Often when a work is translated to film from another medium, changes are made. I don’t mean huge changes, like altering an ending, such as Disney letting Ariel ultimately become human in The Little Mermaid but changes that are more subtle but that do affect the tone of the story.
Like in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s father, Maurice, doesn’t make a trade to give Beauty to the Beast as he does in the original story (or at least the one I’m familiar with). Belle has to follow him to the castle and basically tell the Beast to take her, while Maurice is protesting (and even attempting to find her and rescue her). Granted, in the original story, she does agree of her own free will, but it obviously makes Maurice look more sympathetic that he makes every effort he can to save his daughter.
Another example that I often think of is the film version of Little Shop of Horrors. Seymour comes off as way more sympathetic, esp with regard to killing Mushnik. In the show, Mushnik’s a jerk but he has redeeming qualities. When he thinks Seymour has killed Orrin, he begs him to go to the police and tell them he’s innocent, so Seymour (under Audrey II’s advice) tells Mushnik to go look in the plant and…gulp. In the movie, Mushnik realizes what Seymour has done and basically tries to blackmail him, so Audrey II just comes up from behind and eats Mushnik. Seymour’s pretty passive in both, but he does make a conscious choice to turn himself over to the dark side in the original. (And of course the film has a completely different ending, as I realize, but I was focusing more on the changes throughout that make Seymour seem like less of a jerk.)
Are there any other examples that you guys can think of?
A couple songs from Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks were first recorded in New York and then re-recorded in Minneapolis. There’re many changes between the recordings, but one that I remember most is that in the original version of “Tangled Up in Blue,” the first half or so is in the third person - “and he was standing on the side of the road”, etc, etc. (You can hear it over here). It makes it sound more like a story told from afar. Also, the first take of “Idiot Wind” is much more gentle and toned down than the final version - there’s this strange juxtaposition between the anger of the lyrics and the calming music.
A pet peeve of mine is when musicians cover Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues and they change or omit the line “But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” due to their own morals or whatever. Don’t like it? Write your own song.
The worst was the Cowsills (or Donnie and Marie’s?) cover of Hair. Dropped “Halleluia Mary loved her son/Why don’t my mother love me?” Why bother doing the song at all?
In most Dracula movies, Renfield is usually something of a buffoon. In the 1977 BBC series (the one with Louis Jordan as the Count), Renfield is a fairly sympathetic character.
I couldn’t tell you the specifics since I read it two or three years agoim, but in the book vs the movies, the characters tend to be totally different. After I read the book I went and watched the original Bela Lugosi version and was surprised to find out that they swapped two characters and combined two others into one (or something like that). Doing some poking around on the internet I found that it’s pretty commonplace to do things like that with Dracula.
FTR, that wasn’t a very good movie, I know that they made some big advances in SFX in that (mainly bringing them from stage to screen), but whenever I hear a famous actor quote it as one of their favorite movies I have to wonder if they ever actually saw it.
My entry for this thread is Run Lola Run. I had to go find my old thread about it so I could remember the details.
The movie is in German, overdubbed and subtitled in English. I don’t remember what exactly happens in the scene, but based on what I said in the thread, a security guard is killed (dies?) and comes back to life in Lola’s presence. For those that haven’t seen it, there’s nothing supernatural going on here.
Anyways, the English subtitles have him saying “You’ve come at last my dear”, one day I watched it overdubbed and he said “You’ve come at last my angel”.
My guess is that it was just a bad translation or the way the overdubber chose to interpret what he said. But I’ll always wonder if she was supposed to have actually brought him back to life, if she was actually an ‘angel’.
I checked after I made that post and it’s not on Netflix or Amazon Prime. When I first saw it I watched it three times in one day. First with the subtitles, then with the director commentary, then again with the overdubbing and that’s when I noticed that comment.
I remember watching that and getting the sexual undertones I hadn’t realized could be there. The count is sucking on the girl’s neck and she’s heaving and moaning underneath him. Whew!
Nobody has yet produced a movie or play that is faithful to the book. They invariably leave out or combine characters, and change motivations and forge connections between characters that aren’t in the book. To be fair, Stoker wrote a rambling book with too many characters in it, but I’m always fascinated by what different people wioll do to try and rein in the unruly stable of characters so as to keep the number low enough that people can keep track of them and so that they actually have something to do. In a couple of adaptations Harker never gets out of TRansylvania. In the Bela Lugosi version it’s REnfield who goes to Transylvania and is driuven mad. In the original Nosferatu, it’s Harker’s boss whoi’s driven made. In the Frank Langella version Lucy is Van Helsing’s daughter (!), and so on. Not a single version is immune to this kind of tampering, anthough the Francis Ford Coppola version goes to heroic lenghs to try to include every character Stoker wrote. And they still ended up changing things.
I’d say that just about EVERY adaptation invariably makes changes for length, or comprehensibility, or simplicity. Sometimes they seem to do it for no good reason. A proper response to the OP is to say virtually every adaptation to a different medium introduces changes.
Take Frankenstein. Virtually every version of this makes changes to the book, but the one thing that always bugs me is that they keep trying to suggest that the Monster turned out “bad” because of something wrong with his brain. This isn’t Shelley’s point at all (as Stephen Jay Gould made clear in one of his essays) I view the creation of the creature in her book as Frankenstein’s reducing living bodies to essentials and then reconstituting a creation from “raw material”, not sewing together dead bodies as if he were making a car out of spare parts. If you’ve ever read Clark Ashton Smith’s story The Colossus of Ylorgne, you have an idea of what I mean. Frankenstein was making a creature practically de novo. Some of his “essences” came from animals, not people – Shelley talks about him getting stuff from slaughterhouses.
For some reason, most of the stage and film versions ignore this, and show him stitching together a body from sorpses. I suspect that this was the rationale for the “Bad Brain” idea. If the CReature was using a retread brain, then wouldn’t he be essentially a resurrected version of the person whose brain that was? (Think of Young Frankenstein and Frederick Frankenstein’s desire to get the brain of Hans Delbruck – “Scientist and Saintg”.) So the movie has to explain why this isn’t the case, and explain why the Creature turned out to bed a killing machine instead of a loving homunculus. So Dwight Frye steals an Abnormal Brain, and so does Eye-Gor in Young Frankenstein( “Abnormal Brain – DO NOT USE!” “Abbie Someone.”)
EXcept this is too facile a point – Shelley’s Creature ends up doing evil because of a lack of care – it’s Nurture, not Nature. The f1931 film reverses that. But other versions got it right, no?
No. The 1957 HJammer version, Curse of Frankenstein, tries to save saintly Professor Waldman’s brain, but it gets broken glass in it, which excuses the Creature’s beastly behavior and its not being Waldman resurrected.
Kenneth Branaugh’s version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more original in the way it handled things, asndf in many ways closer to the novel, but they, too, have Victor Frankenstein making his monster out of old corpses, and putting professor Walman’s brain in it. And ifg you watch the creation scene closely, you can see that at one point the body is struck severely on the head, although no attention is drawn to this, and no one edver commenbts on it. But it “explains” why The Creature isn’t Waldman reborn, and why it is a “broken” thing.
Not al adaptations of Frankenstein do this, of course. In some cases the CReature turns out “evil” because Frankenstein’s technique is flawed, even if it doesn’t involve stitching corpdses together. Thus we have the 1973 film Frankenstein: The vTRue Story (which, ironically, isn’t) in which the Creature starts out handsome, but deteriorates over time, going bad like milk left out of the fridge. Or the 19092 TNT version in which Frankenstein sort of clones the creature off himself, but, like the other things he creates with his low-quality duplicator, it turns out “not right”. These, though asrguably better than the “bad brain” versions, still give the reason for the Creature’s evil nature to Frankenstein’s incompetence, not to his lack of nurturing, where it belongs. I can’t think of a single adaptation that gets it right. Young Frankenstein, arguably, comes closest – Gene Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein is the only one who cares about his Creature enough to try and fix it, after his initial carelessness becomes clear.
Happens all the time when stage musicals go to film. Songs get added and dropped, minor characters suddenly get larger roles, etc.
Fiddler on the Roof – Perchek got a more significant part. In fact, he got an extra number, although it was cut from the final film.
Grease – in addition to being a lot raunchier, the original 1972 stage version was framed as flashback during a class reunion.
Carousel – The movie never specifies that Billy must do a good deed to be admitted into Heaven.
Guys and Dolls – Five songs were dropped from the film version, and three added, resulting in an extra feature number for Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra.)
Showboat – There have been so many modifications in different versions through the years, that the film’s different story of the reunion of Gaylord and Magnolia barely even registers as a change.
In Return of the King…in the film, both Frodo and Gollum go over the edge while struggling over the ring. In the book, Gollum is standing alone on the edge, struggling to keep his balance and “God” keeps him a slight push.
I suppose all films made from books change many things, but…
The Shawshank Redemption followed the film to a T for the most part, even down to detailed dialog. Of course, there were plenty of omissions and other small changes, such as combining two mean wardens into one composite character, but that didn’t really bother me and didn’t really affect the plot line. There were two changes I didn’t like.
The most important (and in line with this thread, IMHO) was the ending: in the book, the ending is left ambiguous, with Red traveling to Mexico with a dream, some mad money, and little else. He doesn’t know what the future will bring, and (if I recall correctly) the final words of the book are “I hope.”
In the movie, he has already made it to the Mexican town and is running up to Andy with open arms. Somehow that seemed to tidy, and the fact that it wasn’t how the book ended bothered me.
The second part was a scene that was made from whole cloth for the film, where Andy is playing record albums over the PA system. That scene was not in the book, and even though it fit the tone of the film well, it grates on me when I see it.
A very obscure band called Psychotica released an excellent eponymous debut album back in the mid '90s. The seventh song is a cover of the DEVO classic Freedom Of Choice. The band pissed me off because the cover is decent enough, but towards the end they fucked with things and removed the line “freedom from choice is what you want”, instead incorrectly singing “freedom of choice is what you want”. It pisses me off because it removes all the irony and scathing social commentary from the song, which is it’s whole reason for being written in the first place.
Yeah. Keb’mo’s version on one of the tribute albums that came out shortly after Cash died changes the line “They say I shot a man in Reno, but that was just a lie.”
Here’s a very minor change that was noticeable to me. I thought the funniest line in the movie Sideways was about how the lost wedding rings couldn’t be replaced because they had a special design with dolphins and the couple’s names in Sanskrit. When I read the novel, I was a bit disappointed to find that the humorous details about the lost rings weren’t in the book – it’s just stated that they had a custom design.
Another subtle change between the novel and movie was how Jack and Miles originally met. The general plot and their personalities and interactions are basically the same in both versions of Sideways, but in the movie we’re told they were college roommates. In the book, Miles is the author of a book that was never published but that was adapted as a movie, and Jack was one of the actors in this movie. I felt that the “old college buddies” backstory better explains why these two very different guys are such close friends, and some of their behavior also makes a bit more sense if they’re to some extent trying to recapture their glory days. I think the book’s backstory also makes Miles seem a little too successful as a writer.
Although it’s only loosely inspired by Frankenstein, the “monster” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is innocent. He did receive a partial brain transplant from Eddie, but although Eddie is described as having been “a no good kid” IIRC there’s no indication that Rocky has an evil nature. Although he doesn’t live long enough to have much chance to turn bad, plenty of weird and violent things happen during his short lifetime and he basically just seems confused and frightened.