Which are the greatest ideas that were turned into the worst works of fiction?
Or, vice versa, the worst ideas that somehow were turned into something great?
I guess should really kick it off with an example.
“Super Mario Bros” could have been a great movie full of mindless fun and rom-comedy. I mean, video game characters in the real world? Clash between the logic of computer games and the logic of the real world? The problem of being a stereotypical Italian plumber in a society where such things are frowned upon? Get a really good comic actor playing Mario, a bittersweet love story with a real girl, add Jim Carrey as Luigi, and you´re golden. This is pretty much what Disney did with Enchanted and that was perfectly enjoyable.
Of course, the real Super Mario movie was unwatchable.
There’s a B-grade SF movie called “Terminal Virus” about a bioweapon that gets loose. It is triggered by sexual intercourse … anyone who has sex with a member of the opposite sex dies within 24 hours.
Population drops to zero. Men and women of the world are divided into mutually suspicious, heavily armed camps. One man, the son of a famous research scientist working on curing the bioweapon. He discovers a cure for the weapon, but it must be tested. All women want to do when they see him is shoot him on sight, though. So he must kidnap one, inject her, and make love to her against her will.
So he does that, also kidnaps a scummy guy and chains them next to each other and leaves a porn tape on, and waits for the inevitable. It does … they pick the locks on their chains and try to escape. They don’t want to die!
Y’know, there’s a powerful ethical dilemma here. If they had just thought to give the guy an ounce of ethics, he might have agonized on whether or not he was doing right or wrong. There could have been scenes of him desperately trying to persuade the woman that he was trying to save the world, not kill her. If they had thought to give the woman personality beyond Damsel in Distress, she could have agonized over the issue too … was he lying to her? Was he wrong? Insane? But what if he was right and she had the power to save the human race from Certain Doom?
they skipped all that. Idiots.
Hmm, sounds like a massive blown opportunity. Good ideas, a large budget and good direction skill seldom meet these days. I like the idea of sex being lethal. It would be kind of like the Y the Last Man comics, but with both men and women still existing, in competing societies.
I thought of another: the book “Fragment”, by Warren Fahy.
It’s about a isolated island in the pacific that is the only remnant of a pre-cambrian continent and still contains the fauna of that time, evolved during 500 million years. It’s basically the weird and wonderful creatures of the Burgess Shale, hyper-evolved and combined with all kinds of neat ideas from science fiction. Here’s a few illustrations so you can get a basic idea of its awesomeness:
http://www.warrenfahy.com/page_gallery.html
So how does it read? Well, kind of like the script for some high school student’s comic book project. Wooden characters, jaw-droppingly bad dialog and just horribly, horribly cliches all the way through.
The plot is basically King Kong, only halfway through the author decides he King Kong is kind of lame - I mean, what self-respecting of 30 feet tall, tree-climbing pre-Cambrian predator shrimp could possibly fall in love with Naomi Watts? So the writer decides to do E.T. instead, and messes that up as well.
Stephen King’s It. The “s” and the “h” were unaccountably left off the title. The Losers work it out that Pennywise is identical to the Talus (sp?) monster of Tibetan folklore. When you meet one, you and the Talus have to bite down on each other’s tongues and tell jokes (presumably by telepathy); the first one to laugh loses/dies. What a wonderful setup for an intriguing, philosophical battle of wits at the climax! Instead of which, Bill simply crushes the monster’s heart with his bare hands. No jokes/riddles/conundra are exchanged. I mean, Rambo could’ve done that! :mad:
You could also say that Steven King books always start out pretty good overall. The man has a bucket of ideas and his story telling fu is very respectable. Until his attention span span runs out and he slaps on another lazy, contrived, spectacularly inappropriate Steven King ending. I sometimes wonder why he hates his readers so much.
The movies of Starship Troopers and I, Robot.
The I Robot movie started out as an original screenplay set in the world of Asimov’s robots, with the Three Laws. The Powers That Be evidently thought they’d rake in more money if they retitled it with the name of Asimov’s book, even though it’s not his book at all. So, arguably, the “good idea” was the original screenplay that got hijacked into something it wasn’t.
The Dies the Fire series by Stirling. The idea is fabulous. What would happen if suddenly modern technology stopped working? I was totally into the idea, but I found the actual books almost unreadable. I was skipping pages and pages, just to get to the end.
Sad really.
I can’t find it now, but someone in another thread linked to a good article on how a very innovative, sought-after screen-play about the Sheriff of Nottingham as a sort of proto-detective trying to track down Robin Hood became the most recent, by-the-numbers, completely uninspired Robin Hood movie.
It’s always a spider.
Heh. The next time I fly, I´m going to sneak up behind the first guy I see perusing the King books at the stand and whisper, “It´s a spiiiideeer!”
My exact reaction. it was doubly disappointing because he did so well with the Nantucket books
When I first heard the concept for “Being John Malkovich,” I thought it was the dumbest idea in the world.
People entering John Malkovich’s head and riding around in him like an amusement park attraction? Who the hell was going to want to see this?
But the movie, as it turned out, was witty, fun and excellent overall. I have it on my personal list of the best films of the '90s.
An alien race takes over the planet and subjects humanity to 1,000 years of servatude only to fall to a plucky rebellion. Battlefield Earth could have been a cool story.
Sphere. A mysterious ancient spaceship is discovered deep underwater, clearly thousands of years old due to the corrosion and so forth. A team of government investigators (consisting of LOTS of good actors) break in and find writing IN ENGLISH on the control panel. Time travel must be involved! And then… I forget what happens, but it’s some generic by-the-numbers paranormal gobbledygook.
Click with Adam Sandler having a remote control which can control real life (cleverly gotten from the “beyond” section of “Bed, Bath and Beyond” in perhaps the most justified product placement ever). This premise could have led to at least 3 totally entertaining movies:
(1) Full on raunchy comedy, American Pie style
(2) moderately-hard sci fi thriller with lots of clever uses for stopping time and awesome special effects
(3) being-John-Malkovich-style crazy surreal mindfuck of some sort with lots of self-reference and breaking of the fourth wall
Instead, it ended up being a vaguely tolerable comedy with an obvious and saccharine message.
I read a review of the movie Frequency a long time ago which stuck with me. It basically said “there aren’t any cliches associated with the boring old ‘Son can communicate 30 years into the past on radio and talk to his now dead father’ genre, but if there were, this movie would embrace every last one of them”, which is exactly how I feel about Click, and lots of other movies.
Ah yes, S.M. Stirling. Now there´s a man whose ideas are far ahead of his writing.
Sometimes I wonder if writing shouldn´t be two jobs. When Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Christo - an amazingly entertaining book - he had Auguste Maquet write the plot and the characters in draft form, then turned it into a good story.
In the same way, Shakespeare would find earlier works with plots that he liked, and flesh them out into something good.
A good comparison would be comics.
In comics, there´s the penciller, who comes draws everything in pencil, and the inker, who makes the final, refined product. A good inker is just as important as a good penciller.
I felt this way about Pillars of the Earth. It was a great idea, right up my reading alley - follow the fortunes of those attempting to build a medieval cathedral, during the “Anarchy” when King Steven fought the Empress Matilda - but it was dragged down by a whole host of implausible characterization and plotting points.
I thought Idiocracy had a great premise but it ran out of steam quickly. Maybe it wasn’t completely awful, but a lot of it did have to be endured.
The Superflu caused so much pain, oh!
And with evil a raging volcano
Flagg’s triumph seemed certain
Until King rang the curtain
By pulling a Deus ex ano! :rolleyes: