When it wasn’t a fanboy howl but when they killed off the Daniel Jackson character (and let the actor, Michael Shanks, go), there were thunderous, mighty fangirl squeals of pique.
The fan outrage spanned a website, SaveDaniel Jackson, a variety ad, and royally pissed off the SciFi network who had just purchased the series from Showtime (and they liked the show because it has a relatively high female audience for a science fiction show). And the fan reaction produced results. The show brought the character (and same actor) back…
Nope. Go further back than Arthur Conan Doyle to Shakespeare. Death of Fallstaff, then, at royal urging, the re-writing of him into Merry Wives.
Royal fan-girl, but still a fan-girl.
Hey, movies aren’t the only genre infested with f@nboiz…
My own personal outrage is Brian Herbert’s Dune prequels supposedly based on Frank’s notes and outlines. It is basically the annoying whiny characters from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time set in space.
I think the thing that really upset fans, though, was that the justification for the change constantly shifted and proved so contradictory (to the point of intelligence-insulting) to so much else going on in the series. If Lucas had just outright said, “Because I want to–deal with it”, I think fans would’ve just accepted it (begrudgingly). But with the party line and rationale always in flux, it’s the revisionism that angered people so much.
I disagree with both of these. A lot of people were disappointed that the scouring got cut, but most recognized that it was simply unavoidable - it would have added another hour, minimum, to an already far-too-long movie, and played merry hell with the pacing. Hardly anyone was outraged by it.
And the reaction to cutting Tom Bombadil was, overwhelmingly, one of relief.
A couple of years ago an early script for the next Superman movie was reviewed on AICN. The script included the following revisions to the franchise:
[list][li]Krypton doesn’t explode.[/li][li]Supe’s powers are in his suit.[/li][li]Jimmy Olsen is gay[/li][li]Lex Luthor is from Krypton and has super powers.[/li]
The talkback following the script review is hilarious. It also resulted in an online petition to keep the script from being shot. This was a case where the explosion of fanboy outrage may have actually stopped a travesty from happening.
Miller has some good points re the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. The Rankin/Bass and Bakshi cartoons were outrages all around. Where there’s a Whip There’s a Way, indeed.
I think the biggest Fanboy Outrage regarding LOTR came from 1) "No Elves at Helm’s Deep and/or 2) “What have they done to Faramir?” 3) “Where’s Christopher Lee?” [ROTK] After that it was down to quibbles: “What ? No Houses of Healing?!” “Where’s Denethor’s Palantir?” etc.
A lot of fans - including the book’s author - were outraged by the recent TV movie version of Wizard of Earthsea
Can I ask what you hated about it, if it’s not too much of a hijack? I always thought that the Scouring had been a rather important part of Tolkien’s point. A lot of LotR is about evil, and Sauruman going to do something just to hurt those meddling ki- I mean hobbits made a lot of sense for the overall work.
Not particularly enjoyable to read, but not the full-stop and WTF moment that the visit with Tom Bombadil had been for me when reading LotR for the first time.
Mind you, for a movie version of LotR, I can’t imagine how they’d even try to fit it in. It is an epilog, not really part of the central story. I just think it’s an artistically and philosophically valid epilog.
Killing Supergirl. Awful.
Tossing the whole multiple-reality thing that had been so much of DC to that point.
Then some weird revisionist version of Superman, that was younger than the other heroes, & that had played football in high school. Great Scott!
After a while, though, I got to like much of Byrne’s take on Supes.
Green Lantern from Crisis on is pretty horrifying, though.
This Wikipedia article says his coming out was mostly pretty well received. But just looking at the picture, I have to ask: people were surprised by this revelation?
Of course you may! I should have gone into more detail, anyway. I did like the part where Merry & Pippin fought them off, but the Scouring itself seemed to me to be too much of an injection of real life into a perfectly good story. It was like, “Well, that was the fairy tale - here’s what really happened.”
