Another comment on Frankenstein’s Monster – the common conception of his appearance comes from the movies. In the book he’s huge and apparently scary looking, but in an attempt to make him handsome Dr. Frankenstein gave him flowing black hair and lovely teeth. He has a yellowish (not green or gray!) complexion. I don’t believe there’s any mention of visible stitches; in fact, in the book I don’t think it’s clear that the monster is made from sewn-together bits of corpses at all. Dr. Frankenstein refuses to discuss in detail the process he used to create life, although he does confess he obtained materials from charnel houses and graveyards.
Well, you’ve got to take into consideration the fact that Dorian was making pretty bad lifestyle choices. It’s been years since I read the book, but I think it was suggested that his degenerate lifestyle and bad morals were showing up in the portrait even more than they would have on his face under ordinary circumstances. So when everything rebounded back onto him then he may have looked even worse than, say, Courtney Love (age 40) does now.
Depends on how you define “wuss.” In the earliest, pre-leather-jacket days, the Fonz was a darker character, representing the *id *that was scary and fascinating to the likes of Richie and Potsie (and, in grade school, me). In after years, he passed through increasingly cartoonish stages of machismo and ended up a bland, homogenized moral example (stay in school, kids!).
Slightly related to this, there’s a wonderful essay by Gore Vidal (I read it in his collection United States) in which he reviews all the Oz books and, IIRC, traces the development of Dorothy from resourceful six-year-old well-spoken heroine to folksy vaudevillian little-girl caricature.
One of the big problems I have with the book is that Frankenstein is trying to create a perfect man and doesn’t realize his creation is monstrous until it’s alive. He’s worked on this thing for months, and he hasn’t noticed how it looks?
Anyhoo, the only places he succeeds are with the black, lustrous hair and the perfect teeth.
IIRC the monster’s skin is repeatedly compared to that of a mummy.
Shelly repeats that besides his mummy-complection problems, the monster has a second skin problem. It isn’t scars. His skin is too tight. Every bone, vein, and muscle can be seen clearly and it always seems as though his skin will split open. Horror artist Bernie Wrightson did some fantastic illustrations of the monster as described by Shelley http://www.wrightsonsfrankenstein.com/Images.html
It all makes sense if you accept that Dr. F. is very focused (stupid), obsessive (stupid), and, for a guy who managed to tamper in God’s domain with reasonable success, kind of stupid (stupid).
Elaine from Seinfeld changed drastically between her first appearance and the last episode. She went from something of a straightman (sort of) to just as bad as the rest of the gang.
The Phantom of the Opera is decidedly different in each adaptation as is his back-story. In the novel he is Erik, a brilliant character with no conscience who has travelled the world and been a master builder but who has a very real bloodlust and who is so horribly deformed that he must wear a full mask. By the time we get to the movie adaptation of the musical he no longer goes by Erik, his back story is totally changed (think “Elephant Man”) and his “horrid deformity” is no worse than I’ve seen on clerks in grocery stores and others who hold down normal jobs- it’s small enough to cover with a Kleenex sized mask (with which he’s very handsome). While still a killer he’s much more sympathetic now due to his almost pure love for the insipid and stupid Christine (yeah shug, most angels wear masks and tuxedoes and live in sewers) and, of course, because people have been mean to him and he’s striking back in the only way he knows how (which happens to be engineering works that would make him a billionaire if he patented them rather than using them to ensnare inbred aristocrats in Gothic sewer studio apartments).
Jean Valjean is a much colder character in the original source material than in the blockbuster musical. While he loves Cosette and risks his life to save her in both, in the original he takes refuge in a convent for years and is ascetic and humorless, while in the play he lives as a gentleman retiree when he goes into exile.
Snoopy: used to be far more like a real dog, walked on all fours had a very different dog-like face, was far smaller.
Jeeves: is now portrayed as just a typical ‘stiff upper lip english butler’, originally he was a valet (for most of his career) and a total genius with a knack for solving any problem that anyone could get themselves into.
Blackadder: anyone see the 1st series? Dull, jealous, lame, bowl hair cut. He wanted to call himself ‘The Black Vegetable’ 'nough said.
Tintin: The book ‘Tintin in Soviet Russia’ shows an older man, slightly chubbier, with most of his face covered by a scarf.
George Moody: Chauffer to Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley. In the books he was a sensible man of average intelligece who knew his place. In the TV show his is very intelligent and more of a partner and love interest than a servent.
The Ompalompas: In the book: small thin men, women and children with creative lyrics who wore leaves and animal skins. In the movie: short chubby men (only) who wore overalls and had very repetitive lyrics.
This is all I can think of for the moment but I’m sure I’ll come up with some more soon.
This probably falls more into character development than a retcon, but in Stephen Donaldson’s ‘The Gap’ series, Angus Thermopyle starts out as a sadistic amoral rapist and mass murderer who has no loyalty to anyone but himself. By the end of the last book, he’s still an asshole but he cares about a few other people and he risks his life multiple times to save them.
The Lone Ranger started off in the original book series as a vengeance-minded Texas Ranger, sole survivor of an ambush (IIRC), a much darker character than the Dudley Doright character he morphed into.
I read that that was deliberate. They decided to turn her from a goody-goody into the bitchy, selfish person of the later seasons so they could rationalize why she would be hanging out with such unpleasant people.
Hmmm, I just finished reading Books of Magic, Vol. 2. Boy, Molly sure looked a lot different in the very beginning. Much more short, and also one heck of a lot more of a typical kid. Physically, she looks different. I would say it was due to a growth spurt, but the time between appearances (In the story itself) in the first few issues is too close together for that to be it.
Huh. I guess the artists just changed their minds. I should start a thread looking for other examples. Let me just do a search to make sure I am not stepping on anyone’s toes.
</My thought process>
oly crud! I was the one who made an earlier thread about this. It was about seven months ago. A lot has happened since then.
Well, why waste a good (zombie) thread? I would still like to hear about charectos who have changed over time, and now, I would like to hear about film/cartoon/comic-book characters who have been drawn wildly differently while in the hands of the same artist, writer, director, or what have you, in addition to the old OP. Heck, even different artists, come to think of it.
Spock. Look at the pilot episode; he’s testy and irritible, presumably from that itchy turtleneck they made him wear. By the third episode, they’d pretty effectively split him into two characters, the other being Dr. McCoy (Kirk, Spock and McCoy developed pretty quickly into archetypal Ego, Superego and Id characters). There are remnants of “Testy Spock” well into season 1 (“Gallileo Seven,” “Corbomite Maneuver”), but they figured out what audiences liked about him and focused on the cold-blooded logician.
MASH,the show changed from its original conceptions.The writer,Hooker,told of the crazy things he and his unit did during the war.The book wasn’t anti-war at all.The movie was made along the same lines,it just made fun of pompus officers and noted how insane stress made doctors,but it wasn’t anti-war either.I think it was perceived
as anti-war as most of the characters didn’t give a fuck about the war.The tv show seemed to have more of an agenda about war in general,maybe because people were sick of vietnam.
Actually, David Skal, author of Hollywood Gothic and V is for Vampire, has been unable to find the origin of “nosferatu” – it doesn’t seem to be a real word in any of the local languages. It first entered vampire lore with Bram Stoker’s book “Dracula”, but Stoker got it from the lady who wrote “The Land Beyonf the Forest” (a book about Transylvania, of which the title is a translation), and where she got it from no one knows. Skal thinks she misheard or misinterpreted something. The point is that “nosferatu” is the vampire.
In its original incarnation, the vampire was basically a foul-smelling, uncouth speechless corpse, very much like George Romero’s zombies – see the books Donald Glut has assembvled on vampire lore. Arguably that party in Zurich that gave birth to Frankenstein also gave birth to the modern vampire, since Lord Byron made a stillborn effort at a vampire story, and his friend Polidori gave us “The Vampyre”, starring Lord Ruthven, the first “titled” vampire, and onme who dressed well and could “pass” in society. Ever since, the image of the cultured, titled vampire has been with us. (Special mention goes to Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth”, which was earlier, but I think Polidori really started it all, and I think he based Ruthven on Byron.)
There were similar vampires after that, most notably Varney the Vampire, but most vampires in the 19th century were of the “psychic vampire” type – they didn’t d anything as vulgar as drinking blood. They drained your elan vital, or something. Stoker’s Dracula crystallized the modern image of the vampire, taking the best from Polidori, Varney, Carmilla, and others, and stirring in a lot of “traditional” vampire lore that Stoker actually just made up himself (like the business about not being visible in a mirror). Skal claims that Draculas was a Darwinian predator, not patrticularly attractive or sexy, and the physical embodiment of Lombroso’s atavistic “criminal type”. It really bugs him that people see the Coppola Dracula as faithful, when it tries to make Drac “sexy”, and tacks on that story about Dracula seeing Mina as the reincarnation of his dead love. (An idea lifted from Richard Matheson’s script for the Jack Palance/Dan Curtis TV version of Dracula, and lifed in its turn from The Mummy.)
By the way, if you want to see a changed character, look at “Hi” from “Hi and Lois”. The modern rounded- and-rumpled Dad doesn’t look at all like the original, who was tall, thin, and square-cut. He looked more like Mark Trail or some “real” dad from an adventure strip than someone who belonged in a strip as “cartoony” as Hi and Lois.
Garfield, too, looked very different at the start – his head, and particularly his eyes, were much smaller relative to his body than they now are. He’s the perfect uimage of a neotenous creature, as noted in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on Mickey Mouse. Through time he’s taken on more baby-like traits, with his eyes and head becoming proportionately larger, somethuing that makes him more appealing on a visceral level.
The most extreme and obvious case of this “neotinization” has to be Elmer Fudd. From all accounts, he started out as an truly annoying character called “Egghead”, created by animator Tex Avery, and who no one else liked. He was, I’m told, inspired by radio comedian Joe Penner. (I never liked him myself). In one cartoon, he’s shown riding a scooter labeled “Elmer Fudd”. The Egghead character had a little round head with an enormous red nose and sparse (but definitelty present) hair.
I think it was after Avery left that Egghead became Elmer. His head got bigger and his nose smaller and his voice didn’t sound the same – comedian Arthur Q. Bryant started doing the voice. I think he had dione a “babty” axct before (I know I’ve seen pictures of him dressed like a baby, although that may have been from later). He started sounding like a baby, especially with that characteristic “w” for "R’ and “l” – “Scwewy Wabbit!”.
They still weren’t sure how he should look. Bob Clampett tried making him bigger and fatter, still with a red nose and half-lidded eyes (although still with the Bryant voice), but that didn’t last long. Elmer quickly ended up the way we know him – huge oversized head with no hair, and babny-like speech. Even Clampett drew him that way, finally. Elmer’s easily the most clear example of neoteny in cartoons./ Nobody else who isn’t actually a baby looks as much like a baby as he does.