There’s a new movie out this week starring Angelina Jolie called Taking Lives “based on a Michael Pye novel”. According to the review in the paper, Jolie’s character doesn’t appear in the original book.
I thought this might be relevant to this thread.
Not to slight Mr. Assimov in any way, but didn’t he inadvertantly lift the title I Robot himeself?
AAAAK, the double s in the beknighted Dr. Asimov’s name was entirely unintentional. I am a long time fan who actually had a letter published in his magazine. I do remember feeling like I had lost a dear friend when I heard of his death.
I don’t know whether it was inadvertant or not. He undoubtedly knew or should have known that Eando Binder published a short story by that name in the Jan. 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. That was only a year before Asimov’s own first robot story. Reusing titles is so common in publishing, though, that I doubt anyone ever thought twice about it.
Not to mention punning on them. I can’t leave this topic without a sideways mention of Oi, Robot.
It may be something as simple as the fact that a good title is hard to come by, and since titles cannot be held as copyright, stealing a good title is worth it.
“I, Robot” - Good title.
“Starship Troopers” - Good title.
Both titles are catchy and intriguing.
Now, a BAD title is “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It’s clever, but way too long and clunky. “Blade Runner” is much better so in that case they didn’t use the title of the story.
One movie that truncated the title was “The Shawshank Redemption,” which still is not a good title but sure beats “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” which would have drawn thousands of bluehairs to the theatre thinking they were going to see Rita Hayworth.
The difference between a bad title and a good titles can be big bux, so why not take a good one when you can?
But a good story is hard to come by, too. If they wanted to use the good title “Starship Troopers” and the good story that went with it, they could have made a really good movie. But since they’re coming up with a new story anyway, then why not a new title? Even if it’s hard to come up with a snappy title, doesn’t that pale in comparison to the task of writing the story the title is going to be attached to?
Wot, no mention of the most horribly mangled book-to-screen adaptation to date?
That’d be The Running Man. Of course, there’d be no way these days that there would ever be a more true-to-the-book version of The Running Man made. At least, not without drastically changing the ending.
Summary of the ending of The Running Man, for those who want one: The hero kills the TV exec behind The Running Man TV show by flying a plane into his office, which happens to be at the top of a skyscraper.
It’s been years since I read it it, but didn’t he……hijack the plane to accomplish that? I definitely remember that the last thing the TV Exec saw was Our Hero giving him the finger (after tripping on his own intestines, tough guy!) from inside the cockpit, though.I seriously doubt that would test well with audiences now.
How did the movie end, by the way? I never saw it because I couldn’t get over Arnold freaking Schwarzenegger being cast as the sickly and weak, only-in-the-game-because-he’s-starving-to-death Richards.
Been years since I read it, too. What I remember is this: Richards somehow gets himself into a position to make demands, one of which is a plane. I don’t think hijacking was involved, in which case all he had to do was deviate from the flight plan. He did give the exec the finger.
The movie had Richards confined to the West Edmonton Mall instead of having the entire country in which to hide. He was pitted in a deadlier version of American Gladiators contests with guys who looked like refugees from the WWF. In fact, one of them was played by Jesse Ventura.
The ending: Richards tosses Running Man host Killian (played by Richard Dawson) into the one-man bobsled that inserts victims…err…contestants into the game. The bobsled crashes and Killian is dead.
It’s sad, but I can’t tell if you’re taking the piss there. It seems just plausible enough… of course, back in the eighties, I spent a day at the West Edmonton Mall’s indoor amusement park under the influence of a bit o’ blotter, so the image of WEM as a nightmarish self-contained world from which there is no escape is one that I can relate to fairly well.
This “deadlier version of American Gladiators” mightn’t be called American Governers, would it?
“I’ll snap your pencil neck, California!” “I doubt that, Minnesota- I vill tear you apart.”
All I know is at least part of the movie was filmed in West Edmonton. I’m guessing they used it because of the wide-open spaces it provided but all the audience saw was a bunch of fog effects and maze-like corridors. The fight scenes were probably either filmed on a sound stage or in empty parts of a parking garage. I seem to recall one fight taking place in a skateboard park.
Having Ah-nold & company run around all of West Edmonton would have been an improvement. What we got was all wrong and way too confined. It was as if the filmmakers latched onto the game show part of the story while they ignored the rest.
What? Heinlein wrote a version of Starship Troopers that had a good story to go with it?
Sorry, but that “intellectual exercise” of RH’s was no story. A sketch of a fascist utopia (and I don’t mean that snidely–at various times, I’ve often considered his enfranchisement model a good one) and the way its military operated, yes. A trite coming-of-age snippet in which a ne’er-do-well realizes the value of service to his society, maybe. A story? Hardly.
I, for one, love Starship Troopers the movie. It turned a dry, thinly veiled, ham-handed (what other cliches can I cram in here…?) political treatise into a fun narrative–a parody, of the original, no doubt, but a better story than the original ever had.