This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Nothing To Do With The Original launched as In Name Only: From YKTTW
Lale: Question — was the film The Beast Master a deliberate adaptation of the book? It's the kind of title that could be a coincidence.
Eric DVH: Andre Norton is mentioned in the credits, and the animal companions are nearly the same, so I'd imagine it was.
HeartBurn Kid: Cut some incorrect Natter about The Running Man:
- Based on a short story by Robert Sheckley, about televised legal manhunt in the guise of a million dollar game show. Why people claim it's based on a novel by Stephen King escapes this editor. Sheckley wrote his stories decades before King.
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. Between the caveat and the certain knowledge that Sim City predates The Sims, the original example was just wrong.
- MySims for the Wii & DS is not much like The Sims. It's more like they took the home creation idea from The Sims, retooled it completely, then added it to the premise of Animal Crossing but turned the animals into chibis and jettisoned all the bossiness.
Jack Cain: Removed Tenchi Muyo GXP example, as it's not adapted from anything, and is only a separate story set in the same universe.
Fast Eddie: Goodly number of wicks (nearly 50), for a cutlist candidate.
- Scud East: I submit that's because it's a better name for the trope than Dolled-Up Installment.
Lale: There is "Adaptation Decay," and then there is "changing everything so that it is a completely different story with no reason whatsoever to share the title of a work in another medium." That's this trope. Fans of the book series have issues with the Harry Potter films, but you would never wonder, "Why didn't they just give it their own title if they were going to create a new story out of wholecloth anyway?" like with the The Dark Is Rising films. In Name Only isn't really Adaptation Decay at all; it's "lack of adaptation but borrwing a title nonetheless." And I don't mean that as hyperbole to make a point; I mean it literally.
Silent Hunter: I agree with Lale. Keep this.
Tanto: I don't think you have to make the case differentiating this from Adaptation Decay; you have to make the case differentiating it from Dolled-Up Installment. I guess the only difference is that Dolled-Up Installment includes some shreds of the borrowed franchise? Seems pretty slim to me.
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Okay, here goes. The most famous instance of Dolled-Up Installment is the American edition of Super Mario Brothers 2. Is that a Mario game In Name Only? <listening for anything other than crickets>
Germaholic: I'll do even better.
Dolled-Up Installment, they at least try to make enough changes necessary for the installment to fit into the overall franchises as well as possible. An example would be the 7th Hellraiser movie; it was not originally intended to be a Hell Raiser movie, but as they got further into production, they decided that it should be the 7th Hell Raiser movie and so inserted Pinhead and the Cenobytes into the movie as well as incorporating the Lament configuration and following the Hell Raiser rules as best they could during the movie. The movie still would have been better off standing on its own, but as a Hellraiser installment, it sort of works, though most Hellraiser fans hate it.
In Name Only, on the other hand, is where they just use something with the same name, but the movie has nothing to do with the "source material". The most obvious example that I can think has already been used, being The Running Man; the protagonist in the movie and the book both have the same name but are otherwise completely different characters entirely. Both are about a deadly gameshow but this is a very superficial similarity in that the rules of the gameshows are completely different, as is the story, the characters' backgrounds, the reasons the protagonist is there. An even more blatant example is is the sequel for 8mm, which doesn't even have any ''superficial' similarities to the first movie. They simply wanted to use the name to sell the movie and didn't even try to make it like the source material or original movie.
On the other hand, I do think this distinction would need to be clarified on both entries and that both entries would need to be cleaned up so that the examples go where they fit the best.
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: It occurs to me that In Name Only can apply to narrative units smaller than an entire installment. I'll edit accordingly.
arromdee: Cut the reference to the Doctor Who movies. It's true they changed the things noted in the entry, but the entire plots of those movies were directly taken from two TV stories and the changed elements had little effect on the story. Besides, just having Daleks at all disqualifies it from being "in name only", since Daleks are specifically associated with the series.
Seven Seals: Took out Mission Impossible. It moves away from the series, but the fact that you can see it move at all disqualifies it as an instance. This trope is not "being unfaithful to the source material", it's "not even having been anywhere near the alleged source material", or at minimum "gleefully unconstrained by the slight similarities to the alleged source material".
Bring The Noise - Removed: ** On that respect, this troper always saw UFC as the homoerotic version of WWE. It's not "In name only" what with the different name and the fact that UFC goes out of its way to point out that it is not like wrestling (what with the actual sport aspect and all).
Revevil: The WWE isn't homoerotic?
Blork: Removed this example, the game was terrible and killed the series for quite some time, but it still involved Lara raiding tombs to defeat some ancient evil magic thing and had the same basic style of gameplay as all the others.
- Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness tried to take Tomb Raider in a whole new direction. Unfortunately, it happened to be "down". The only Tomb Raider related thing in the game is Lara herself, but her personality has been so mangled that it's best to pretend the game never happened.
—- Random Troper: Removed this example. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory made a few changes in the story (and I wouldn't be surprised if the 'Charlie and Grandpa Joe stealing Fizzy Lifting Drinks' incident is at least part of the reason Roald Dahl hated it), but otherwise was the same story of the book.
- The first film based on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory made Roald Dahl so angry at the unfaithfulness to the book that he banned Warner Bros. from making a sequel, something that still stands to this day.
Antigone: Removed the Alan Scott example from the "Comics" section. Alan was the original Green Lantern, if we're putting any GL here it would be the Green Lantern Corps and the rest of the Silver Age rewrite.
- Green Lantern Alan Scott is a golden age superhero who is not associated with the corps and got his power from an entity known as starheart.
Pteryx: Removed this, because a bad sequel whose status as such takes time to manifest is not the same as a sequel In Name Only:
- Chrono Cross is a sequel in name only to Chrono Trigger. The battle system is completely different, the world is almost unrelated, and the links revealed in the ending feel tacked-on.
- Except that the links revealed in the middle of the game explain that the reason the time stream is so screwed up is because Crono and company saved history, that Prometheus a.k.a. Robo is the only thing keeping evil master computer FATE from screwing things up even worse, and that the Frozen Flame at the heart of the whole mess is a piece of Lavos' crystalized badness. You don't have to have played Chrono Trigger to understand Chrono Cross or vice versa, but the latter game answers one important question the first one leaves hanging: Schala Lives!
Twilight: I'm going to put it back without the natter. good sequal/bad sequal aside, I've been told (about to start playing it, I can give a personal account after I do) that it's a much better story if you forget it's attached to Trigger (IE: you stop yourself from freaking out over how different it is), so I think it counts enough
Coat: some less-than-bright kid claimed that C&C Generals was based on the earlier Bf ME, which is ofcourse a quite silly remark. I'm having trouble with rephrasing that entry, though.
Daibhid C: I've not seen Wanted, or read the original comic. But I have read an SFX article about the movie by Mark Millar, and he liked it. In fact he refers to one particular scene (shooting a fly?) as one he was very unsure about when he first wrote it for the comic, but when he saw the actors doing it, it finally worked for him. So it may or may not be In Name Only, for all I know, but I thought I should mention that where it says it's "losing all of the message the original author intended", well, the original author disagrees.
The entry on the Ultimate universe is largely not true. The characters in the Ultimate universe have the same codenames, the same civilian names, usually similar backstory sometimes the same, and the same powers.
Ultimate Spiderman, for example, is certainly more than Spiderman in name only. It's Peter Parker who gets bit by a special spider and gets spider powers, wears the exact same costume, uses the web shooters. The key parts of his origin story are left intact right down to the wrestling for money and his uncle getting killed and that motivating him to become a superhero. The only things they did differently were retell the origin as if it happened now and change the radioactive spider to a spider injected with an experimental drug. Oh, and Aunt May is a bit younger.
Captain America varies a bit from his original story in terms of personality but again, its a one of a kind super-soldier getting frozen in a block of ice in World War II and thawed out in the modern era to try to be a hero in a world he doesn't completely understand. All of the important aspects are intact. Homosexual Colossus is not Colossus In Name Only so neither should Jarhead Captain America be.
The only character that immediately strikes me as even coming close to an In Name Only is The Wasp, with her being Asian and getting her powers from being a mutant instead of experiments done by her husband, but if anything it was done specifically to throw a curveball at long time fans by having Hank get his formula from reverse engineering her powers rather than the other way around.
So I deleted the following entry:
- The Ultimate Marvel Universe contains many characters who share only a name and their hero schtick with their counterparts; they are utterly different as people, for example Ultimate Cap (sensitive, politically progressive artist vs. a cross between John McCain and John McClane). Ultimate Deadpool shares only a name and a colour scheme with the original.
- The Ultimate Universe itself is almost unrecognizable as the Marvel world with its lack of both silly comedy characters/stories built on Rule of Cool, and deep, depressing emotional B Plots.
I mean if anything, it makes far more sense for a government super soldier who fought in World War II before being suddenly transplanted to the modern era to have some politically incorrect attitudes than for that same guy to be a sensitive progressive artist whose sensibilities fit our modern ones like a glove. I'll give the classic Cap some leeway because he was thawed out at least a decade ago comic book time, but the Ultimate version is still fresh from The '40s and should be using words like "dame" and "colored."
Are politics fair contributions to this article or not? Two good-faith contributions I made were removed. The first of the following may be a bit long and POV (though I tried to avoid that!), but New Labour itself seems a legitimate example.
- It's open to debate, but this troper has no doubt that the UK Labour Party fundamentally became a different party when Tony Blair became leader in 1994 and started "New Labour". From being clearly left-wing (albeit having already purged itself of extreme leftists during the 1980s), it became accepting of- and even endorsing- Thatcherite-style reforms. Some consider it "centre-left"; this troper considers it more "centre-right", but Your Mileage May Vary.
- This troper has heard China described as "the world's first truly mature fascist dictatorship"; he assumes that this refers to Mussolini's original vision of fascism, where the interests of business and the state were one and the same, "fruitful inequality" was a good thing and liberal democracy bad.
Umbramatic: Added the How To Train Your Dragon movie as a Film example; should I move it to Western Animation? Also, should I move the Shrek and Sinbad entries?
