I decided to start this thread after watching the 2021 BBC/PBS miniseries of Around the World in 80 Days with David Tennant.
Note: spoilers for the book and series are blurred in the OP, but not after.
Let me say that I am not a huge Jules Verne fan, much less a purist. And I understand that when transforming a work from one medium to another, changes must be made.
That said, it seems to me that if you’re going to take a famous book and make it into a TV series, you really ought to use more than the title, the names of a couple of the characters, and the barest outline of the plot. But that’s all that the creators of this version did.
Here’s what the 2021 ATWI80D includes from Verne’s original novel:
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The title.
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The names of leading characters Phileas Fogg and Passepartout.
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Set in 1872.
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Fogg wagers he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days.
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Newspaper reports say that the railroad across India is complete, but when they get there they find it isn’t.
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The travelers’ train must cross a damaged bridge, but the series puts it in a different location and changes other details.
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They chop up a wooden vehicle to keep their conveyance running. In the book it’s a ship, in the series a train.
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At the end, Fogg believes he has lost the wager, but hasn’t because he gained a day by traveling eastward.
That’s it.
The series fills six 45-minute episodes with dozens of scenes that bear no resemblance to anything in the book, adds entirely new characters, and drastically changes the personalities of Passepartout and Fogg.
I think it is the last that bothers me most. In the book the character of Fogg is practically the archetype of the Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark type superhero: mysterious past, wealthy, loner, extremely wide-ranging expertise, etc. But most of all, and somewhat unlike those two, an almost inhuman imperturbability. The very model of the British “stiff upper lip.”
Tennant’s Fogg is insecure, weak, bullied, not very sharp, naïve, and damaged by a love affair gone wrong.
It may be that the creators of the series felt that Verne’s Fogg was not relatable to today’s audiences, or would be seen as imperialist, or needed to have more of a character arc. It’s true that Verne’s character does not change very much from beginning to end. But he does change in a few key ways.
Anyway, I could rant and rave about every idiotic, pointless, cliched, and absurd changes in the series, but that would take much too long. If you want a much more faithful version, see the 1956 film with David Niven, which, despite its ponderous length (three hours) and 1950s wide-screen travelogue feel, is quite true to Verne. Except for the balloon (which Tennant’s version uses, too) and the unnecessary (but not gory) bull-fighting sequence. (I haven’t seen the Pierce Brosnan/Eric Idle miniseries from 1989.)
On to the point of this thread: what adaptations do you feel do unconscionable violence to their source material? They can be book or play to movie or TV show, or any other combination you can think of.
The first one that comes to mind for me is I, Robot (2004) with Will Smith. I’ve never seen it because, as an Asimov fan, I knew it couldn’t possibly bear any resemblance to the original stories. Although I have nothing against Bridget Moynihan, she is obviously not Asimov’s mousy, middle-aged Susan Calvin.
I suspect others will mention Starship Troopers.
(We need not deal here with titles that were applied to entirely different stories, like Alan Nourse’s The Bladerunner made into the title of the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)