Both of those were indeed done on the original version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I believe all of the newer episodes were remakes of the originals.
These two were also redone for Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, an anthology series based on Dahl’s short stories. The DVD set of the first two seasons will be available this coming Tuesday, with both of those episodes included. Each episode includes a brief introduction by Dahl himself, which could be helpful for a class on adaptations.
Tales From the Darkside adapted a lot of short fiction also, so you might be able to find some material there.
For movies, I’d suggest The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
The short film version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is outstanding. The full length film version is crap.
On Tales from the Darkside, they adapted Stephen King’s Word Processor of the Gods. Good story and a good adaptation. That is a show that needs to be released in season sets on DVD.
I remember reading a short story in Playboy called “The Red Button”. A destitute couple is given the chance of pushing a red button and being given a million dollars. The catch: Someone will die.
Christopher Nolan based Memento on his brother Jonathan’s short story Memento Mori. Interesting note - according to IMDB, the screenplay is still considered to be original because the movie was finished before the story got published. Anyway, they’re both very cool, although they’re very different entities.
The Swimmer, from the story of the same name by John Cheever. Terrific performances from Burt Lancaster and Janice Rule. Also Joan Rivers’ film debut (not comedic).
A couple of the subplots in For Your Eyes Only are based on Ian Fleming short stories. “Risico” , in which Bond encounters a pair of Greek smugglers, was one. I don’t remember the title of the one in which Bond’s target was killed by a crossbow-wielding woman.
Fleming’s short story “The Living Daylights” became the pre-credits sequence in the movie.
Octopussy contains two Fleming stories: the auction scene is loosely based on “Property of a Lady”; when Bond and Maud Adams first meet, she briefly alludes to the events in the short story “Octopussy”.
Alien is said to be a ripoff of an old A.E. van Vogt story. I can’t remember the title.
The TV mini-series *The Martian Chronicles * lumped together a lot of Ray Bradbury short stories. The anthology series Ray Bradbury Theater filmed many of his stories.
Is it? I’ve always thought it was inspired by a Joseph Conrad deal in which a nasty colonialist completely mucks over an African village, prompting one local (who’s family has been murdered or disgraced?) to stow-away aboard the booty-laden ship, spending the voyage picking off the crewmembers one by one, and skillfully hiding during the day.
Trouble is, I can’t remember the title of the story, and only dimly recall it. Hell, maybe my memory is being tricked by the coupla Conrad references (Nostromo and Narcisuss) and the story I’m thinking of is actually by Kipling or something and only coincidentally similar?
One could argue that O’Bannon was reworking a few of the ideas he developed for Dark Star, of course.
Alien – I’ve been over this at length on the Board a few times.
It’s an original screenplay by Dan O’Bannon Walter Giler, and a bunch of other guys. Fans of old SF movies (like me) couldn’t help noticing a particularly strong resemblance between it and Jerome Bixby’s underappreciated 1950s movie It! The Terror from Beyonf Space, one of the gens of 1950s SF cinema. In it, the second spaceship to Mars picks up an unwanted hitchiker who hides out in the air ducts, picks off the crew one by one, and is ultimately killed when they open the airlock (asphyxiating the creature, rather than blasting it into space). Some other visual elements seem lifted from Mario Bava’s Italian SF/Supernatural film [B[Planet of Vampires** – The derelict alien spacecraft, the skeleton of the alien pilot still in the ship. The idea of the alien implanting its young in the bodies of the spacemen could have come from everal places, but I’m willing to bet the immediate inspiration was the Roger Corman 1950s cheapie Night of the Blood Beast (which was featured on MST3K).
Bixy can’t have been unaware of an A.E. Van Vogt short story entitled Black Destroyer (It’s in the seminal anthology “Adventures in Time and Space”, among others), bu the only resemblance between the two is that Black Destroyer is about an alien monster that gets aboard a starship and begins eating the phosphorous out of the crew. But the crew is aware of the alien, and regards it as benign at first. Later on, the aien ttempts to escape in a lifecraft, showing it’s got technical savvy. Another Van Vogt story, “Discord in Scarlet”, features an alien that comes aboard a spaceship and implants its eggs in the bodies of the crew. Interestingly, both these stories were later incorporated into a novel, “The Voyage of the Space Beagle”. As far as I know, Van Vogt was the first to use both ideas.
So, Alien uses ideas first used in two van Vogt stories, but I wouldn’t say it was an adaptation of them. Certainly the writers didn’t say it was. (Although they have mot8ivation not to. And, to be fair, I’ve seen adaptations that had even less to do with the source material. Look at I, Robot.) I think Alien was largely inspired by It!, to which it bears a much greater resmblance. But oficially, Alien is a original story.
Oh, yeah, about Dark Star – DS startede as a short student film. They remade or revamped it for the commercial screen, but i as too short. So they came up with an extra story line about an alien loose aboard the space ship. The thing is, it as a “beachball” – an incedibly unlikely creature that looked like a… well, a beachball. Painted in realistic skin tones and given unlikely monster feet. The crewman Pinback (played by Dan O’Bannon) chases it all over the ship. At one point it attacks him in an elevator shaft by tickling him (The onster is definitely played for laughs). In the end, Pinback fires a tranquilizer dart at the monster. And it blows up.
When I saw the trailer fr the film, back at iyt initial New England release (it showed first at MIT), I was sure that this was some weird remake of It! Turns out I was just a bit early.
quartet
The Lord Mountdrago segment of Three Cases Of Murder. The segment The Picture is also brilliant. Don’t bother with the other segment, it’s very forgettable.
My absolute **least ** favourite adaptation is Roger Moore’s point-missing version of the Saint stories. Awful, just simply unbearable. You can use that as an example of an original being altered almost beyond recognition.
