History Main / CompressedAdaptation

* The game show ''Series/DealOrNoDeal'' originated as the bonus round of a Dutch lottery game show called ''Miljoenenjacht'', which preceded this with an elimination quiz involving the entire audience in a large studio, narrowing it down with quiz rounds and ''Series/LetsMakeADeal''-style buy-outs to leave the game. Some of the early adaptations used a downsized quiz to determine the player, but others either picked the player randomly from an on-stage pool (such as the British version), or just had a contestant pre-determined (like the U.S. version).

* ''WebVideo/FascinatingHorror''[='=]s April Fools' Day 2022 video covering [[Film/JurassicPark "The Isla Nublar Incident"]] does not go into detail about Dennis Nedry's role in sabotaging Jurassic Park's systems, and does not name any character except for John Hammond. Specific details about the damage the dinosaurs caused are also left vague.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnRMDFeKFIE The 1963 animated short film]] [[WesternAnimation/NoddysToylandAdventures "Noddy Goes To Toyland"]], by Peter Lee and Arthur Humberstone, shortened the original 1949 children's book of the same name. It only included scenes such as a montage of Noddy and Big Ears building Noddy's house, Noddy accidentally letting the animals from Noah's Ark loose, and the trial to determine if Noddy is a toy.

While AdaptationDistillation will condense things down effectively, a Compressed Adaptation will leave out whole chunks, hoping that the story stays together while being swiss-cheesed, and/or combine certain scenes - much to the chagrin of many of its fans, of course.

This trope usually pops up when a relatively long story (usually literature) has to be adapted to a fresh medium that has time constraints that the entirety of the original plot could never reasonably fit, whether it's a film, {{OVA}}, a MiniSeries, or even a [[TheThemeParkVersion theme park ride]]. Instead of simplifying things down into a [[AdaptationDistillation distilled adaptation]] or merging and editing elements to create a {{pragmatic adaptation}}, the writers basically decide to start cutting out scenes to fit the story into the allotted time instead. [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools Sometimes it works.]] Other times, you get a jarring mess that only people who already know the original story can follow.

!!Examples

* While the first part of ''Film/TheHungerGamesMockingjay'' featured a lot of padding, Part 2 has a lot of stuff trimmed. Katniss and Joanna training is the biggest omission, while Katniss's time back in District 12 before Peeta returns, at the end, gets heavily cut.

* ''VideoGame/KirbySuperStar'''s first game, Spring Breeze, is a compressed adaptation of ''VideoGame/KirbysDreamLand'', the first game of the series. The original game was already rather short, but Spring Breeze cuts a whole level (Castle Lololo) and a boss (Kaboola), as well as excluding the BossRush near the end.

* Happens to almost every adaptation of ''Literature/LesMiserables'', though there is a French ''series'' of films from the 1930s that includes everything. Much of this is because the book is filled with backstory and tangents that have very little relevance to the plot. Creator/VictorHugo spends ''fifty pages'' talking about the Battle of Waterloo (which includes the events of the battle itself, the geography of the area, and asking who can be considered the victor) contain one event relevant to the rest of the novel. So condensing the novel is necessary to fit today's expectation of more focused stories.

* The second and third ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}'' DirectToVideo movies took this route. ''Legends of Metru Nui'' summed up the quest for the Great Disks and the fight with the Morbuzakh plant as a short {{montage}} (glossing over the mystery of the disappeared Matoran citizens and the clash with [[ShapeShifter Krahka]]) but some of the comic and novel plots could be fitted in-between certain scenes of the film, with minor continuity hiccups. ''Web of Shadows'' wasn't as clear with its continuity, since it played out like a self-contained story with no clear cuts, but it left just about enough room for the comic, novel and online video side stories. Still, as comic and novel writer Greg Farshtey had put it, only if you read his works (and follow the story for years) do you fully ''understand'' what goes on in the movies.

* ''WesternAnimation/AroundTheWorldInEightyDaysBurbankAnimation'' cut quite a bit of the book, such as Aodua's subplot, from the 48 minute film.

''VideoGame/NewHorizons'': Disney turned the original into a licensed game late in development, and it shows: The movie's plot is reduced to "Black ghost ship with an undead crew", no movie-characters exist, its corresponding quest is extremely short, the Black Pearl is only encountered twice, and she is a frigate.

** Disney's California Adventure has ''WesternAnimation/MonstersInc - Mike and Sulley to the Rescue!'', a dark ride that retells the plot of the film... well, sort of. Everything about the conspiracy to kidnap children and suck out their screams that Randall is a part of is removed, thus Randall's plot here is pretty much "sabotage Sulley's efforts to get Boo home ForTheEvulz".

[[folder:Film -- Animated]]

[[folder:Film -- Live-Action]]

* This trope is the eventual fate of almost any game released for a handheld system that is primarily released through a major console. Handhelds typically have greatly reduced processing power and storage space, making AdaptationDistillation and Compressed Adaptation necessary. Over the course of time, it's more bearable as handhelds become more powerful and/or developers tailor specifically to them. For example, ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'' was originally a UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 game, but ported identically to the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS.

* ''VideoGame/{{Miner 2049er}}'' for the UsefulNotes/Atari2600 had cut out seven of the original Atari 8-bit computer version's ten screens from its release due to the limited memory of the Atari 2600, resulting in a Part 2 release featuring three other screens.
* The UsefulNotes/{{iOS|Games}} port of ''VisualNovel/NineHoursNinePersonsNineDoors'' takes out all of the puzzle portions, leaving a pure visual novel where the only choices are the ones that cause route branching and everything else that previously had a choice is locked to one of them. On the other hand, [[AdaptationExpansion there's a new bad ending]] that "rewards" you for making the biggest ViolationOfCommonSense at the second branch by ending your game before you ever reach the third.

* Creator/DavidLynch's ''Film/Dune1984''. It follows the plot of the book reasonably closely, but compresses two-thirds of a [[DoorStopper long novel]] into half an hour. The [[Film/Dune2021 2021]]-[[Film/DunePartTwo 2023]] film adaptation went the DividedForAdaptation route to avoid this issue.

* Being a half-hour program, and a family-oriented one at that, the various works adapted on ''Series/{{Wishbone}}'' are compressed both for time and content. But as they take things out, but never add anything in, they still remain among the more faithful adaptations you'll find anywhere.
* Par for the course in ''Franchise/PowerRangers'', as most of the seasons have a different episode count than their Sentai counterpart. (For example, most Sentai ran up to about 50 episodes while Power Rangers managed to hit an average of 32-45.) However it [[ExaggeratedTrope takes the cake]] with ''Series/PowerRangersMegaforce''. How? It took two [[Series/TensouSentaiGoseiger different]] [[Series/KaizokuSentaiGokaiger seasons]] and spread the footage out through forty episodes, with half of them being of one season and another half being of another season. As if they couldn't exaggerate it enough, they managed to compress the adaptation ''within'' the adaptation as they take six episodes from the former season and cram them all into ''two episodes''.
** Sister show ''Series/VRTroopers'' is somewhat similar to ''Megaforce'', in that they were adapting more than one show that had little to no connections to each other -- in this case, the ''Series/MetalHeroes'' series ''Series/ChoujinkiMetalder'' (39 episodes), ''Series/JikuuSenshiSpielban'' (44 episodes) and ''Series/SpaceSheriffShaider'' (49 episodes). Season one, which adapted ''Metalder'' and ''Spielban'', got 52 episodes, and season two (which replaced the ''Metalder'' footage with ''Shaider'') had 40; overall, it's 92 total episodes to 132 (if all three source shows are tallied together).

* ''Series/GameOfThrones'' is an unusual example. An adaptation of the still ongoing ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' series, which had five books released at the start of the show. The approach taken by the show was One Book per season and the first four seasons were highly faithful to Books 1-3, with Season 3 and 4 being an adaptation of the very long ''Literature/AStormOfSwords'', leading one to assume that the fifth and sixth seasons would continue in the same vein. Instead, from the fifth season, the show became looser in its approach to the material, since the plan was to finish the show in seven seasons (and ended up with eight seasons). This led to drastic changes and reconfiguring of plot and character arcs to suit the show, and in a sense ended up becoming a case of [[OvertookTheManga Overtook The Source Material]] due to the last couple of novels being unreleased as of the end of the show.
* ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'' compresses the timeline of events that took place over the course of centuries in ''The Silmarillion'' into the span of less than a year, to avoid having to recast the human characters every few episodes. Two significant events exemplify the show's compressed timeline; in the books, the forging of the rings happens roughly 1500 years before Isildur's birth, while in the series Isildur predates the rings.
* Two ''Series/{{Monk}}'' episodes were adapted from tie-in novels. Season 5's "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing" was an adaptation of ''Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse'', and borrowed only the base of the murder solution. Season 8's "Mr. Monk and the Badge" is a loose adaptation of the Golden Gate Strangler and Officer Milner plot thread from ''Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu''.
* The first season of ''WesternAnimation/WinxClub'' consists of 26 half-hour episodes, while ''Series/FateTheWinxSaga'' consists of only 6 one-hour episodes. Only major plot points like [[spoiler:Bloom uncovering her past]] were kept, while less plot-relevant adventures were liberally cut loose.

* Considering how long [[Manga/OnePiece the manga]] is, it was inevitable that ''Series/OnePiece2023'' was going to be this. The 8 episodes of the show's first season, which serve as an adaptation of the East Blue saga, adapt the first 95 chapters of the manga.

** The entire ''ComicBook/AgeOfApocalypse'' AlternateUniverse. The plot revolves around Bishop, Shard, and an alternate Storm and Wolverine trying to put history back on track with only a small amount of time spent on the Professor X-less MarvelUniverse.

* The miniseries of ''Series/TheStand'' wasn't as compressed as one might expect of a 900+ page book, but the Boulder section and Stu and Tom's journey home suffered it. The Boulder stuff was justified, as even King thought it got a bit boring before the bomb incident and he wrote that part to kick start more action.

* ''Hakyu Hoshin Engi'' is a 23-episode adaptation of the 23-'''volume''' ''Manga/{{Soul Hunter}}'' manga. As such, in the attempt to cram an entire volume's worth of content into a single episode, many plot elements are cut or simplified. Unfortunately, the end result still ended up being a poorly paced mess that left newcomers confused and hardcore fans disappointed.

* Inevitably all of [[Creator/WillamShakespeare William Shakespeare's]] history plays use this approach, as they have to show events that in reality spanned years or even ''decades'' in the space of a few hours. It does sometimes get a bit ridiculous, though; ''Theatre/HenryVIPart2'' has Richard of Gloucester killing the Duke of Somerset in a battle at St Albans, when the real Richard was barely ''three'' years old at the time of the real battle.