Inspired by my post in another thread about the novelization to the 1993 Jean Claude van Damme film Hard Target
https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Target-Movie-Robert-Tine/dp/0425138615
I was wondering what the weirdest novelization or tie-in product you have seen for a movie and/or TV show?
MLB put a spider web on the bases for a day or 2 to promote one of the Spiderman movies
It’s obvious to anyone who saw the movie why they did it, but despite Guardians of the Galaxy being a 21st-century movie, they released the soundtrack on cassette tape.
GotG sdtrk on cassette is a GREAT idea!
I was making a version of 13 Reasons Why for a friend… dubbing the audiobook onto cassettes and sending them in a shoebox with a walkman, and a map.
Surely that time the Red Bull F1 team were sponsored by Star Wars
There’s literally a Spaceballs novelization. I can guarantee it’s nowhere near as funny as the actual film.
Despite the name, the James Bond films Moonraker has absolutely nothing to do with the Ian Fleming Novel Moonraker, so they wound up having to make a novelization of the film under the title “James Bond In Moonraker” to prevent confusion with the previous book.
The king of bad movie tie-ins has to be the time Dr. Suess’s “Lorax” was used to promote an automobile:
I have the novelization for Snakes on a Plane and I read it while on a plane. Much more effort went into the book than into the movie.
All Nippon Airways painted three of their jetliners in Star Wars livery a few years ago:
Then, last year, United did the same:
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/star-wars-plane-united-d06c4d0c7e864de49912ed9fcfd84e31.jpg)
But they made up for it with Spaceballs The Flame Thrower. The kids love this one.
Smurf gelato. I had it in Italy.
I’ve got to ask: What does Smurf taste like?
It was Smurf blue and weirdly tasteless; my guess is they were going for marshmallow.
the ACC BB tourney for men had a theme song around 10 years ago. “Shawty Get Loose” by Lil Mama. It was rap and they kept playing it.
They had already done the same thing for The Spy Who Loved Me. Both novelizations were written by Christopher Wood, who wrote the screenplays for both movies. These are easily the two most puerile and awful of the Bond films. But I have to give the novelizations credit – they’re better than you’d expect, and better than the movies. But still not very good.
There have been a lot of pointless novelizations, where you’d think re-releasing the source novel or story would have been enough.
The Thing – novelization by Alan Dean Foster. You’d think they could just reprint a collection of John W. Campbell stories featuring this one.
Total Recall – Piers Anthony wrote a novelization. They could have just published a collection of Philip K. Dick stories highlighting We Can Remember it for you Wholesale. In fact, some company did just that. But the mass-market edition was Dick’s. Reportedly awful. Personally, I think they should have just published Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization (from which they stole a lot of the film) instead.
The Island of Dr. Moreau – My recollection is that they issued a completely new novelization as a tie-in for the release of the 1977 Burt Lancaster - Michael York - Richard Basehart version, but I can’t bring it up on the internet right now.
Doctor Strangelove – Peter Bryant completely rewrote his novel Red Alert as a tie-in form the film so it would more closely resemble the movie
Marooned – Martin Caidin did the same with his novel Marooned when the movie came out.
The weirdest tie-in product I can think of (at the moment) is the Alien facehugger plush toy.
“Cute and cuddly, poseable fingers, he just wants to give you a kiss!”
Forbidden Planet by W.J. Stuart (really mystery novelist Philip MacDonald) is one of the weirder novelizations I’ve read.
The movie is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (with very significant changes – it’s not really an adaptation, as I’ve argued many times), so there was no original. Stuart’s novelization is interesting because it differs markedly from the movie, which is weird in a business where they usually try to make the tie-in match the movie pretty closely. Nor do I think this is a case like the Dell and Gold Key comic tie-ins where the creators of the tire-in were given a copy of an early draft of the script, and things changed during production. “Stuart’s” changes seem to be done in the service of making the story more logically consistent for him. (Similar to the way Isaac Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage differs from the film because the good Doctor wanted to correct their scientific and logical errors).
In Stuart’s novel, for instance, the animals aren’t “real”. The film explains that the Krel visited Earth and brought back biological specimens (hence the Tiger). But in the novel a monkey gets run over by the crew’s utility vehicle, and when Doc Ostrow dissects it he finds mostly random tissue inside with a few features, but not a functional anatomy. The monkey isn’t something brought back by the Krel, but must be a product of the Krel Id Machine taking its cues from Morbius’ mind to construct sort of living animatronic animals. There are other such differences.
The novelization was published by Bantam at the same time the film was released in the fifties, with a (slightly wrong) painting of Robby on the cover, and with a photo from the movie on the back cover. It’s been republished several times since (the Internet Speculative Database lists at least six American editions, with still more foreign editions, the most recent in 2005)
My wife and I used to make fun of this, saying in a dog-lover’s style:
“Who’s a cute little Face Hugger? YOU are! Yes, you are!”
And then there are the Cthulhu plush toys. That’s just wrong. 
I agree. I own two of them.