Kids shows take up most of my viewing nowadays, cos kids. And the remakes of classic kids shows are bugging me at the moment.
Specifically Thomas the Tank engine, and Peter Rabbit. It’s not that it’s different to the show/book I remember(I get that I will never recreate the feeling of watching a show as a 6 year old), or made with CG, or woke (wtf that means). They are just so generic. They have completely lost everything that made the original show or book unique. It could be swapped out with any of the countless anthropomorphic rabbits/trains on Netflix.
Emphasis on “loosely”. Hint: if the title tries to sell the adaptation as being very close to the source material, it isn’t going to be anywhere close to the source material.
“Frankenstein: The True Story” very clearly isn’t Mary Shelley’s story, but an imaginative very different story. It scores points for originality, but none for faithfulness.
Interesting cast, though
James Mason – as "Polidori:, so if you know anything about the circulstances of the writing of Shelley’s book, this is a big red flag
David McCallum
Jane Semour
Agnes Moorehead
Ralph Richardson
John Gielgud
Tom Baker
and Michael Sarrazin as The Beaver.
The Lucifer TV show. The character is taken from Gaiman’s The Sandman universe (and DC) where Lucifer Morningstar is basically the second most powerful being in existence and turned into a Psych and The Mentalist clone helping a female LEO solve crimes with his special abilities.
I only saw the first few episodes, so maybe that changes. I guess it might not be a bad show for what it is, but it seemed far from the source material.
I’d, again (c.f. Lovecraft above), say that this is yet another case of taking some rather transcendent source material, and making it mundane and trite. Epic scope reduced to a setting and characters that can easily fit inside a diorama, blunting their span and impact in the process.
Definitely true–in no small part because the original screenplay author (who turned it into a science-fiction movie) was fired, and the book’s author was brought in to write a new script and to storyboard the movie.
I used to read Holes and The Tale of Despereaux to my students. We’d watch Holes after reading the book, but hell no to Despereaux.
When “The Firm” was in theaters, everyone was saying, “If you read the book, you won’t like the movie, and if you haven’t read it, you’ll love it.” I had read that book and saw it in a packed theater with a friend who hadn’t; she loved it, and I said “That’s not in the book!” so many times, a man in front of me turned around and told me to shut up.
I generally reserve my disdain for bad remakes, but there are a couple of adaptations…
Damnation Alley (1977) is an adaptation of the Zelazny novel, which is a dark, cynical tale of a condemned criminal coerced into carrying a vaccine across a post apocalyptic wasteland (the novel has a very Escape From New York vibe). The movie features an early prototype of the Cybertruck (see below) and a studly, clean shaven hero leading an intrepid band of volunteers through some of the usual sci fi monsters and mayhem.
The Landmaster
Logan’s Run (1976) is an adaptation of the sci fi novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, The book is a surreal journey through a society that euthanizes its citizens when they reach the age of 21. The hero is an enforcer of this status quo who flees when his embedded “jewel” flashes. The novel describes scenes of sex, violence, drugs and a landscape that’s a cross between The Warriors and The Wizard of Oz, all inhabited by underage teens and children. The movie has almost none of this, aging up the characters, placing them in a stereotypical “city of the future” and retaining none of the off-center weirdness of the book.
The comic series Hellblazer is about a British magician who looks like Sting’s character in the movie of Quadrophenia and battles all variety of supernatural entities.
The movie Constantine stars Keanu Reeves as a freelance exorcist with a secret lair inside a bowling alley in LA and is set in a world where Roman Catholicism is the one true religion.
In the film, the underground city is destroyed, leaving thousands of yong people out in the wilderness, with no training, no skills, no tools or weapons, and the Old surface guy states there is very little food. They wont have to worry about turning 30, they will all be dead in a couple months.
Most of the James Bond movies fall into the category of “bad adaptations”. It’s easier to list the ones in which they tried to be faithful (mostly the first few) –Dr. No (sorta) From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and parts of For Your Eyes Only. You can’t really blame them for The Spy Who Loved Me – Fleming wouldn’t let them use anything more than the title, which turned out to be a good thing. Except they didn’t have to make a movie that bad. Most of the others really have almost no connection with their nominal source, starting with You Only Live Twice
I notice the same disconnect between other spy movies and the novel. Look at Ice Station Zebra, or The Osterman Weekend
Or The Bourne Identity and its sequels. They took the story out its Cold War setting and dropped it into the 2000s, and had to rewrite pretty much the entire thing as a result.
Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about it. It’s not even an adaptation, just a movie that has some of the same names for characters and institutions, but that doesn’t follow the same story, have the same ending, or the same point.
And really all anyone remembers is Dana Delany coming out of the pool.
That kind of points to something I have noticed in the thread thus far. There seem to be two types of contenders for this thread- the first seem to be “adaptations” that only share the title and maybe character names, but that don’t have the same characterizations, stories, or endings. The second seems to be adaptations that significantly change the ending/story, or characterizations.
I suppose there could be a third, which would be adaptations that attempted to stay true to the source material, but were just poorly done. I can’t think of any off the top of my head though.
