scenes of him displaying his considerable martial art skills.
Robert Tine apparently also wrote novelizations of The Last Action Hero, Beethoven, Beethoven’s 2nd, and Footloose. I have NOT read those so I can NOT comment on THEIR quality.
Swashbuckler is a mostly forgotten pirate movie from 1976. There was a novelization by D.R. Bensen which added some background to the story. I won’t say the movie or the book are great but they’re both entertaining.
Checking on Bensen, I see he did novelizations for several other movies. He also wrote several science fiction and western noels and a book of biblical limericks.
The movie and TV series MASH were based on the novel MASH by Richard Hooker, which was the pseudonym for Richard Hornberger. He wrote two sequels to his book; MASH Goes to Maine and MASH Mania.
There were also twelve other books in the series, starting with MASH Goes to New Orleans and running through MASH Goes to Montreal. These books were credited to Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth, but they were written entirely by Butterworth. (I haven’t read these books but their quality can be speculated upon by the fact all twelve books were written in a three year period.)
Butterworth was a prolific writer, who wrote a number of quick novels in the sixties and seventies under a variety of pseudonyms. (Butterworth had at least twelve different pseudonyms.) In the eighties he hit it big; he began the Brotherhood of War series (about some US Army officers from the 1940s to 1960s) using the pseudonym W.E.B. Griffin and they became very popular. Enough so that the name W.E.B. Griffin became an established author, who went on to write other books.
So when John Kevin Dugan began the Men In Blue series (about a group of police officers) he sought an endorsement from well-known author W.E.B. Griffin. Griffin obliged and his quote praising the books was printed on the cover.
You can probably guess the twist; John Kevin Dugan was another one of Butterworth’s pseudonyms. He was endorsing his own work.
But none of these are novelizations of the movie.
I’ve never read a single sequel to MASH. I wonder if any of them have any value.
I don’t suppose you know: how did the apes get the spaceship, sunk at the bottom of a lake, to fly again, especially if they didn’t even have powered flight?
…and managed to get it to go backward through time to just the right point after the ships had been launched.
Nope. Not a clue.
A Federation crew with a very loose interpretation of the Prime Directive showed them how…
The Spaceballs helped them out.
True. But I figured fifty posts in, we’re allowed to wander a bit.
Sure, I suppose I’ve seen the James Bond novels mentioned as well. In a way, you could consider the sequel books lame attempts to sequel the movie or show even though they are about the book characters. Kind of novelizations of a sort. They would not exist without the movie or show, which boosted the original book a lot.
O.K., so let me now talk about the movie and the novelization that I mentioned in the OP. The movie is called One on One. It came out in 1977, and it wasn’t anything particularly good. It’s this film:
I would have completely forgotten about it except that shortly after seeing it I happened to pick up a copy of the novelization of it in a bookstore. I flipped to the end of it and read some of the last page. I was astonished how the ending was so much better in the novelization. It had the hero of the story, who in the movie figures out a way to screw over the bad guys in a way that makes the hero just as bad, instead decides to walk away from them after making it clear that he’s not going to help them. The novelization was also clearer about showing all the ways that the bad guys were doing things without getting caught. I won’t give anything away, but it’s about corruption in college sports.
I also just recently noticed on my shelves a book that gives a good example of a novelization being better than the movie. There was a television series called The Starlost. The original script was by Harlan Ellison. The producers changed many things, so much so that Ellison hated the result. Ben Bova, who served as a science advisor on the show, also hated what the producers did. He later wrote a novel called The Starcrossed was a thinly veiled account of how the show got so messed up. Edward Bryant wrote a novelization of the television series. It’s apparently a lot better than the series.