We recently binged Deadwood. It petered out at the end of 3 seasons - ending in a way that left us unsatisfied. So we were really looking forward to the movie. I can imagine the challenges of making a movie so many years after a show ended, but what a disappointment.
Led me to wonder about which TV shows ended, and later had a good quality movie made.
I offer Firefly/Serenity as the gold standard.
At this point, I think I am suffering from a lifetime oversaturation of all things Star Trek, that I’m limited in my ability to compare the various shows and movies.
There was a pretty decent Dragnet movie made after the TV series.
No, not the 1987 Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks comedy. I mean the 1954 movie with Jack Webb and Ben Alexander (his first TV partner). Dragnet had been a radio show first, then a TV show starting in 1951. The film was the first time they were in color. (When the film came out, Dragnet was still on TV. And radio, for that matter. A trifecta)
OK - I guess we should have 2 categories. I was thinking about movies w/ (largely) original casts. Other than the Dragnet movie (which I have not seen) the other offerings are reboots.
Like I said, with all of the various ST shows and movies, I’d need to do some research before I could even discuss which movie was used on which series. Plus, as I recall, each ST show/movie had it’s own considerable ups and downs, such that it would be a challenge (for me) to compare a movie in it’s entirety with a ST series in it’s entirety.
McHale’s Navy (1964) McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (1965) (no Ernest Borgnine – he was acting in Flight of the Phoenix) Munster’s Go Home! (1966) (the original cast, except that they changed Marilyn again
I haven’t seen the McHale’s Navy movies. The Munster movie is no worse or better than the TV series. All of these had the advantage of being in color, which the TV shows weren’t.
The Nude Bomb (1980 – “Get Smart”)
Not all that great.
But the three Naked Gun movies were as good as or better than the TV series Police Squad. that inspired them.
There are, of course, a lot of TV shows that were repackaged and sometimes merged to get turned into theatrical releases, but I won’t count such things as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier or Davy Crockett and the River Pirates or To Trap a Spy or The Spy with my Face (both Man from U.N.C.L.E.) or Battlestar Galactica, or made-for-TV movies like Koroshi (Danger Man/Secret Agent 1968) or The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E or too many others to list.
I’d give the nod to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life which is essentially a two hour episode of Flying Circus. I’m not sure their narrative films would count.
