For some reason, The West Wing has been on my mind recently. Specifically, it occurs to me that Aaron Sorkincould easily have created it with the working title What Would the White House Have Been Like from 1993-2000 If Bill Clinton Had Been Just as Liberal and Generally Competent, But Not Nearly So Much of a Sexually-Predatory Creep. When the suits at NBC read the first script, someone sent a note saying, “Um…that’s a little long. Can we make it shorter and less insulting?”
What other television movies, television series, books, or so forth clearly benefited from a renaming?
Quantum Leap was originally titled My Invisible Friend Follows Me Wherever I Go and Makes Lewd Comments Only I Can Hear; And Sometimes I Get to Be A Woman.
Lost was originally titled A Bunch of Highly Improbably Well-Groomed Plane Crash Victims and Other Various Unexplained Gits Going Around And Being Soap-Operaesquely Stupidly Evil To Each Other For No Apparent Or Remotely Entertaining Reason
Doctor Who possibly benefitted from a name-change from it’s original title: The Mysterious Man Who May Look Young But Is Old, Old, OLD And His Ever-changing Roster of Very YOUNG Nubile Girl & Randy Bi-Sexual Boy Travelling Companions. That was just way too long.
IRL, That 70s Show was originally going to be called Teenaged Wasteland - which IMO, is actually the better title. Why they didn’t go with that is beyond me. (It also wouldn’t have locked the show into the 1970s, and thus time could have been allowed to progress at a realistic pace throughout the course of the show.)
This one is actually true- Sid Sheinberg, the president of MCA, wrote a letter to Robert Zemeckis suggesting that he change the title of Back to the Future to Spaceman from Pluto.
Another Low-Budget Zombie Horror Explotation Flick was changed at the last minute to The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
I remember hearing that they couldn’t get the rights to use The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” as their theme song.
Funnily enough, “Baba O’Riley” later became the theme song for “CSI: New York”. Probably just as well they didn’t call it “CSI: Teenage Wasteland”, although that might be an interesting premise for a show.
When I was living in Japan, one of my students informed me that there was a Japanese remake of “Bewitched” titled “Housewives Is Witches”. This was his own translation of the Japanese title “Okusama wa majo”. I think “(The) Wife Is a Witch” is probably the better translation of this phrase, but I rather like “Housewives Is Witches”.
