Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
I don't see any Stars and they sure aren't Trekkin.
"The only thing Out Of Africa owed to the book was an apology."
— Barry Norman
The gradual distortion or even disintegration of a world and its characters during its odyssey from original source material to movie to TV movie then to television series then to video game and finally to licensed derivative work. The dramatic equivalent of photocopying a photocopy of a photocopy.
Every step away from the original property involves new input from multiple directions which dilutes and changes the flavor and behavior of the story. When handled well, Adaptation Decay can be minimized, and each generation of the process will remain reasonably faithful to the original. Handled poorly, and the TV series version of a favorite novel will look like a completely different product that just happens to have some of the same names, and subproducts on the "lower" levels may not even have that much resemblance.
Decay is inherent — practically expected — in adaptations between print and other media. Because visual works are typically limited in the amount of runtime, there are many decisions that have to be made about what to cut, and how best to condense what's remaining, that hopefully preserves some semblance to the original work. While it's perfectly possible to squeeze thirty pages of material into a few seconds of video, the audience of a visual work doesn't have the same ability to scrutinize details that their fellow readers had. All it takes is one clumsy decision to remove something that appears to be disposable, yet was integral to the story, for an adaptation to fail in many eyes.
Because of its tendency towards using poorly coordinated pools of writers, its need to economize on sets and locations, the interference of know-nothing network executives determined to get their two cents' worth in, and the limitations of the medium in general, television is particularly prone to egregious Adaptation Decay. One specific type would be the frequent act of relocating a story to the Los Angeles area from wherever else in the United States World it was originally set, simply to make it a bit cheaper to film, regardless of whether or not the local flavor is a vital part of the story.
Another form of Adaptation Decay comes when alterations are made to a story to give it more resemblance to a recent success (which itself might have been an adaptation), a specific form of Follow The Leader that can involve Plot Tumors. As many have commented, the climactic battle in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is relegated to a few paragraphs, since the focus characters were elsewhere at the time, but the movie decides to show it, a choice likely inspired by The Lord Of The Rings' then-recent film adaptation. Western animated features are full of this sort of thinking when it comes to adaptations, as you'll see below (especially sidekicks).
Other typical effects of Adaptation Decay include:
Anime frequently suffer some degree of Adaptation Decay, since many series are based on either manga or video games, which are subject to less censorship than TV shows. One of the most obvious effects is the reduction of explicit sexual acts from a dating sim to mere fanservice in the anime; a very understandable change. However, more egregious examples include dropping or adding characters (both of which happened to Excel Saga) and changing characters' hair colors to allegedly make them more distinguishable ( Mahou Sensei Negima, Ranma 1/2, Revolutionary Girl Utena).
Additionally, when an anime series is brought to the United States, it may suffer further decay if it is being translated with an eye toward broadcast markets — Japanese character names will be replaced with Western ones, dialogue may be arbitrarily changed or censored, and entire plotlines may be removed. See Sailor Moon and Yu-Gi-Oh for two of the more prominent examples. Very few American anime license holders "Americanize" their shows in this way these days, however. (With the prominent exception of shows like Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh, that are designed primarily to market toys to little kids.)
Sometimes, Adaptation Decay can result in a product that's good in its own right but has little to do with the original source from which it was adapted. (See also Woolseyism.) In fact, many iconic film works are a product of Adaptation Decay from the original literature source. If an attempt is then made to move it closer to the original material, it will usually get grief from fans of the new version, who liked it the way it was, and fans of the old version, who don't think the changes are enough.
Tropes
Distantly related to Sequelitis.
Examples
open/close all folders
- Beowulf has been put to film a number of times as well made films that follow the source fairly well. Then, there's the 1999 film featuring Christopher Lambert. It also featured horrible dialog, bad acting, cheesy effects, bad swordplay, out-of-place music and more flips and handsprings than the average kung fu B-movie or the average movie about gymnasts. Or, for that matter, the average kung fu B-movie about gymnasts.
- Cyborg was an early-1970s novel by Martin Caidin featuring a foul-mouthed, promiscuous ex-military test pilot named Steve Austin, who after a disastrous accident was given beyond-bleeding-edge prosthetics. He could not run faster than a normal human, nor could he lift cars (although his grip strength was phenomenal), but he had incredible endurance. His replacement eye granted no sight but instead held a film camera, making him a perfect intelligence agent. Cyborg was adapted into a TV movie and called The Six Million Dollar Man. Raunchy and irreverent Austin got a personality transplant and was deliberately turned into a "James Bond" type. Instead of the relatively "realistic" traits from the book, his bionic parts now turned him into a low-level superman. When the TV movie turned into a series, he underwent another personality transplant (into a soft-spoken boy scout type) and the power level of the bionics was upped again.
- With The Moomins, this worked. The books changed entirely over the course of the series, becoming serious and even a little meaningful.
- The David Morrell novel First Blood getting turned into the Rambo series. In the original novel The Sheriff actually treated Rambo pretty decently. Everything about his detention is pretty standard and by the book. Unfortunately Rambo's mental stability is much worse, so he still ends up Going Postal. The novel's body count reflects a far less optimistic view of what happens when a Green Beret loses it. The closest thing to an accidental death is when Rambo disembowels a deputy who was trying to give him a hair cut.
- With the exception of The Hunt For Red October, which featured minimal changes to the plot and even won an Academy Award when first released, movies adapted from Tom Clancy's far more plot- and nuance-heavy offerings tended to correspondingly have more and greater cuts and alterations, particularly Clear and Present Danger.
- The novel Watership Down was an award-winning allegory about society, war, politics, religion, and interpersonal relationships, all told through the adventures of a warren of rabbits. An animated film was made of the book which, while shortened and simplified, still managed to capture much of its themes. An animated series made in 1999 radically changed the characters, situations, and even the look of the animated feature. The series not only managed to totally destroy the dramatic and moral qualities of the original work, but even in some cases actively subverted them.
- An example of long-term multi-source Adaptation Decay is the Flanderization of Doctor Watson in adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the stories, Watson lacks Holmes's gift for deduction, but is both a competent and well-educated medical doctor, and a stalwart man of action. He is, in fact, explicitly more knowledgeable than Holmes on various subjects that failed to pique the detective's interest, such as astronomy and literature. Largely as a result of Nigel Bruce's film performances, Watson's popular portrayals generally tended toward bumbling and moronic — such as in a Holmes-themed Something Completely Different episode of Alvin And The Chipmunks, where Simon (as Holmes) claims that he is only able to come up with the right answers because Theodore (as Watson) exhausts all the incorrect possibilities. When Watson is portrayed as a more competent character, there is usually some other motivation at work, as in the later episodes of the Jeremy Brett series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where Watson was given many scenes originally written for Holmes, to cover Brett's illness. Also in the recent PBS Hound of the Baskervilles, where Watson was used as a foil for Holmes's drug-addled and bipolar character. And, of course, the film Without A Clue, which proposed that Watson was the real brains all along, with Holmes as a sort of Remington Steele character.
- The Bruce performances also created the trope of the much-older Watson and, eventually, of the much-older Holmes. When they first met, Watson would have been approximately 32 years old, Holmes 28 (give or take a few years). Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, who play Holmes and Watson in the 2009 movie, have been called "too young" to play the characters by critics when in fact Downey is approximately 15 years older than the character he portrays.
- Barry Levinson's film Young Sherlock Holmes is a baaaad example of this: The film explores the question what would have happened, had Holmes and Watson met as young teens. This could have turned out interesting, had the film not portrayed Holmes as a terribly arrogant Canon Stu who solves the case single-handedly and is already the hero of his school before the film starts! Watson, on the other hand, doesn't grasp a clue if Holmes bludgeons him over the head with it and is generally only there to cheer for Holmes and admire him. Needless to say, this Holmes immediately gets the girl; he loses her tragically, though, and afterwards stays away from women because he is faithful to her memory.
- Ian Fleming's James Bond novels have been adapted into movies that use nothing but the name of the book, changing the stories entirely. A prime example is The Spy Who Loved Me, which in the movie is an international adventure involving such wonders as submarines, whereas the book is about Bond trying to rescue a motel clerk from being burned alive in a motel arson by a couple of low level crooks. In that case, however, Ian Fleming (embarrassed by how the book had turned out) forced the decay, refusing to license the book's plot along with its title.
- The 1960s movie version of Casino Royale (not to be confused with the 2006 version) also retained very little of the novel, but since that film was designed as a silly comedy it probably shouldn't count.
- Bond's character, too, becomes more and more unrecognizable as the series progresses, becoming far more reliant on gadgets and abusing the Bond One Liner. Fans tend to cite Roger Moore's tenure as the lowest of the low points with the gadgets, the villains and the dialogue becoming gimmicky and corny. The Daniel Craig incarnation of Bond seems to have reversed some of that, being rougher and less device-addicted, but it remains to be seen whether this will tip the character into Darker And Edgier territory.
- A good example of unnecessary location-change would be the 1999 television movie The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax — for no apparent story reason, Mrs. Pollifax's home is relocated from the suburban house in New Brunswick, NJ she enjoys in the series of novels on which the film is based, to an apartment building in California.
- The recent film adaptation of The Dark Is Rising (renamed The Seeker for no good reason) is a good example of a particularly insulting variation on relocation. It does still take place in Great Britain, but now the hero is now an American boy who moves to England, thus nearly completely destroying the whole point of the series (at least they got the setting right).
- I Am Legend. Three times and counting. The most recent was originally the most faithful one (in that it kept the He Who Fights Monsters element), but a last-minute ending change removed the twist that was the entire point of both the novella and the movie.
- Note that while the first adaptation (The Last Man on Earth) kept the original ending, they completely ruined the point of it- like in the book, the hero discovers that the vampires have a drug which suppresses the effect, and the hero has been essentially killing innocent people, unlike the book, this is somehow NOT portrayed in a negative light, because apparently regardless of circumstances, vampires are just evil.
- The recent cinema movie based on Nancy Drew also relocated Drew to California. This was done deliberately to portray the rural, midwestern, 1940s Nancy Drew character as an anachronism.
- Disney is particularly infamous for its Adaptation Decay — compare and contrast, for example, the original book version of Mary Nort0on's Bed-knob and Broomstick (no plurals in the book title) with its mutant Disney offspring.
- Likewise, The Princess Diaries films seem to be unrelated to the Meg Cabot novels of the same name on which they are ostensibly based.
- Disney's Alice In Wonderland manages to both mangle and combine two different books into one huge mess. A huge mess which, unfortunately, is regarded as definitive canon by many people who haven't bothered to read the books.
- Sometimes Disney only continues an Adaptation Decay process which had already begun, as with Sleeping Beauty. In one of the several original tales that later merged into the modern ''Sleeping Beauty'', the Prince rapes the sleeping maiden and impregnates her without waking her. Nine months later she gives birth to twins; one, trying to nurse, sucks the poisoned splinter from her finger. She awakens, realizes what has happened, gathers up her children and goes off in search of their father. Meanwhile, the Prince has gone home to his wife...
- And the Disney list goes on. Especially egregious examples include The Jungle Book, which transformed Rudyard Kipling's rather savage Mowgli stories with rather racist under-tones into a cheerful musical with a skat-singing orangutan. They also turned Kaa into a villain—because, you know, Snakes Are Always Chaotic Evil, right? Oh, and in the movie he was a sniveling coward whereas in the books he's essentially a living force of nature that even Shere Khan and the elephants trod carefully around.
- And then there was Pocahontas , which completely rewrote the actual life story of a real historical figure to give her a romance that never occurred, a pack of Empathy Pets, and aging her up by about six years. And let's not get started on the talking tree.
- Hercules is even worse, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the original Greek myths. Honestly, if Hercules resembles anything, it's the first Superman film. Disney's reasoning is probably that Greek Mythology is in no way kid-friendly
- Pretty sure there weren't any smart-alecky gargoyle buddies in the original Hunchback Of Notre Dame, either. How Disney decided that famously dense, dark, moody novel — with a major Downer Ending — was even filmable as a kid's movie in the first place boggles the mind.
- Forgiving the dialect confusion within Mulan's name, the original poem mentions that she had siblings, joined the army with her parents' foreknowledge, and spent more than ten years in the army without anybody figuring it out (as opposed to the few weeks it took to thwart the Huns).
- Disney adapted Madeleine L'Engle's young adult novel A Ring of Endless Light, by dumbing down the plot (from Vicky's struggle with death and nihilism to a Save the Dolphins issue-of-the-week), losing the poetry and philosophical insights, and simplifying most of the characters, particularly Vicky, Adam and Zack.
- And what of Disney's
butchery adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time? L'Engle herself went on record shortly after it aired saying that it turned out exactly as she expected — horribly.
- One of the classic film examples outside of Disney is The Phantom Of The Opera. Only the original silent version is anything close to Gaston Leroux's novel; each subsequent Hollywood version lost more of the original and added further encrustations of fancy from scriptwriters who had never read the book. The most obvious of these is the transformation of the Phantom from a man with a birth defect/deformity — a skull-like face — to someone who got splashed with acid, and the subsequent change in Back Story manufactured out of whole cloth to account for it.
- The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (and the recent film thereof) attempts to be faithful to the novel — the libretto is clearly written by someone familiar with the book — but no one told either the Broadway or Hollywood makeup artists that the actual dialogue says "skull face" and not "acid burn" (or, in the case of the film, "mild sunburn"). A book about the making of the musical reveals the creators initially tried to imitate Lon Chaney's makeup from the original film, but discovered that it made Michael Crawford, the actor portraying the Phantom, completely unintelligible. The distinctive half-mask was developed in order to allow Crawford to sing.
- The ultimate decay, though, was an episode of The Real Ghostbusters which turned the Phantom into an actual non-corporeal, dead-and-gone, ghost, apparently on the ignorance-fueled assumption that if he's a "phantom" he can't be a living person. On the other hand, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made him into an alien...
- Even that, however, could be seen as preferable to the Julian Sands version. In this excuse for a movie, the Phantom is a far more handsome yet far more insane deviant who lives in the sewers, has sex with rats, dies at the end, and is revealed to the other characters by a person who is in no other adaptation: an exterminator who drives around the sewers in a Batmobile ripoff. Eek.
- One of the biggest difference between the novel and several subsequent adaptations is in tone — Leroux's book is written from the point of view of a police investigator and reads rather like a pulpy detective novel (unsurprisingly as that was his usual genre). Adaptations tend to play up the gothic romance/tragedy aspect.
- The 2002 movie version of The Time Machine manages to upend virtually every everything about H. G. Wells' work except the title. Changes to the Morlocks and the Eloi cause a complete breakdown of Wells' social satire, and the inclusion of not one, but two extraneous love-stories adds further obfuscation. Meanwhile, by making the Eloi masters of Bamboo Technology (as opposed to the frail and helpless creatures of Wells' book), the movie also undermines its own credibility — a strong, healthy and intelligent race would not be all that likely to accept the terrorism of the Morlocks without at least trying to build the occasional pit-trap or deadfall. And the movie was directed by Wells' great grandson!
- The 1939 film version of The Wizard Of Oz has been criticized by some for its considerable deviations from L. Frank Baum's 1900 book, most notably in making the whole story All Just A Dream (though for some reason, the originl script called for the camera to pan down and reveal Dorothy's slippers under the bed. This is overlooking the fact that the 1902 stage version, which was written by Baum himself, deviated even further from the book, up to reducing the Cowardly Lion to a bit part, the total absence of the Wicked Witch of the West, and writing Toto out of the story and replacing him with Imogene the Dancing Cow.
- Furthermore, the changes made in the 1939 film version have nothing on the previous '20s adaptations, which essentially took the first ten or so Oz books and threw them into a rotating fan. For all its faults, at least the 1939 version resembled its namesake...
- Readers of Oliver Twist, are often disappointed in the movie Oliver!, which cut out some of the best parts of the book, up to and including the book's mysterious main antagonist.
- Perhaps the biggest victim of adaptation decay is Bram Stoker's creation, Professor Abraham Van Helsing. In Dracula, Van Helsing was a former professor of Dr. Seward, who was called upon for his knowledge of foreign diseases. It is mere coincidence that, in his many years of study, he happened upon enough knowledge to recognize the patient as a vampire's victim. In Stoker's novel, he serves more as the professor than anything else. In nearly all later fiction, Van Helsing becomes at least a professional monster hunter, usually one known and feared by all things evil.
- One of the worst offenders would be the film Van Helsing, in which the titular character is a Victorian badass longcoat, who wields guns and a bizarre automatic crossbow against fellow adaptation decay victims Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula's brides, before turning into a werewolf to battle Dracula himself. (And it's awesome...).It also changed the character's first name from "Abraham" to "Gabriel", and proceeds to imply that he is the archangel of the same name; this was apparently because the original character is public domain, but a new character could be copyrighted.
- A related great example: Blade: Trinity claims that Professor Van Helsing doesn't exist, and that Dracula's only enemy has always been Blade. Not only did Van Helsing exist in the Marvel Universe comicbook (Tomb of Dracula) that introduced Blade, but his great-granddaughter was the primary protagonist (well, other than the title character).
- Roald Dahl's books tend to suffer through this. Arguably the most drastic cases are:
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (which was originally Charlie and...) which has a lot changes for both practical, monetary, and stylistic reasons — making Charlie's father dead, adding some painfully twee songs, and drastically altering the Oompa Loompas. Dahl was unhappy with the results, to say the least. The more recent adaption by Tim Burton, which retained the original name, was a good deal closer in feeling and in content, but still had its own differences — for example, Violet Beauregard became a smug overachiever, and Mike Teevee became a know-it-all obsessed with violent video games. Also, both movies were given a fair bit of Padding in the form of a new subplot (the Slugworth dupe in WWatCF, Wonka's backstory in CatCF).
- Keep in mind, Raold Dahl wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film.
- The changes in the new movie were mostly to update the content to the modern day, though; in the original, Violet is just a gum chewer, and Mike Teevee was a kid addicted to cowboy shows and movies, both of which would be rather anachronistic (chewing gum is hardly in and of itself a huge issue, and Westerns haven't really been in style since the 70s).
- The Witches, especially the ending. The difference between the two endings is downright bipolar... Dahl allegedly hated the happy ending of the film so much that he stood outside cinemas with a megaphone telling people not to watch.
- The book of Matilda was surprisingly dark, whereas the movie tended to gloss over all of that. Pity, considering that Danny DeVito's not known as the sunniest director. It also suffered from extreme Americanitis, altered Matilda's brother from being dim-witted but nice into a sadistic brat, changed the source and nature of Matilda's powers and let her keep them (completely missing the point of them in the book), and also added an entirely unnecessary segment in which Matilda raided the Trunchbull's house. On the plus side, Pam Ferris is The Trunchbull personified.
- Dune has yet to see a faithful adaption to film:
- The 1984 film contains a star-studded cast of thousands running around Mexico wearing confusing and bizarre costumes and leaving out important plot points. (Incidentally, this is not all David Lynch's fault; weird as he is, the producers cut the film (and his original script) heavily.) Fans complained about it heavily, although a rare few consider it enjoyable for different reasons.
- In the 2000 miniseries, Paul became a whiny teenager. Although it was closer to the original novel, it updated a lot of the dialogue. It was shot for $1 million in Prague, and it's fairly obvious: every desert set has a painted backdrop, most of the Fremen are white guys with Czech accents and the sandworms look horrible. It was followed by an adaptation of the next two novels that was better received.
- There's actually a new movie by Peter Berg being made. There's no details on it yet, though.
- Stephen King's books suffer this fate frequently. There have been a few good adaptations (Misery, Pet Sematary) and some OK-but-not spectacular ones (Needful Things, The Dark Half), but some have been utter atrocities (Christine). Needless to say, different King readers have different opinions about the various adaptations — The Shining splits opinions heavily, some seeing it as a horrible travesty, others as a good movie but a poor adaptation. (Of course, assessment of The Shining also depends on which version is being discussed: the Stanley Kubrick feature starring Jack Nicholson, or the mini-series starring Steven Weber.)
- The movie The Running Man is Adaptation Decay writ large — most of the original book seems to be decayed away, leaving only the name of the hero, the last name of the Big Bad (his first name is changed from Dan to Damon for some reason), and the name of the show they appear on.
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was a novel about the progress of science in the face of the truly alien, with romantic and psychological sub-plots around that theme. The 1970s film adaptation was lamented by the author as "Crime and Punishment in space", and the 2000s version was essentially a love story. Not that there's anything wrong with Crime and Punishment, of course: the 70s version of Solaris is considered a classic, proving that Adaptation Decay can be a constructive process.
- The short-lived Dresden Files TV series had many changes from its source material. One example was having Dresden sleep with a Red Court vampire. In the books, the Red Court vampires are slimy bat-like creatures that would enslave any human that slept with them. The author himself has explicitly stated that the series was its own 'verse, and not supposed to adhere to the book canon. He never expected nor wanted it match the book canon. He knows better. Strictly speaking, the series is inspired by the books, more than adapting from them. Other than the Pilot, which was loosely based on the first Dresden novel, everything else was original to the series.
- The 1954 animated movie of Animal Farm features an ending where the animals rebel against the pigs, completely subverting the original point of Orwell's novel; reportedly, his widow was enraged by the change. Of course, since the film was covertly funded by the CIA, odds are good that this was a deliberate but poorly executed piece of propaganda.
- Another, more minor but still annoying, point is the poultry's worries about the "four legs good, two legs bad" dictate. In the book, their concern is assuaded by a concise, clear, and well-thought-out diatribe from Snowball explaining that wings are used for locomotion and balance, but not fine manipulation, and therefore, for the purposes of the article of the animal Constitution, wings are to be classified as legs so as to allow the chickens to be a part of society without breaking rules. This translates, in the animated version, into a stupid grin, an equally stupid flapping of the trotters, and a slightly throaty voice (presumably the pig's, but no one's mouth moves) saying, "Wings count as legs!"
- The 1999 live action movie version also features an alternate ending, where several animals escape the farm and return years later to find it a shambles. Rather than propaganda, though, this seems to be a reference to Russia's state after the fall of Communism. The live action version is still arguably Adaptation Decay: It removed most of the historical allegories (the Battle of the Windmill being replaced by Farmer Jones blowing it up out of spite, for example); spent a good twenty minutes on ballads, one of which took up two lines in the book and one which didn't exist; and made the story almost laughable. This editor switches between remembering the hilariously bad attempts at drama and its cringe-worthy changes to the story.
- The movie version of Eragon — hated by both fans of the book and people who had never read it. There are just so many screw-ups that it is hard to imagine that the writers read anything more than the inside cover. Including:
- Within the first five minutes the narrator reveals that Arya is the elven princess, a detail that is withheld from readers until more than halfway into the second book.
- Roran's absence in the beginning of the story is explained by him joining the Empire's army...even though it is established that everybody in the village hates the Empire, and getting into the second book the entire village, led by Roran himself, fights back and flees to the rebel army. Yeah, have fun trying to get out of that plothole.
- The Shade, described in the book as a slender, handsome man, in the movie becomes a hideous old guy who for no apparent reason summons a dark mist dragon-thing to ride on and battle Eragon in the movie's climactic moment.
- The witch Angela is stripped of all her character and sideplots and is reduced to a two minute fortune-teller scene.
- Farthen Dur is supposed to be a marble tower inside of a giant mountain crater; let's just make it a couple of caves set in a canyon.
- Dragons are basily slaves (well even more so than the book), if the raider is killed the dragon dies, if the dragons dies the raiders doesn't (in the book there's a 50:50 chance that one will die if the other dies)
- The Urgals, who in the book were 8-foot-tall horned humanoid monsters, bald stuntmen with black makeup in the movie. And if you hadn't read the books, you wouldn't know from the movie that there were even supposed to be different races: the Elves and Dwarves as well as the Urgals are only distinguishable from the humans by their makeup. That they even existed was only mentioned very briefly. They Just Didnt Care, indeed — surprising for an adaptation of a book series so popular and still unfinished.
- Howl's Moving Castle: In the novel by Diana Wynne Jones, Old Sophie is a much stronger character, Howl is a drama queen, womanizer, and coward/pragmatist (as well as Welsh), Michael is a teenager in love with one of Sophie's sisters, Suliman is a man and is not the Big Bad, and the Witch of the Waste is the Big Bad. In the Studio Ghibli production, Sophie is fairly bland, Howl shows little emotion (in fact, the only scene where he seems the same is when he accidentally dyes his hair red), is a pacifist, and turns into a bird, Michael is a child (and renamed to Markle for no reason, even in the English dub), Suliman is a composite of the Witch, Suliman, and Howl's old teacher, and the Witch is quickly defeated by Suliman and taken home by Sophie to become a nuisance. The novel was light-hearted, whereas the film sends a strong environmentalist and anti-war message. The novel ends with Sophie becoming young again just before the ending, after the defeat of the Witch; in the movie, she gradually becomes younger and younger, although she keeps her grey hair. This doesn't necessarily make the movie bad, just letting you know what you're getting into if you're a fan of the book.
- Additionally, in the movie, Howl is accepted as a natural inhabitant of a magical world. The book tells quite a different story... In truth, he came from our world and goes back and forth between the two on a regular basis.
- The actor who voices Howl (Christian Bale) in the English dub is Welsh, but he uses both his "American" voice and his normal accent in the film. In the breakfast scene, his American accent is notable, but in the Sky Stroll scene, it's his normal voice. Since the movie was released at the same time of Batman Begins, he was probably doing both simutaneously and kept mixing up the voices.
- This one goes back at least as far as Uncle Tom's Cabin. There's a story about how Harriet Beecher Stowe went to a stage performance of her work, and had to have the plot explained to her.
- Though long-winded, this article
 tells about the massive decay the novel The Children of Men went through in its transition to the silver screen. Especially jarring was the transition of Theo Farron from an old, timid man to a muscled Action Hero played by Clive Owen. A very disturbing change was the complete removal of the character of the creepily titled "Warden of England", who served as the novel's primary antagonist.
- The film version of The Golden Compass (a.k.a. Northern Lights) by Philip Pullman has so much of this, it sits happily in They Just Didnt Care territory.
- The central conflict has been significantly trimmed and simplified. In the film, the Magisterium have to take the blame for ill-doings they weren't responsible for in the book; at the same time, the fact that they represent religion, perhaps the most significant theme in the novel, has been toned down almost to nothing.
- Also, the opening sequence consists almost entirely of spoilers for the third book and Anvilicious explanations of the book's elegantly unexplained metaphors.
- They switched the attack on Bolvangar and the Svalbard incident thus creating a whole new plothole.
- The portrayal of the Tatars as... Cossacks? Tatars are Turco-Mongol badass nomads, not high hat wearing Russians! Not to mention having a obviously Norse inspired warrior bear voiced by Gandalf was odd.
- And let's not forget how The Lord Of The Rings fared. Many fans of the original Door Stopper were scared of what Peter Jackson would do, especially based on Ralph Bakshi's halfway (literally!) animated attempt. Long lists have been made of what went wrong in that one. Long lists. Fans are divided on whether the movies are Adaptation Distillation or Adaptation Decay.
- There's also the (much earlier) made-for-TV animated movie adaptation of LotR's predecessor The Hobbit. Surprisingly, the Decay was again fairly minor, especially considering the novel ends with a massive and extremely bloody battle. Unfortunately, this cannot be said in regards to the same company's stab at a Return of the King cartoon.
- In a case of Adaptation Decay in waiting, Guillermo del Toro will be directing not one, but two movies called The Hobbit. Rather than splitting the book into two parts, it has been reported that the first film will be The Hobbit in its entirety, and the second will be an entirely new story written to bridge The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Tycho Brahe's reaction to this new can be found here.
- The 2003 adaption of Gail Carson Levine's book Ella Enchanted is almost universally loathed by fans of the novel for its many unnecessary changes to the original work. Most of the original plot was cut out, and only the story's main plot point- that Ella had an obedience spell cast on her as a baby- was kept. Add to that an anachronistic soundtrack, Flanderization (Lucinda was foolish in the book, but the movie turned her into a ditzy, empty-headed soul sister), and the excision of some important characters, and you have one very unhappy fan base.
- The movie adaptation of Steven Gould's Jumper was so decayed that when the author wrote Jumper: Griffin's Story, he had to preface it with a disclaimer that it followed the continuity of the movie and not his previous two books.
- The TV version of Jacqueline Wilson's Girls In Love series was criticized by fans for turning the protagonist from a shy, dumpy, awkward girl with weight issues into a thin, pretty and confident Libby. The actual Libby from the books became a wise-cracking Token Black Girl.
- The recent miniseries of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain also suffers from this, in which it greatly diverges from the novel (which tended to stay within realism) and added far out concepts of wormholes, time travel, and thinking viruses into the mix. It also added a heavy-handed, preachy environmentalist subplot in the story, to the point that it could be considered the root cause of the events. The whole decay happened because if the adaption went literally by the book, it'd be more like a fictional documentary; the book spends more time explaining the decontamination process and science-wanking than it does discussing any dramatic events, unlike Crichton's other books.
- The environmentalist subtext came off more as a Take That against Michael Crichton to me, since he was notorious for using bad science and just plain false data to crusade against global warming.
- In the 1930s there were two film adaptations made of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. Both were egregious examples of Adaptation Decay. The first film made Bertie Wooster into some kind of millionaire playboy and made Jeeves, a perfect Deadpan Snarker with a penchant for Xanatos Gambits, into a very vocal individual who complains a lot. And, adding further insult to injury, changed the plot from a funny hijinx featuring dozens of would-be lovers into a 'comedic' spy story. The sequel didn't even have Bertie in it at all, and just featured Jeeves being involved in a con artist's scheme in America. The film's credits state the Wodehouse was involved in the production, but seeing as it had none of his signature sense of humour or style, one suspects that it was a horrible case of They Just Didnt Care. Thankfully, the early '90s Jeeves And Wooster TV series more than made up for that travesty.
- A case of Older Than Feudalism, for the Greek myth of Medea. In the famous play by ancient Greek playwright Euripides Medea, she is portrayed as killing her two sons by Jason, for revenge for him scorning her to marry another woman. In the older myths of Medea she herself did not kill her children, they were killed by other people or gods. In many textbooks you will find that the only version told of Medea's story is that of Euripides play.
- This is debated within the Jane Austen fanbase, but the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice is widely considered as a prime example of Adaptation Decay:
- Darcy is no longer proud (as he openly admits at the end of the novel), he's just shy! Lizzy even says, "He is not proud! I was wrong." This totally negates the whole point of the book (Lizzy learning not to judge people based on first impressions, Darcy learning to change his character and not be so stuck-up). Then there was the Brontë-esque ending: Darcy striding across the moors at dawn with his shirt billowing open, to declare, "You have bewitched me, body and soul! I love love love love you!" Not to mention the execrable American ending...
- The worst change is the confrontation between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth. In the book, Elizabeth confidently and awesomely defends herself in Tranquil Fury, obviously not feeling Lady Catherine's attacks on her are valid at all. The actual dialogue in the movie is more or less the same, but Elizabeth's attitude is completely different. She's crying her eyes out and runs to her room afterwards in tears like an embarrassed little girl. What have you done to my heroine?!
- The 1997 adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring Ciaran Hinds (in a hilarious Large Ham performance) and Samantha Morton. Rochester is turned into a raving maniac who bellows lustfully at Jane ("I need you, Jane! You want me! I can feel your passions are aroused! Say you want me! SAY IT!!") and throws a childish fit when she leaves him.
- Arthur in the 2005 TV adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays. His near-death is a big moment in the book, and is the start of Tom following his influence and advice throughout the rest of the book. In the film? He dies. There doesn't even seem to be a reason for this; no additional message or emphasis added. He just doesn't survive.
- The movie of David Brin's The Postman spins a completely different tale based on the setting and first 20 pages of the novel. Surprisingly, the author likes the movie, mainly because the first draft was so much worse.
- Robin Hood has somehow become a "champion of the poor" who "stole from the rich to give to the poor" during the 18-19th century... except that in the original tales what Robin Hood "stole" rightfully belonged the citizens of Nottinghamshire in the first place — his primary claim to fame was that he did it with style (not unlike many other highwaymen and brigands who entered popular folklore).
- The Harry Potter movies. Even the better ones lose a lot in their adaptations. The subplots suffer the most from this. Really if the screenwriters won't explain the subplots, it would be better not to bring them up at all, for the sake of not confusing the (admittedly, like, three) people in the audience who haven't read the books. Perhaps the most telling note that your movie franchise has an Adaptation Decay problem: when MAD Magazine's movie parody has a panel referring to something that didn't even happen in the movie, only in the book. And this was Philosopher's Stone that this happened with — one of the Chris Columbus ones, which were generally regarded as sticking the closest to the novels. Also, the sixth film deserves a special mention here since it was rated PG even though the content in the book would merit an R rating. Perhaps the screenwriter wanted to avoid the dreaded R rating?
- Let's not forget about the utterly pointless (and unfunny if you're over the age of 11) "Mc Gonagall teaching the kiddies to dance" scene from the fourth film.
- How about the fact that Grawp is shoehorned into the fifth film, with no reference whatsoever for non-readers that Hagrid is half-giant (as it wasn't even remotely remarked upon in the fourth movie)?
- Enemy Mine changed the ending of the original novella from its ultimately happy but somewhat darker ending to a feel-good Happily Ever After. This also destroyed the entire point of the original ending, about the hostilities that remain between cultures that have been at war and are now at peace, and about the obstacle sheer blind racism presents. For those who are curious, but can't or don't want to read it, in the original novella the human lead character, once the war is over, heads to the home planet of the alien race to meet the alien child he raised... only to discover he's been imprisoned as a madman. This and earlier experiences on the planet making him realize just how far from true reconciliation the two races are, he takes the child and returns the the planet he was stranded on, converting it into a colony for those among the two races who are willing to put aside their differences and work together.
- The 1984 remake of A Streetcar Named Desire.
- Cadfael, adapted from books to TV, suffered from this severely after Author Existence Failure. In Saint Peter's Fair, for example, Emma's character was derailed and her Crowning Moment Of Awesome taken away.
- Johnny Mnemonic decayed from a cool William Gibson short story to a great big pile of offal, with stops for Character Derailment, Chickification and Missed Moments Of Awesome along the way. Some blame Executive Meddling.
- Nearly all of Agatha Christie's books have faced this at one point or another. For instance, the new TV series based on her Miss Marple books is now infamous for either keeping the story faithful until the final ten minutes, placing Miss Marple in stories she wasn't in originally, and in the most extreme cases, changing the entire story except for the title. There are a few exceptions, but the series is more remembered for the unfaithful adaptations than the faithful ones. And don't even get me started on And Then There Were None. Or Miss Marple's reminiscences of a wartime affair with a married man.
- Neither Cobra (starring Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen.) or Fair Game (starring Cindy Crawford and William Baldwin) bear any resemblance to the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling, except in its basic premise (a woman witnesses a crime without realising it, and so is chased by killers).
- Legend Of The Seeker has been seen as this by some, while others think it's a fine series on its own, even if it doesn't follow the book's plot to the letter. Most notably, the Mud People haven't shown up, despite being both important and recurring in the books, Michael's actually less of a dick (he's misled rather than being an outright traitor), Giller is more of one, and some of the character relationships have been changed (Rachel, for instance, is not adopted by Chase).
- The Mud People are unlikely to show up, and if they do unlikely to be called "Mud People," since "Mud People" is an extremely offensive term used by white supremacists to describe people of color, and the Mud People in the book are presented as being culturally like certain tribes of Africans (except no mention is made of their skin color).
- Having read the first book, I think a strong argument can be made that the series is a VAST improvement over the hackneyed and frankly bizarre "characterizations" of the author. It really is a craptacular book.
- True Blood took an awesome, unique series of books with strong mystery plots and very little sex and turned it into a 60-minute ode to porn-level sex, gratuitous drug use, tons of totally unnecessary foul language, severe Character Derailment and some of the worst stereotypes of Southern life. The parts that focused on Sookie, Bill, Sam, and Gran were good (mainly because of the quality of the actors).
- Gullivers Travels contains quite a few voyages in it; besides going to the miniscule Lilliput, Gulliver also voyages to: Brobdingnag, the land of giants; Laputa, a Floating Continent inhabited by straw physicists and philosophers; Glubbdubdrib, inhabited by good-aligned necromantics; Balnibarbi, where people misuse science in idiotic ways; and the country of the Houyhnhnms, where horses are sentient and mankind, called "Yahoos" (thus coining the term), are the animals. Few films or plays bother to go beyond Lilliput.
- Shrek kept an ugly green ogre from its original source material, but that's about it. Sure, there's a donkey, a dragon, and a princess (although the book one happens to be an uglier-than-Shrek ogre princess), but they get very little coverage in the book. Gone are Shrek's parents, to replaced by a fairy-tale character roll call and a straightforward story.
- The Inspector Lynley Mysteries made by the BBC don't have a great deal in common with the Elizabeth George novels on which they're based. Lynley and Havers bear little resemblance to the characters in the books, and Helen Clyde is a completely different character.
- The film version of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose drops most of the philosophical content to focus on the murder mystery (a Pragmatic Adaptation, as the novel is very dense), and also tacks on a happy outcome where the girl is saved and the ruthless Inquisitor gets a Karmic Death.
- In the film version of Blood and Chocolate, the script writers threw out almost everything exept the names and the werewolves. The setting is different, the main conflict is different, and the message was completely reversed.
- Les Miserables, having been, perhaps, adapted more often than any other work of literature, and also being quite long and densely written, runs into this quite regularly:
- The 1935 American film version, particularly in the way the revolutionaries are treated. Marius is the leader. Eponine his secretary. Enjolras is an evil Commie who sways the students away from Marius, who had apparently organized a peaceful protest. No Gavroche and no Thenardiers after the inn.
- The 1952 Italian version. No Gavroche. No cart scene; Valjean isn't even HINTED to be strong until near the end. Speaking of Valjean, he survives being shot in the back. Twice. Gillenormand is the Minister of police and is Marius's dad.
- The 1952 American version. No Eponine. No Enjolras. No Thenardiers period, not even at the inn. Valjean has an annoying sidekick. Contains anachronistic French translations of Shakespeare.
- Just don't bring up the 1998 movie. Ever.
- And then there's this.
- A good test to see if a Wuthering Heights adaptation is decay or not is the age of Heathcliff and Cathy before the latter dies. They're supposed to be in their teenage years (Cathy dies at eighteen), but adaptations invariably shift their ages into the early twenties.
- Apparently, the people who made the movie The Power of One saw the book title and guessed what the book was about. Oh, and they peeked inside to grab a couple character names. It's possible they never even bought a copy of the book.
- Gossip Girl. Oh, Gossip Girl. I don't even know where to start. The books were a funny, well-written, scathing indictment of New York society brats, showing very plainly that though these kids had it all, they were empty. There were complex, believable characters, and a variety of those. The show stripped away all the deconstructionist elements of the books, and it became "Oohhh look at our pretty people aren't their glam rich lives simply fabulous." The casting was also spectacularly bad in some cases — while Leighton Meester was pitch-perfect as Bitchy Blair, they ruined the character of Jenny completely. In the book, she was a shy, buxom, short, curly-haired brunette artist who feared she would never be like her tall, skinny blonde idol Serena. They cast tall, skinny, blonde Taylor Momsen to play her, and changed her from a talented aspiring artist to a wannabe fashion designer. I was glad I stopped watching before I had to suffer their genericizing of fiercely independent shaven-headed filmmaker Vanessa into a trite CW teen show "rebel". I want so badly to hand the books to the TV series fans, but I'm afraid that they would completely miss the point.
- The movie version of Stuart Little not only changes the title character's origin but completely discards the book's plot.
- The movie version of Coraline was faithful to the events of the book, but drastically changed most of the significance of the major characters (in addition to hamfisted Americanitis). Coraline went from a sensitive, lonely girl with overworked parents to a sassy, plucky girl with a neglectful father and an emotionally abusive mother. The Beldam in the movie is treated as a singular entity; in the book, one of her victims is a pixie, suggesting that the Other Mother's realm is not the only one out there. Further, the pixie in the movie is changed to a little girl who went missing, tying into the backstory of movie-only character Wybie. Wybie himself primarily exists to rescue Coraline from several situations that she was able to save herself from in the book; in particular, the scene with the Hand of the Beldam. In the book, Coraline specifically lures it to the well to trap it, and does so on her own. In the movie, she is helpless to defend herself, and Wybie comes in the nick of time to save her. Mr. Bobinsky is also radically different, and the movie completely omits the singing rats' creepy rhyme.
- The movie of The English Patient, for some, in that it focused mainly on the affair between Almasy and Katharine Clifton to the expense (somewhat necessarily) of the book's sprawling backstories. Consequently blamed for the Misaimed Fandom of that affair.
- An Animated Adaptation of Louis Sacher's Wayside School is so different from the books that it has been accused of being In Name Only. There are several familiar elements (the thirty story height, the missing nineteenth story, the cows, Todd being sent home Once An Episode, Myron's desite to be class president, etc.) but several changes. The rather large cast is focused on just four, excusable in that the same cast from the books would have cramped things. The three Erics no longer have their individual quips or their ironic nicknames. Sammy gets a much larger role, despite only showing up in one chapter in the first book. Ms. Mush is a Funny Foreigner. Principal Kidswatter, Mrs. Jewels, and Myron become Cloudcuckoolanders. From what This Troper remembers, only two episodes adapted stories from the books: Mrs. Gorf and Pull My Pigtail, and even then they change a number of things.
- How on earthsea has Tales From Earthsea not been mentioned? It's practically Earthsea In Name Only considering how little it has to do with any of Ursula Le Guin's books. Apparently she actually didn't think so hot of it.
- Similarly, Howls Moving Castle was also given similar treatment even if Diana Wynne Jones had said in an interview she was expecting it to be different.
- Subverted for any adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because it was intended To be different. Surprisingly most people can't just get this through their heads....
- The Animorphs TV series. So low-budget. So cheap. So massive a lack of effort.
- My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult suffered this in its 2009 film adaptation. While the original idea remained the same, they completely cut out a main character, changed another character entirely ( In the book, Jesse was a drug addict, a pyromaniac and a drinker, while in the movie he hardly has any lines and he's an artist), randomly threw in a sex scene, and completely changed the ending.
- The book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, was a story about a grandpa telling a tall tale about an island that had significantly different weather (it rained food). The upcoming movie version? About a scientist who invents a method that turns water into food, and it affects the weather across the world.
Comic Books
- The original V For Vendetta comics by Alan Moore placed the villains as a totalitarian dictatorship whose downfall may very well cause the last bastion of humanity to die of starvation in a nuclear winter, and the titular character V as an arguably insane terrorist. The movie, however, is far less ambiguous, placing V as a romantic freedom-fighter hero, and the villains as near parodies of modern political figures with no redeeming purpose. Moore has gone on record as complaining that the original work went from open-ended morality and discussing whether the ends justify the means, in context of British 1980's Thatcherism and classical anarchism, to an allegory of America's 2000 Liberal-Conservative battles with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Evey's character is incredibly different; rather than a weak character driven to desperation and trying to prostitute herself at the beginning of the comic, she's a strong and reasonably successful woman. The story is therefore not about her becoming strong and taking V's place, showing that anyone could achieve that kind of strength, but about strong people inciting the weak into a revolution. On the other hand, David Lloyd liked it... which is why all the credits refer to "the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd," with Alan Moore's name remaining conspicuously absent. Moore specifically requested that his name be removed from the production after Joel Silver (V for Vendetta's producer) lied about Moore's enthusiasm for the shooting script. This, and the rather poor quality of previous adaptations as elaborated below, prompted his (in retrospect, possibly hasty) decision to have his name removed from any and all adaptations of works he has no ownership of, and his pseudo-royalties distributed amongst the relevant artists. Hence, he has received no money from the filmmakers behind V for Vendetta, Constantine, or the upcoming Watchmen movie. Alan Moore could be a freakin' martyr for this particular trope.
- Alan Moore's works suffer this quite a lot. He wrote From Hell as a means of deconstructing the whole of Victorian society, using the Jack the Ripper murders as a mere jumping off point. Forty pages of the book is footnotes, detailing Moore's research and justification for every single panel. The identity of the Ripper is known from the beginning, and the murders themselves are finished less than halfway through the book. The film transformed the portly, pillar-of-society Inspector Abberline into Johnny Depp's absinthe and opium soaked, psychic dandy. The prostitutes are all portrayed by pretty actresses (especially Heather Graham), a trope of Ripper stories that Alan Moore had deliberately avoided (both because it is factually inaccurate, and because of the disturbing psychosexual overtones). It is also changed into a whodunit, and the nuanced analysis of Victorian society is completely absent.
- And then there's the travesty that was The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Besides the use of fictional characters derived from Victorian literature, the film has virtually nothing in common with the comics. The film plot is not related in any way to either of the comic's two story arcs and the characterization was completely off. Captain Nemo, originally a snobbish, world-weary, retired underwater terrorist with undertones of sexism, xenophobia, and misanthropy is portrayed as a noble pirate. Mina Harker was an ordinary woman leading the team with sheer willpower and charisma but in the film was given vampire powers and was demoted. Dr. Hawley Griffin, who was a psychopathic rapist, was changed to Rodney Skinner, a rather noble thief who stole Griffin's invisibility formula (this was to avoid copyright problems with the Wells estate). Finally, Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray, who only had brief cameo appearances in the comics, were shoehorned in as main characters in order to expand the cast. It was really no surprise that the film was a box office failure, and why Alan Moore refuses to associate himself with anymore adaptations of his works. Hell, this movie was so terrible, it convinced the lead actor Sean Connery to retire from acting entirely.
- One can also point to the Japanese TV adaptation of Spider-Man from the '70s, where Spidey gets his powers from aliens and has a giant robot due to the difficulties at the time of handling webswinging SPFX. Funnily enough, Stan Lee liked it... If only I could find that video interview, that was pretty interesting. The series is actually pretty good by itself, it's pretty solid 70s toku.
- The recent Spider-Man movies also have some decay, to a lesser extent. Peter Parker is traditionally a Deadpan Snarker, while the movie version is... not. A sense of humor would go a long way towards countering the Wangst. Also, "Symbiote Night Fever".
- For that matter, the decision to have Mary Jane be the one girl that Peter had always been in love with. In the first movie, it seems like Adaptation Distillation but it seriously undercuts any dramatic potential Gwen Stacy could have represented in the third movie.
- Long before the X-Men theatrical movies there was a TV movie (and unsuccessful pilot) based on the X-Men spinoff title Generation X, which is a perfect example of this trope due to the nonsensical premise and all the other radical depatures from the source material.
- The Belvision version of Tintin was decayed in many ways, including an attempt to Bowdlerise Captain Haddock's drinking problem to sleeping drops in his coffee, and Alan's opium running to diamond smuggling.
- The Nelvana Tintin cartoons are a curious variation, in the sense that the Animated Adaptation itself suffered from Adaptation Decay due to censorship. Most of the cartoon is in fact more Adaptation Distillation than anything else, streamlining Herge's original plots and remaining much more faithful than the original cartoon, and in fact keeping in many of the references to opium and alcoholism. While the censored version of The Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Crab With the Golden Claws that this troper saw growing up changed the opium reference to diamonds, the uncensored versions available on You Tube in fact kept the drug references in. Even the censored versions kept some elements, such as the Bohlwinkel Bank from The Shooting Star and Haddock's drinking problems in The Crab With the Golden Claws.
- The 2007 animated, direct to DVD, Doctor Strange movie, which turned the story into a martial arts epic where magic only comes into play in the last 20 minutes of the film. Which, for those who don't know, is a big deal because the point of Dr. Strange is that he is the Earth's Sorceror Supreme. Or, for that matter, the live action TV Movie.
- The 2005 film of the Fantastic Four is generally considered by fans to be inferior to the source material; in particular, the character of Doctor Doom is seen as having been unnecessarily altered from being (in the comics) an impressive, complex and almost noble, if obsessive and vindictive, Evil Overlord who is ruler of his own nation, a genius on par with Reed Richards (with a burning and character-defining hatred and jealousy of the other man to match) and a powerful sorcerer into a slimy Corrupt Corporate Executive whose primary motivation for turning evil seems to be that he fancies Susan Storm as well as Reed. Also, for some reason he has Colossus and Electro's powers.
- A few of the other characters also suffered from this trope, particularly the Human Torch, who was painted as just a general Jerk Ass to a much greater degree than he was in the source material, (though that was fixed somewhat in the second movie.) The case could also be made that both Reed and Sue lost much that was distinct about them in the transition, and that's all without even getting onto the mess that was the second film's depiction of Galactus.
- Specifically, movie Reed's nice guy Absent Minded Professor personality makes him much less interesting than the cold distant genius of the comic books.
- Also, the focus on sitcom antics over sci fi and cosmic exploration is a big departure from the tone of the comics.
- The unreleased 1993 version was much closer to the comics. Until Johnny Storm suddenly gained Faster Than Light abilities. And Dr Doom performing a game of charades because they didn't bother overdubbing his voice. And...screw it, just take a look here.
- Dostoyevsky Comics was a comic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. With Raskolnikov as Batman.
- Batman. Entire entries could be filled with this character's oscillation between tough, pragmatic Anti Hero and gadget-centric, optimistic Technical Pacifist... and many more about which is decayed from which, though no fan will ever accept all renditions, and many are simply Flanderizations of others. Batman has undergone more Adaptation Decay than half the rest of this list combined.
- Catwoman. The 2004 film has a Catwoman with super powers, a different name, and no connection to Batman whatsoever. There's a reason it's called CINO (Catwoman In Name Only). Even Halle Berry herself expressed regret over this one, showing up to receive her "Razzie" award in person.
- Little Orphan Annie was a comic strip that was firmly steeped in conservative, no-one-should-sponge-off-the-government values, almost to a Writer On Board extent. The second main character was a war-profiteer for God's sake! When adapted into a musical, however, the story gained a much more positive view of the government, with the song "New Deal For Christmas" a particularly fawning tribute to fiscal intervention.
- It may be saying something that "New Deal For Christmas" isn't in either movie version, nor "We'd Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover". There's a fair deal of further decay from the musical to the films, but the 1982 film restored characters like Punjab and Asp that weren't in the stage show, and the climax is considerably more exciting and elaborate.
- Constantine adapts Hellblazer, replacing blond, bisexual, English, Magnificent Bastard, Technical Pacifist magician lead John Constantine with an American, Catholic, hetero Church Militant played by Keanu Reeves. After that, the other changes seem so small... Fortunately, God is still an indifferent bastard, angels can be evil, and the devil is a cosmopolitan gentleman. While Constantine's character is changed quite a bit, he still is a trickster looking out for himself and accidentally killing his friends. The mood and tone is quite true to the comic.
- "Cosmopolitan gentleman"? He was a cross between a used car salesman and a sleazy lounge singer!
- When WITCH was animated, the writers took away Will's one main perk of being the leader, her powers over Absolute Energy, and the uniqueness of Hay Lin's ability to fly (although in the first episode Hay Lin gets the hang of it immediately, while Will flounders a bit). Some of the Absolute Energy power leaked back in during Season 2, under the name Quintessance. (This is probably because Greg Weisman, who helped write S2, wanted to stick to the source material more.)
- Other changes made to the series in its conversion from comics to TV included keeping Yan Lin around as your typical "Oriental wise person", turning Caleb into a human, introducing Blunk as an extra male character (instead of, say, making one of the other viable males into someone more "actiony"). Of course, once Greg Weisman came on board, he turned some of those lemons into lemonade... but that's another section.
- Probably the finest example of Season 1's Adaptation Decay is the episode "Framed". The situation was based on the fifth issue of the comics, which was an important part of the story particularly concerning Elyon and the history of Meridian. What we got here was a filler episode with a pointless medieval fair subplot in the background, no advancement in the Elyon plotline, and the character of the artist Elias Van Dahl changed from a middle-aged man to an longe-haired young man in an obvious attempt at appealing to girls and failing miserably (the general consenseus was that he looked like Marilyn Manson without makeup.)
- The adaptation of Wanted follows the comic fairly faithfully for the first part, before going off on its own thing. How a Fraternity of comic book supervillains became a Fraternity of assassins/textile factory workers is something I will never understand.
- Sable, a shortlived TV series based on Jon Sable Freelance was notable only for its changes to the premise, and for introducing Rene Russo to audiences as one of the leads. In the TV series, instead of Sable being the public face and masquerading as "B.B. Flemm," a children's book author, "Nicholas Fleming" was the children's book author and Sable the mysterious masked do-gooder. Sable was wanted for murder in Africa, it was explained, and the vaguely effete Fleming persona was the only way he could live safely in Chicago. A new character for the TV series was "Cheesecake" Tyson, a hacker friend who inevitably supplied exposition.
- The film version of Red Sonja has little to do with comic book incarnation, instead focusing mainly on the Prince Kalidor character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie comes across as a third film in the Conan franchise for which the producers were unwilling to pay for the rights to the Conan character. Also, Red Sonja as we know her isn't the character Robert E. Howard created (a Russian revolutionary). Roy Thomas morphed her into a female Conan for comics.
- The DCAU generally gets high marks from fans as Adaptation Distillation, but one of the rare exceptions is the JLU version of Wonder Woman; there's very vocal dissatisfaction among her fans about a lot of how the character was handled, starting with discarding most of the important parts of her origin (the Contest, her mission to man's world, the latter being inverted to make her an exile), and her personality; it's rather difficult to see how an intelligent warrior-diplomat known for empathy and grace turned into an angry, uncultured brawler who prefers punching out TV screens to listening to people who disagree with her). The later seasons, however, do show her first reconciling with her mother, and then becoming the Amazons' ambassador to the rest of the world.
- The first movie adaptation of the German Werner comics was succesful and had very faithful adaptations of a few strips, but no one liked the badly acted real life scenes shoved inbetween. The second and third movie suffered from the titular character being more down-to-earth than his comic self. Werner returned to his reckless self with an original plot in the fourth movie, but no one watched it from being disappointed after the last few movies.
- The Superman radio show. In the first episode alone, Krypton was located to the opposite side of the sun from Earth, Kal-El matures into Superman during his rocket ride to Earth, and he takes up the Clark Kent identity at the suggestion of a professor and his son. Here's Mark Engblom's take on this adaptation decay.
- The 1980s cartoon adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic took what was often a dark, grim and even bloody comic series and turned it into silly fun, to the point where fans complain that the 2003 version is Adaptation Decay, even though it was closer to the original comics than the 1980s cartoon ever was. Go figure.
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Deadpool. Comics fans, start your headaches.
- The Akira movie suffers severely from Adaptation Decay; they pretty much try to squish 2000 pages of manga into a two-hour anime movie and the whole thing feels very rushed and confusing because of it and many important things were changed as a result, including who/what Akira really is. However, the script was written by the author of the original manga, and is perfectly fine if you see it first.
- The Galaxy Angel manga, especially in regards to making a love triangle between Milfeulle, Tact and Ranpha the focus of the series and removing half the story. The show based on it has no such illusions.
- This is because the manga is actually based on the game instead of the anime. The anime was orginally was supposed to be based on the game, but when it was held back due to problems, the anime had to go ahead with it's current "plotline". The manga is actually quite faithful to the videogame.
- Among other things, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon caught flack from the fansub community for its mutation of Minako from a ditzy, loopy, yet oddly clever and reliable girl to an overserious Ineffectual Loner, and the neutering of Rei's volatile personality (though this persona change might be a result of the show starting off being closer to the manga than the anime, where Rei was less volatile). Ironically, the removal of Makoto's obsession with being feminine caused little complaint, but that was a reflection of more current attitudes. In fact, pretty much every successive adaptation of the original story has shades of this. The most obvious example is the original show's complete adoption of the sentai format.
- Excel Saga parodies this; the beginning of the first episode starts with a signed statement by Koshi Rikdo, the creator of the manga, that he won't complain about any changes made to his work. Each episode thereafter features a Cold Opening where something happens, and Rikdo states that he approves Excel Saga being made into a certain genre that that episode parodies. Sometimes at gunpoint.
- Gonzo's Hellsing went for 5 episodes at which point they Overtook The Manga (probably a record at the time). The aftermath wasn't pretty, the Gecko Ending was so bad that when American fans demanded a sequel, Gonzo's answer was that they couldn't make a sequel because they couldn't put the plot back on track. The end result is that they had to remake the entire series all over again just to finish the plot.
- Rurouni Kenshin's "Raijuta" saga was notable for having one new character kept the same, and only keeping the sub plot the same as well. The original plot in which Raijuta tries to reform the Kenjutsu schools into schools for killing by banning the use of the shinai is discarded so you can get the more action packed story of Raijuta trying to start a revolution. The problem is that Watsuki noted that Raijuta was a failure because his attacks were nothing special, having more action just compounds this factor and the only good parts concerning Raijuta (that he wants to reform Kenjutsu into the art of killing) are removed. Yutaro's motive for strength in the original, that his father was a living merchant who sold katanas to the west, was changed to the more cliched his dead father was a great swordsman (the testament to his father's great skill was by Kenshin's standards relatively weak).
- The anime series Yu Gi Oh ("Yugioh: Duel Monsters") deviates from the manga quite a bit, with several filler arcs, changes to the canon arcs, and refitting the entire series to revolve around a childrens' card game, completely omitting the many earlier games played in the manga. These stories were adapted into the earlier 27-episode Yu Gi Oh series, but that too was altered heavily from the source material (notably changing Kaiba from Big Bad of a story arc to Big Bad of the whole series, and featuring a one-shot character from the manga, Miho, as part of the main cast.)
- Even before they had to apply a Gecko Ending due to its cancellation, the writers of the anime version of Mahou Sensei Negima had already irreparably altered the plot, excising such key elements as Konoka, Nodoka and Setsuna's Pactios with Negi (all made during the Kyoto arc), Negi's friend and rival Kotaro (whose role admittedly didn't get expanded until after the Kyoto arc), Setsuna's true nature, and Konoka's own mage talents.
- Love Hina also suffers from a progressive form of this, due in part to the anime concluding well before the manga did. First the anime rushes through the early portions of the story, with the first three volumes are squeezed into 6 episodes with some generous alterations such as the manner in which Shinobu is introduced; then a number of new characters (Kentaro, Mei, Moe) and new or heavily altered (the dream sequence in volume 8) and a few outright filler-type stories are inserted; then the main series ends just barely into events from volume 7 of the 14 volume manga, with completely anime-exclusive storyline events comprising the final episodes. The following christmas TV special is assembled from bits of volumes 6, 7, and 9 with more generous alterations, while the spring special is a heavily abridged, slightly altered take on volume 8's Pararakelse story, and the OVA packs in volumes 11 and 12. Unfortunately this means the entire ending — books 13 and 14 — and many large portions of the story — including the final revelation and backstory explaining Keitarou's childhood promise — are nonexistent in the anime.
- The Rosario+Vampire anime and original manga start out more or less similar, but already the anime adds much more fanservice, changes some of the stories, and changes the order of events so all of the main cast can be brought in quickly. After a certain point, the manga starts focusing much more on drama and action than the comedy, which the anime doesn't follow, instead creating its own stories to focus more on the harem aspect. Because of this, we will probably never see Tsukune turning into a ghoul—at best, it seems he'll just be temporarily turned into a vampire every season finale.
- The manga adaptation of Code Geass (or rather, the one closest enough to the original to be considered an adaptation) is noticeably lighter in tone than the anime, featuring more sight gags and Super Deformed character heads in text balloons to help identify the speaker. The Humongous Mecha are completely removed, along with any mention of Sakuradite (the whole reason Britannia invaded Japan), and much more of the story takes place at the school, which now has a group of almost fascistic students (armed with guns) who act as stand-ins for the Purist Faction. Instead of bombing buildings and other acts of terrorism, the Japanese rebels express their displeasure with Japan being enslaved by committing acts of petty vandalism like spraypainting anti-Britannian graffiti on public property.
- The manga adaption of The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya could be considered this. I mean, the Ryoko Asakura incident occurs way too early in the story!
- The anime version of Gunslinger Girl is a fairly faithful adaptation of the manga, aside from a somewhat different chronology to make the plot better to follow in animated form. The one big difference though is how they handle the story of Angelica, who is heavily implied to die in hospital at the end of the first season. This makes for a strong emotional ending in its own right, so it's jarring when Angelica simply returns in full action in the sequel, which follows the rest of the manga — in which she does not die. Of course Angelica could simply have fallen asleep while watching the meteor shower, but this largely diminishes the emotional impact of the first season's ending. Oh well, it seems you can't have it all.
- While it's certainly fair not to expect the writers of the anime adaptation of Disgaea to convey the raising of troops, or the depth of the gameplay, it would have been nice to have kept the characters remotely similar. The worst example was changing the Bunny Ears Lawyer and Large Ham Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!, his genius sidekick Jennifer, and their powerful Robot Buddy Thursday into a Terrible Trio. In the original version, all three are powerful enemies who do a Heel Face Turn once they find out that Vulcanus has lied and become valuable allies. In the anime, however they are a complete joke. It quickly becomes obvious that they didn't have the budget to show the epic battles in the series, which leaves the question of why it was made in the first place.
- Princess Tutu has quite a bit of adaptation decay in the manga (the anime came first). In the original anime, the main character is a duck who's given the power to turn into a girl, Mytho is a Prince who's come to life out of an unfinished book, the main villain is the writer of the book, and several of the characters have connections to the unfinished story as well. In the manga, the main character is a schoolgirl who only turns into a duck in one chapter (and is quickly cured of it), Mytho is simply a pure-hearted boy who had a magical power, Fakir and Rue have no connections to any Fairy Tale whatsoever, and the villain's unemotional puppet from the anime becomes the slutty villain in the manga. Most fans of the anime won't even touch the manga. This editor has the manga and (sort of) enjoys it, but partially because she pretends it's an odd AU fanfic.
- All of the adaptations of Devilman seem to be at least somewhat decayed, with the 1972 adaptation getting the worst of it. Ironically, 1972 anime was the original idea pitch (even if every adaptation of Devilman since then has almost always followed the manga). Go Nagai changed the tone and characters afterwards to more closely resemble a previous unfinished work of his.
- The original anime version of Fist Of The North Star gets a good deal of flack for suffering from the usual Shonen cheap animation and Filler issues, but it's pretty faithful to the manga otherwise. The 1986 animated movie, on the other hand, hits this trope hard. Essentially a condensed retelling of the first eight volumes of the manga, it glosses over many plot points and changes the roles of several side characters: Mr. Heart becomes an underling of Jagi, along with Jackal and Fox, his Theme Naming now meaningless; Toki is never seen nor is mentioned, and neither are Mamiya and Yuda, leaving Rei with not much to do after rescuing his sister Airi from Jagi, except get killed immediately after fighting Raoh during the climax of the film; and Shin is reduced to mere stage dressing and dies from a previously inflicted wound when he fights Kenshiro. the film comes to an inconclusive ending when Lin talks Raoh out of killing Kenshiro and he rides off, while Yuria disappears during the final battle, her fate left ambiguous.
- Your Mileage May Vary. While the movie is far from perfect, it's pretty decent when viewed as a stand-alone film. Considering it adapts the first eight volumes (or the first 50 or episodes anime series), obviously not everything was going to make it to the movie anyway. Most of the complaints seems based on the Streamline Pictures dub of the movie, which excised most of the back-story and actually changed the context of most of the dialogue.
- A chronic problem with anime adapted from CLAMP manga:
- The movie version of X1999 is... decayed twice-over. Most of the plot and back-story is thrown out the window (along with a character or two), a character added in, and character development nonexistent. Characters are introduced, and then subsequently killed off for little to no reason. The director did outright say that he was aiming for beautiful fight sequences ... and boy, did he succeed: Amazingly lovely to look at, amazingly hard to understand, especially if you've never seen the series before. Given that it has the same director as Akira above this is perhaps unsurprising.
- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle suffered a tremendous case of Adaptation Decay at the hands of its anime version by Bee Train. The world arcs were stretched out longer than necessary and riddled with filler, many of CLAMP's cardinal rules were disregarded completely, and Fai was paired with Chii (which violated CLAMP's "one true soulmate" rule, as Chii is officially meant to be paired with Hideki, not to mention the fact that the manga is currently leaning more towards Kuro/Fai as well). Reportedly, CLAMP didn't like the Bee Train anime either.
- xxxHolic fared better than Tsubasa, but it still suffered due to the fact that any and all connection to Tsubasa was intentionally eliminated from the anime adaptation. This, needless to say, posed problems later on when the two manga stories became more closely intertwined.
- Card Captor Sakura notably suffered very little decay, but even it had a few subplots cut and plotholes added.
- Violinist of Hameln: The series, originally a dramedy, has all of its humour stripped bare. Most of the cast has their characterization retooled to a point where they aren't the same characters anymore- The main character, Hamel, goes from a secretly nice self-centered jackass to a depressed, whining hero, and his best friend, Raiel, who in the manga constantly lusts for, and marries Hamel's twin sister and becomes the father of two seems to be oddly close to him. Not to mention the studio's funds growing short as time progressed, so the series became less and less an anime and more and more a set of pictures with voice acting. The movie is a much better example of the manga's style.
- Not the mention the complete difference in plot and OMFG that ending! It's like a bad case of canon rape...
- Jojos Bizarre Adventure: The anime OVA started in the middle of the original story starting from the D'arby encounter and went from there, cutting a good chuck of story in the process (even though it consisted of the characters fighting Dio's lackeys). Even the final climax against Dio is different. Afterward they went back and animated the starting points of the series, but still made many changes. In the end, they still covered very little of the series.
- The anime adaptation of Chrono Crusade ended up following the manga reasonably close for about half of it...and then wildly diverging afterwards. Gonzo added more Fan Service and made an already dark story Darker And Edgier. In the process, it changed much of the cast, including slowly transforming Action Girl / Badass Normal Rosette into a weak-willed Mysterious Waif with mystical powers that is brainwashed into attacking Chrono and Well Intentioned Extremist Aion into an lusty Card Carrying Villain with no redeeming qualities or even real motivation outside of "I hate God, because I'm an evil demon!" Then they killed off the main characters. And the villain comes back to life. All in all, the two versions rest on opposite ends of the scale, with the manga being very idealistic and the anime plunging head-first into cynical Humans Are Bastards territory.
- The anime adaptation of Black Cat deviated a lot from the manga starting from episode 1. Train is shown to be a lot less carefree and badass, frequently wangsting and hardly showing his more wisecracking side that was present in the manga. His relationship with Sven is shown to be less close and have much less trust, with Sven being the one saving Train most of the time (unlike in the manga, where Sven felt the need to become stronger so he wouldn't be a burden to Train). Rinslet, instead of being a smart, capable thief that has a huge crush on Train, is downgraded to a useless Tsundere that dislikes Train and yells at pretty much all the men. (In one part, she's even shown yelling at Train that someone like him doesn't deserve to be saved by Sven — something her manga counterpart would never have done.) Creed is made out to be much more of a perverted sexual deviant than in the manga (which is saying a lot). This wouldn't be such a bad change if they didn't invent a Heel Face Turn for him, which makes very little sense considering that his slightly more mellow manga counterpart didn't even do one.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. It's based off a sound novel series. However,the anime lacks alot of the major hints, such as the TIPS, some flashbacks, major dialogue and character thoughts. However,the anime tried to make up for it by putting stuff into the second season.
- Venus Versus Virus. The anime misses way too many important scenes,especially in the early volumes. Also the manga may have a different ending, and expands beyond the anime.
- Life by Keiko Suenobu,is a manga about a girl who harms herself. It is adapted into a live action show, where many things have been modified. Including the basic whole reason for a lot of the stuff in the manga, Ayumu's self harm habits.
- Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl is about a boy who turns into a girl after he dies and is brought back to life. The anime changes tons of stuff. Such as taking out scenes, changing scenes, changing one of the three girls' illnesses slightly, changing the ending slightly, making it seem like nobody but the main character, her family and her teacher know about the aliens (and that the main character only knows about them really being aliens) and even changing the person who the main character ends up with, through the OVA even. They even completly took out the curry party. The curry. They changed the conversation to the haunted house instead.
- Sayuri and Mai are much more explicit in their RomanticTwoGirlFriendship in the Toei anime adaptation of Kanon. Unfortunately, this is also the version where Mai's plot gets squashed and condensed, so when it's revealed that the monsters Mai battles at the school are manifestations of her own inner power but neither that power nor the fact that it left Mai ostracized her whole life with only Yuuichi and her now-dead mother knowing and accepting the truth is never explained. Mai's left without a reason to care about Yuuichi at all, making her last-ditch plea to keep Yuuichi from moving away by pretending the field they play in is being attacked by monsters look somewhat deranged. It all seems to imply that she literally drove herself crazy because she couldn't handle losing a childhood crush, and her relationship with Sayuri was one more aspect of self-denial. Considering she's also the closest thing in the series to an ActionGirl, there are so, SO many UnfortunateImplications
- The first anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist either suffers from this or is an example of Pragmatic Adaptation, depending on who you ask. It Overtook The Manga extremely fast, resulting in radically different characterization (a lot of characters got their roles severely downplayed, their backstories left out or completely changed), which is somewhat understandable, considering the fact that their back stories had not yet been created in the manga. While a couple of original characters were added and some extras got ascended, it features less emphasis on alchemy itself, a few filler episodes in the beginning, and exchanged the Gallows Humor for a much darker tone, which many manga fans think of as cheap Wangst. Granted, adapting a work built around a rock solid Myth Arc that spans twenty-something volumes with only a handful of chapters out was no easy task. Since the anime is more popular than the manga, at least in the west, this has lead to a pretty spectacular case of Broken Base.
- Amulet Books' "American Manga" adapatation on Hamlet has this in spades. Here I'll just quote the added very not-Shakespeare prolouge.
The year is 2017. Global climate change has devastated the Earth. This is a cyberworld in constant dread of war. Prince Hamlet has come home to face an uncertain future.
- I'm not even sure where to begin with Eyeshield 21, the anime was so horrible I nearly cried when I saw it. A one chapter match with an unimportant team turned into a two episode long thing in which the other team somehow manages to kidnap Hiruma. What were they thinking?
Video Games to Television and Film
- The big thing in the 80s and early 90s appeared to be packaging kids' favourite video games as cartoons and watching the ratings roll in; surely kids will watch anything if Mario's face is on it! The Super Mario Bros Super Show was an attempt at cashing in on Mario's immense popularity, and even had live-action segments starring Captain Lou Albano as Mario. The cartoon had a variety of differences from the games, the most obvious being the Big Bad King Koopa, the show's interpretation of Bowser. Instead of the red hair and yellow belly and snout that Bowser has, King Koopa appeared much more like a crocodile with dark green skin and a crown. Very few of the episodes had anything to do with the games and most were simply "Mario Bros. in space! Or in the old west! Or in China!", with King Koopa taking on some guise for each one. Original characters were abundant. Also, Mario and Luigi's occupations as plumbers was played up immensely to the point where their arsenal consisted mostly of plungers and wrenches (this editor recalled an episode set in an Australia-like place where Mario pulls out a plunger and bends it into a makeshift boomerang... and it works).
- Super Mario Bros. 3 followed up the Super Show, this time introducing several power-ups from the games (most notably the Raccoon Leaf), some new monsters and, most notably, the Koopalings (called Koopa Kids in the cartoon). However, their appearances were somewhat altered, and their names were changed entirely from their original musician-inspired names. The live-action segments were gone and much of the show was considerably more faithful, down to random blocks containing power-ups for no adequately explained reason, but it had its fair share of deviations and flaws. Plus it was the show that involved the dreaded guest appearances of, of all people, Milli Vanilli.
- The final Mario cartoon was Super Mario World, which definitely had the worst budget when it came to animation. Yoshi was in and the Mushroom Retainer Toad was out, more or less replaced by a diminutive and rather annoying caveman called Oogtar. The creators had taken the name "Dinosaur World" and ran with it, having cavemen and dinosaurs up the yin-yang to replace the mushroom people from previous shows. Most of the episodes have to do with the cavemen being taught how to do something like play football or grow crops, with King Koopa and his Koopalings barging in to ruin it, at which point the Mario Brothers and Yoshi need to fix it. As you could expect, teaching cavemen is not something you are expected to do in the original game; there were very few other dinosaurs to begin with except for Yoshi himself (if he's even a dinosaur), and no cavemen at all. Speaking of Yoshi, he gravitated between being an annoyance who messed everything up to an invincible Mook eating machine, often in the same episode.
- As a final note, it should be said that all three shows had short musical interludes which are just as painful as they sound. The Super Show at least had music from actual popular musicians of the time (which was taken out in home videos and future showings), but the other two had music made especially for the show. Most are pretty much unbearable.
- And don't even get us started on the movie...
- Oh, and Shigeru Miyamoto actually likes it! And his only complaint? It's to similar to the games.
- The Japanese anime, while a bit closer to the game are still pretty bad in terms of sticking to the games, with Mario apparently being a shop assistant who ends up playing a game like Super Mario Bros (the NES version), has characters escape from the game (and Bowser pummel him into the floor), goes to the Mushroom Kingdom via some weird cave and the dog that's been following him turns out to be the prince of the Mushroom Kingdom...
- Then there's the other Mario anime series, based on Japanese fairy tales. Basically, think the Super Show's Japanese counterpart. Heck, as shown on the cover of one of the 'films' on this Mario Wiki page, Mario even weilds a freaking gun of some sort.
- Finally, there's the So Bad Its Horrible Mario Ice Capades. Yes, Mario on ice. With Bowser trying to take over the world via computer viruses apparently transmitted through NES consoles. And moving around on a wheeled version of the castle while singing. Mario and Luigi freaking defeat enemies with wrenches and weapons, and various apparent audience members end up involved. No, as seen here on The Mushroom Kingdom website, this is sadly a real adaptation.
- The king of shoddy video game adaptations has to be Captain N The Game Master, where just about every video game character present bore very little resemblance to their source material: Castlevania's Simon Belmont became a tall, square-jawed Jerk With A Heart Of Gold in pilot goggles with a backpack; Mega Man, the blue bomber, was turned into a green midget with a Verbal Tic, and his creator Dr. Light looked more like some kind of strange dwarf/elf creature than a human; and Mother Brain from Metroid was a trash-talking brain in a jar, looking much more feminine and a whole lot less threatening and grotesque than the original. The worst had to be the new designs for the Mega Man robot masters, who were either made much more generic or just plain stupid looking. Most of the stories either had nothing to do with the game plots or were very, very loosely based on them, often getting many facts about the games wrong in the process.
- The first season of Video Power (which was later repackaged under the title The Power Team) probably deserves the honor of "worst... video game cartoon... ever." It was essentially Captain N with an inverted premise (it was the video game characters who were trapped in the real world) and the famous video game characters replaced by second-stringers from Acclaim. Most of these rather unappealing characters were faithful to the originals, except Kuros from Wizards and Warriors, who got the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter treatment. The producers at Bohbot Studios must have decided that if Fabio was going to be on the front of the game's box, he might as well be in the cartoon as well! Annnnyway, the show was horribly written, with predictable stories, dull dialog, lousy comedic timing, and constant references to "bonus lives" (who the hell called them bonus lives?!). Eventually, Video Power was reimagined as a game show, starring Stivi Paskoski as a pre-Kevin Periera douchebag who constantly mugs for the camera and penalizes contestants for giving the correct answers. Needless to say, it wasn't much of an improvement.
- On the Sega side of things, Sonic The Hedgehog got the Saturday morning cartoon treatment in Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog. Like the above, it bore little resemblance to the original games outside of its main characters and their relationships. Most of the action took place is a strange, angular desert with only a few references to the games in terms of setting. Robotnik was entirely redesigned except for his colour scheme and facial hair (the character designer aimed to make him "animation's sexiest fat man" in his movement) and he is helped by two inept robots Scratch and Grounder, who themselves are loosely based on Badnik enemy designs from the second Sonic the Hedgehog game. Sonic regularly eats chili dogs and, despite supposedly being "way-past cool", always ended the episode with a "Sonic Says" moral for the kids on subjects ranging from road safety, climbing in driers, drinking and, most (in)famously, what to do if someone "touches you in a place or in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable". At least we had Long John Baldry's performance as Robotnik, surely the character's best voice actor. Oh, and the theme song was a great remix of the game's theme, I"n The Hall of the Mountain King", and "Flight of the Bumble Bee". So far it's the only time This Troper has ever heard music (remix or otherwise) from the Sonic games in a show being played in America (though I hear the Japanese versions of the animes have the game music in them occasionally)
- AOSTH was followed by a slightly darker take on the character in the aptly named Sonic the Hedgehog, which is often dubbed "SatAM" by fans. This show did not just change the Sonic universe to suit itself, it almost completely revamped it with Sonic, Tails (stuck in a much less important role and no longer Sonic's main sidekick) and Robotnik (who was once again drastically different in appearance and attitude to his video game counterpart) being the only regular characters from the original games; everyone else was created just for the show, most notably Sonic's love interest Sally Acorn. The post-apocalyptic setting where Robotnik rules and has roboticized the animal inhabitants was certainly a very different take on the franchise compared to Adventures' largely Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain (although probably not meant to be sympathetic) slant on Robotnik. For many fans this is arguably an instance of Pragmatic Adaptation than decay.
- The third Sonic cartoon series was a complete joke in most viewer's eyes: Sonic Underground once again did away with all the characters of the original games and instead starred Sonic and his two newly introduced siblings Sonia and Manic searching for their lost mother, who is apparently a queen. Sonic and his brother and sister all have instruments for weapons and have a musical interludes most episodes, while Robotnik resembles his SatAM counterpart, except he is once again largely ineffectual due to his two useless cohorts Sleet and Dingo. One episode included the first Western animated appearance of Knuckles the Echidna who shared some traits from the video game he first appeared in (a knack for traps and distrust of intruders and strangers; the former of these traits is very rarely seen in the games nowadays). Otherwise, some viewers must have been wondering why they bothered making the cartoon about Sonic in the first place.
- The newest series, Sonic X comes the closest since it does use characters from the games like Tails and Knuckles, and even includes newer and fringe characters such as Amy Rose and Shadow. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the cartoon itself is good. In particular, the series adapts several storylines from the games. For example, the show kicked off the second season with both Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2... and tried to cram each of them into about two less episodes than they needed. Even with weaker time constraints and a direct adaptation in mind, they still managed to mess them up.
- For example, in the original Sonic Adventure, Zeta was with his brothers when they went to catch Froggy and was beamed away along with everyone else when Gamma succeeded with his mission. In the adaptation, he did not appear at any moment during that point of the story at all. In fact, he only appears for the sake of adapting his boss battle into the anime, effectively turning him into a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.
- The undisputed king of this has to be the Resident Evil franchise. Director (on the first film) and writer (on all three) Paul WS Anderson took a franchise with an established plot and characters, and used them as a backdrop for a story about a super-slick post-Matrix post-Buffy psychic genetic action girl of his own creation, to be played by his own fiancee. Her status as a Mary Sue or a Canon Sue depends on whether you consider the movies to be works in their own right or multi-million-dollar Fan Fic.
- Mega Man received a show of his own eventually, but as always there were massive deviations in both story and design. Unlike Captain N, Mega Man was at least blue this time, but he was made tall and muscular as opposed to small and child-like, making it look like they based him off of Megaman X instead of the regular Megaman. His sister Roll was similarly upgraded (minus the muscles of course), this time sporting a rather silly angular blaster on her arm that regularly functioned as a vacuum cleaner. Dr. Light and Dr. Wily looked rather faithful to their game counterparts but the robot masters were similarly redesigned, mostly giving them the muscle treatment as well. Compared to Captain N of course, they were quite faithful... The first major plot change was making Mega Man's de facto brother Proto Man into a complete bad guy. It is often joked that the producers of the show never finished the fifth game where Proto Man was framed (or maybe not even the third, where he first appeared), but a more realistic assumption would be that they needed a physical match for Mega Man of some kind (this was before The Rival from the games, Bass/Forte was created). Despite being perfect for the Monster Of The Week format, the plots were instead based on rather cliche or ridiculous ideas from a shrink episode (every Saturday morning cartoon in those days needed one. It was practically a law), Mega Man going into space or mummy lion creatures turning everyone in the world into lion creatures like themselves with eye-beams. The robot masters themselves usually acted just as henchmen to carry out whatever Dr. Wily needed them to do before clashing with Mega Man for a while. The ones used the most often seemed to be Guts Man and Cut Man.
- Don't forget the almost-psychotic Mega Man X! At the time, the depiction of X and the Mavericks was faithful to the Mega Man X series, given that Ruby Spears aired that cartoon sometime around the first game's launch (and thus there wasn't much of anything about X's personality or otherwise). Nowadays, though, it's unsettling to see X so ... so ... so eager—but hey, at least it stuck closer to the games than, say, this. For a more eloquent discussion of the decay, see this and this.
- Later, Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force received animes of their own. While both ranged from some truly awful filler to some truly excellent moments, both took the premise of the games and made their own storyline with it, with varying results depending on the arc. As a result many characters had alternate backstories/personalities, with the "biggest change" award probably going to Star Force's rival, who went from a Dark Magical Guy with a downright hatred for any sort of human connection to someone who sealed himself away so that his friends' sacrifices would not be in vain. He even does a Heroic Sacrifice at the end for good measure.
- While the Double Dragon games didn't have much in the way of storyline or any coherent continuity, that didn't prevent the series from having both, a weekend morning cartoon and a live-action film, both which ended up straying from the basic premise of the games. Whereas the video games were about twin brothers who used their martial arts skills to fight gangsters and rival warriors, for some reason the animated series (done by none other than DiC of Captain N infamy) decided to give the Lee brothers dragon-shaped masks and magical laser-shooting swords, as well as introduced a new group of villains that resembled nothing like the ones in the video game (only Abobo and Willy were in a couple of episodes before being sucked by the Shadow Master's mural). It did borrow a plot element from the NES games by having Jimmy as the bad guy for the first episode and having him do a Heel Face Turn and join his brother for the remainder of the series. The movie does more or less the same, turning Billy and Jimmy into cowardly sissies who spent most of the film screaming and running from the bad guys until they gained magical powers from the Double Dragon Medallion. Oddly enough the cartoon and the film both inspired their corresponding fighting game tie-ins.
- The Legend Of Zelda also got a rather short-lived cartoon series loosely based on the games. Instead of actual sword-fighting, enemies were defeated by the swords's beams and other items only. All bad guys come from Ganon's "evil jar" and are sent back to it when defeated in combat. Of course, the contents changed every episode. Mostly these cartoons are known for Link's Catch Phrase "Excuuuse me, Princess!", which he said at least twice an episode, not counting the intro, and his repeated (futile) attempts to score a kiss from the Princess. It's hard to say how much he and Zelda act out of character considering the series was based on the first NES game (which had precious little text and no actual plot outside the setup in the intro), but later games make it rather apparent that Miyamoto didn't quite intend them to act like they did in the cartoon.
- Then there's the American Darkstalkers animated series, which gave the starring role to some dorky kid named Harry Grimoire, and only tangentially featured the actual monsters fighting each other (and gave them weird accents and really funky character designs, to boot). This one, like the Super Mario Bros. cartoons, was also produced by DiC, and generally laughed at by fans of the series. The really weird part is what it got right — the closing theme was "Trouble Man", the theme song of everything Darkstalkers-related. That may be the only thing it got right. In comparison the Street Fighter cartoon looks like Shakespeare. Given that the Darkstalkers game don't even have an actual cohesive plot (nearly all the characters endings have nothing to do with Pyron or Jedah) you have to wonder why they even bothered making one in the first place. Even the Japanese anime has no real plot.
- The Street Fighter franchise has the honor of having many of these floating around.
- Easily the most notoriously awful example of Adaptation Decay is the live-action American movie, which converted an ensemble piece with a few main characters (Chun-Li, Ryu, and Ken), into a typical Jean-Claude Van Damme, cast as American operative Guile and turned it into a typical mid-90s mindless action flick. Despite the fact the movie crammed in pretty much everyone from the games, it seemed to pay little to no attention to what little backstory they *did* have: T. Hawk and Cammy are part of Guile's squad, Chun-Li, E. Honda and Balrog are reporters, Dhalsim is a scientist (who never fights, by the way), Vega is Native American, Blanka and Charlie are the same character, Sagat is Bison's second-in-command, Dee Jay is a computer expert and a bad guy that never fights, Balrog is a good guy, Ryu and Ken are slimy incompetent con men... it just goes on and on. The only highlight is the novelty of Kylie Minogue playing Cammy and the ability to mourn Raul Julia having to play M. Bison for his last role, taken entirely so he could ensure his family was provided for after he died.
- The movie spawned an animated series that is bad compared to the games and the various anime floating around, but is Shakespeare compared to the movie. Despite being based on the movie, it still included a lot of elements from the games, put Balrog and Dee Jay on the right sides again, and even remembered Cammy had hints of a history with Bison at the time that were still unresolved at the time the series was made. On the downside, the animation in the second season is terribly low-budget, the series placed the heroes on a Brand X interpol Justice League-like squad of "Street Fighters", Balrog was now the tech expert, and M. Bison had to give out some truly atrocious (or totally awesome, depending on your perspective) zingers for some reason. And yet this show still managed to make an entire tribute episode for Final Fight... as well as portraying Gouken as alive some 15 years before Capcom made that canonical in Street Fighter IV. This episode should give you a real good idea of the quality of the animated series...
- Compaired to the Hong Kong-made Street Fighter movie Future Cops (aka Super School Overlord), the Hollywood film is great. For instance it made Vega into a hero, and Ken and E. Honda are turned into Bison's time-traveling henchmen. This movie is definetly So Bad Its Good.
- The anime Street Fighter II V takes allot of liberties with the source material. Ryu and Ken are made the leads and are just starting their journey (and are only in their late teens) when the series begins and are not yet the World Warriors. They end up getting their asses handed to them by Guile in a bar fight, inspiring the duo to go on a training trip worldwide, where they end up meeting the other Street Fighter characters: Chun-Li is a tour guide at Hong Kong and her father is still alive at the beginning of the series, Sagat is a wrongly convicted felon who befriends Ryu in jail, Dhalsim becomes a Yoda-like mentor to the duo, and Cammy is a Catholic assassin hired by Balrog, who is now a Shadowlaw spy implanted into the FBI. Like the more faithful American series Your Mileage May Vary
- Another good example for decay in Street Fighter is the Malibu comics which sport awful art, and an even worse storyline. You want to see Chun-Li about to make out with Ryu? How about fight scenes that constantly have people firing fireballs upwards only to have them land downwards. How bad was this comic? Capcom pulled the license by issue 3, to put this in perspective, Capcom has allowed a ton of awful adaptations, but the Malibu Comic was so bad that Capcom pulled the license. Malibu than revealed that their plan was to introduce Evil clones, and then implied that Sagat, Balrog, and Vega were evil clones of good street fighters.
- Street Fighter The Legend Of Chun Li makes all of the other adaptations facepalm in shame. For a short list, Ryu and Ken don't appear physically, M. Bison is a rich, Irish gentleman (what!?), Balrog is Shadaloo's second in command, Gen is young, Rose is M. Bison's daughter, and almost all of the entire cast is booted out.
- USA Network aired three more of these cartoons at the same time:
- Wing Commander: Took Exo Squad and swapped out the original elements for game elements.
- Mortal Kombat: Take the notoriously bloody and violent video game and adapt it towards the Saturday morning crowd. What could possibly go wrong? It turned it into GI Joe with martial arts instead of lasers, complete with Catch Phrase ("It's Kombat Time!").
- The not-game based but similarly horrible Savage Dragon. Turned the foul-mouthed, skirt-chasing, Hulk-with-a-brain Dragon of the comics into a Ninja Turtle with a badge.
- Any video game movie made by Uwe Boll. Massacres of his include House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne 1 and 2 (and I hear he's making a third one), Dungeon Siege, and apparently he's trying to make a Far Cry movie. His movies are so bad, that a petition is online to try and get him to resign. Apparently, all it needs is 1 million signatures. We can only hope.
- Boll's most recent film, Postal, is in some ways better about this than his other movies. It doesn't deviate from the plot as much as his older movies (mainly because the game didn't have enough of a plot in the first place), and is pretty faithful to the game's general tone and sense of humor. Whether or not this a good thing depends on the viewer, since a lot of people didn't like the source material.
- The 1993 animated pilot episode based off of the Bubsy games transformed the title character into a careless and arrogant Jerkass, when there was little evidence in the games that he was this type of character.
- The animated Art Of Fighting OVA had lackluster animation, a generic plot and made the protagonists, Ryo and Robert, bumbling heroes with their hair colours swapped. Oh and Ryo was depicted as poor.
- It's hard to say if the Doom movie underwent decay, especially when its source is none other than Doom itself, drawing more from the third game than any other though it may. The movie operates by throwing out the plot of the first two games and plot elements of the third game in lieu of rubbing scifi Applied Phlebotinum everywhere in hopes that it sticks together. Gone is hell and hell's demons and in is an "evil gene" and "extreme genetic engineering" in the way that only Hollywood can interpret it.
- Kirby: Right Back At Ya! — most of Kirby's friends are gone (although, in all fairness, the same can be said of many of the later video games), replaced with a bunch of new characters. Furthermore, King Dedede, who in the games merely had the misfortune of repeatedly being possessed by Dark Matter, is portrayed as being evil in his own right. Still being manipulated, of course, but he contacts N.M.E. of his own free will.
Close Video Games to Television and Film
Television and Film to Video Games
- Aeon Flux. The Movie. The Game. For the Nokia N-Gage. It exists. Go cry now.
- Rambo for the NES is actually not a terrible game...if you ignore the Rambo license. Somewhere, some marketing executive thought a Zelda II clone would be the perfect use of the Rambo intellectual property. Ostensibly, the game is based on First Blood Part II, but, well, do you remember the part in that movie wherein Rambo fights a giant spider in a cave with a knife? Yeah, me neither.
Close Television and Film to Video Games
Stage To Screen
- Many musicals filmed in the 1930's and 1940's were thoroughly gutted versions of the Broadway originals, no thanks to the Hays Office (which Broadway laughed at from time to time) or Hollywood's estimation of moviegoers' aptitudes. In many cases, plots were completely rewritten and the characters redesigned to the point of only dim resemblance to the original Dramatis Personae (this happened as late as the 1950's film version of Anything Goes). With musicals, Adaptation Decay could also involve throwing out almost all of the songs and replacing them with new ones commissioned from in-house songwriters, all the better for the studio-owned song publishers (this happened when Gay Divorce was filmed as The Gay Divorcée; the screenplay of On The Town was faithful because it was written by the writers of the original play but most of the songs were replaced). The cruel irony is that many of these witless movie versions can be easily found on video and there is little opportunity to see or hear more faithful representations.
- One radical example of Adaptation Decay was the 1938 movie version of Sweethearts, which reduced the original operetta to a Show Within A Show, and, just for sake of the story, assigned its authorship to fictional characters.
- The 1970s film adaptation of the hit Broadway play The Wiz portrayed Dorothy as a 24-year old kindergarten teacher. Okay, fair enough... but they ended up casting the 33-year old Diana Ross as Dorothy, getting her flamed by the critics for being too old for the role. It's a shame that they didn't cast Stephanie Mills, who'd already made her mark playing the role on Broadway, was the actual age of the character, and was supposed to get the part in the first place... until Ross began throwing a hissy fit to get it.
- George S. Kaufman, who wrote Stage Door with Edna Ferber, said the film adaptation of the play was so different that its title might as well have been changed to Screen Door.
- Then there is the famous anecdote about producer Sam Goldwyn, who during the 1930s wanted to make Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour into a movie without really knowing anything more than it was a hit on stage. The then-famous producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. protested, "You can't film that play! It's about lesbians!" Goldwyn responded, "So what? We'll make 'em Americans!" It ended up as These Three, with the lesbian relationship bowdlerized into a hetero love triangle.
- Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd, while for the most part true to the tone of the story and kept mostly intact, featured actors chosen entirely for their dramatic talent, ability to look the part, and their box office pull. While most of the cast sings passably well, every reedy note and pop inflection sticks out like a sore thumb in Sondheim's challenging score. The movie also left out the song "Kiss Me", and most of Johanna's character and development with it. Perhaps Burton attempted a non-musical version of the story, it would have been perfect.
- Even in the stage show, where she has considerably more to do, Johanna is not a demanding role dramatically. The primary requirement is a sturdy coloratura soprano that can handle her music, which is quite a bit more florid and operatic than most of the score. The film's Johanna was cast with a very young, very pretty girl who looks precisely as the 16-year-old Johanna ought to look (more so than the 20- and 30-somethings that usually play her onstage), and sings like Little Orphan Annie. Her "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" is not a revelation.
- The movie version of Bye Bye Birdie is far from the worst in Adaptation Decay: it preserves the characters and much of the score, but the plot is considerably rewritten: it includes a number of the original scenes, but also such new elements as a stupid subplot about a Super Speed formula.
- Well, how about Little Shop of Horrors? Originally a C-Grade horror/comedy farce by Roger Corman, made for around $30K and taking just two days to make, using recycled sets from a recently completed film which were scheduled to be torn down. Decades later it was completely revamped and turned into a successful musical theatre production, which was then in turn adapted into a musical motion picture. By this stage the resemblance to the original source was thin at best (only character names and base premise survived), but then it gets turned into a cartoon called Little Shop which deals with the main cast members deaged to be children with blood and violence aspects all but removed (Audrey 2/Junior turned into a meat-eating plant, not a blood thirsty cannibal, although some may not see the difference) and the sadistic dentist relegated to school bully.
- The movie version of Paint Your Wagon has considerable Adaptation Decay, despite its original author (Alan Jay Lerner) producing the movie and writing lyrics for several new songs. The original play's primary love plot centered around Ben Rumson's daughter and her Latin Lover; neither character is in the movie. The mining town's name was changed from Rumson Creek to No Name City, and the reason for its demise was changed from the gold running out to the destructive influence of Gold Fever. The movie also has no dancing (and a severe deficiency of competent singing actors), though the stage version was flush with Agnes de Mille ballets. (In particular, the troupe of Chorus Girls in the stage version were replaced with prostitutes in the movie, though their arrival was still heralded by "There's A Coach Comin' In.")
- Hair underwent a complete story transplant in its conversion into the so-called "Star Wars of musicals" in 1979 — 90% of the characters were thrown away, the rest were rebuilt from scratch and a couple new ones were added, none of the original story survived except for a plotline very loosely inspired by Bukowski's draft card worries, and most of the songs were repurposed to suit the new plot.
- A Shot in the Dark was loosely based on a play of the same name (itself adapted from a French play). The play had roughly the same premise as the movie — a maid is accused of her lover's murder, and it becomes clear to her lawyer that she's covering for somebody — but was a dialogue-driven, one-set mystery/comedy instead of a farce, and did not involve Clouseau; the humor largely came from the maid being The Ditz.
- Grease: take a popular musical about a bunch of 1950's high school kids, throw away half the songs and two-thirds of the plot, cast a bunch of obvious 20 somethings to play the kids, and throw in a irrelevant auto race and two Australian pop songs while you're at it. Sounds like a real recipe for sucess to me! Oh, and the sequel was even worse.
Video Games to Comic Books
- The comic book adaptation of Metal Gear Solid (later released as Digital Graphic Novel on the PSP) was, for the most part, an excellent Pragmatic Adaptation. The comic book adaptation of Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn't so good. The main character is reduced from a very dark take on an Older And Wiser Cool Old Guy into a rather flat Action Hero. The Scrappy was adapted from a clueless White Haired Pretty Boy into a rather more masculine, suave James Bond-type, which destroyed a large part of the plot, and his girlfriend, Rose, was all but written out. A tragic death scene is reduced to one page, and Otacon, who by now should have grown up, acts twice as shy and useless as he ever did in the games, and his best friend treats him like dirt. The Mind Screw element which was the reason for the game's appeal (and the only reason the story makes any sense whatsoever) was removed, and the story focused a lot more on Snake's side of the mission — which, essentially, ruined the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot of the game. The pacing is incredibly fast, meaning the drama has little time to sink in amidst the chaos. On the bright side, the pictures were pretty. And Fatman is pretty good in it.
- The Kingdom Hearts manga is almost an example of how not to adapt a game into manga. All of the fights are reduced to one attack, and then Talking The Monster To Death takes over. Sora's reduced from a naive kid to an Idiot Hero. Half the worlds are thrown out, apparently for space reasons. If you haven't played the game you'll be lost.
- Chain of Memories is even worse — not only does the Audience Sucker Punch return in full force, but Organization XIII is reduced from sinister conspiracy to Quirky Miniboss Squad... and played entirely for laughs. One truly painful moment sees Larxene, a sadistic "psycho bitch" in the game, be defeated by a sprinkler.
- The as-yet still untranslated novelizations also fit the bill. The writer adds new scenes and elements that completely contradict what's in game canon (example: Riku and Saix duke it out in mid-story, yet in the game Saix is surprised to see Riku alive at the end because ROXAS supposedly took care of him.) Let's not get started on Namine's Character Derailment either (going from a sad figure who accepted her fate to a perpetually wangsty emo girl.)
- As bad as the Disgaea anime is, it's nowhere nearly as horrible as the Disgaea manga. Severely butchers the story, makes no mention of the Defenders of Earth, and even botches the ending. The Disgaea 2 manga started out very faithful to the game, but is also falling into Adaptation Decay because half the story is missing. Chapters 4-5, and 9-13 are gone. On top of that, it's only 4 volumes, (to properly do the game's plot justice, the manga needed 9-10 volumes).
- The Mega Man Zero manga is the most foul example of Adaptation Decay ever done to a video game. Butchers the story, butchers every character except Fefnir, and replacing the female lead with a Scrappy Bratty Half Pint. The worst examples are Omega going from Ax Crazy to cross between Megatron and Cobra Commander and Ensemble Dark Horse Harpuia going from honorable commander just doing his job to heartless bastard.
- Oh god, Archie Comics’s Nights Into Dreams. The covers are very nice, at least for the first three comics, and they had a few interesting ideas. That's it. The rest fulfills this trope to a T. A few examples: Elliot stealing most of Claris’ spotlight, him deciding to climb to the second floor of a house to hear her song better, talking nightopians, Jackle misspelled as Jackal, a smith forging a spire on a wooden table, and NiGHTS abandoning Elliot mid-fight without a word of explanation. All of this happens in the first comic. It Gets Worse. The art doesn’t help either -– there are inconsistencies not just from the games, but from panel to panel. Any original design is either bland or weird (Madame Puffilla embodies the latter), everyone likes to pose randomly, the art style itself varies from bland to horrible, and there’s a strange overdose of pink.
- The Metroid manga. Oh dear God, the Metroid manga. The first issue isn't scandalously bad, but future installments quickly devolve into abysmal quality. Samus ends up utterly chickified, there are a pair of alien teenage sidekicks who alternate between being more Bad Ass than Samus and being complete and utter loads, and Samus has a pet — a giant sentient space bunny. The Feds run around with a huge Idiot Ball for the entire series, meanwhile the Space Pirates couldn't care less about Metroids (their entire motivation in the games) because they've got a planet-killing micro-black-hole-generating superweapon. Nobody gets more than a two-panel explanation of goals or motivations, and main series characters (Old Bird, Adam Malkovich) are reduced to cardboard cutouts. Every ship, weapon and technology apparently runs on some combination of Applied Phlebotinum and The Force; the descriptions aren't even consistent from one issue to the next. Mother Brain has serious mommy issues, and Ridley gets talked to death in three panels. Oh, and Samus develops a raging case of PTSD, turning her into a Death Seeker about two thirds of the way through... but she's instantly cured by a big group hug from the last few Chozo on Zebes. What. The. Hell.
- Bubble Bobble — The comic in the NES port's manual deviated, from the premise of two human boys, Bub and Bob, who suffer Involuntary Shapeshifting into cute bubble dragons and must rescue their human girlfriends, to that the boys and their girlfriends (who are all just stated as "brontosaurus buddies") and everyone else were all living peacefully as bubble dragons in the first place. Bub and Bob find out that "two of their brontosaurus buddies had been abducted by" someone whose name was a victim of Woolseyism. This comic is the result of a mix of Did Not Do The Research and Dinosaurs are (cute Bubble) Dragons, although they probably couldn't possibly have been informed about the real plot either.
- The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon manga follows the plot of the original game pretty loosely — for one thing, the main character keeps his memories of his human life and is capable of defeating most every enemy with one attack. For another thing, the manga ends with the defeat of Groudon, while the game continues quite a bit afterwards. And then it turns out to be All Just A Dream...
- The Legend Of Zelda goes back and forth in quality on its manga adaptations, but this trope is most evident in its American comic book published by Valiant Comics in the late 80's. Bearing something of a superficial similarity to the cartoon show, it shares many of its problems, like Link's characterization as a lovesick teenager who just won't shut up to the triforce just being a really powerful gem instead of a Cosmic Keystone. Case in point: one issue has Ganon's plan revolve around the fact that for one day each year, the Triforce will spontaneously stop working. And apparently, the Triforce of Power is truly evil and turns Link into a pig, instead of being neither good nor evil like in the games. And the art for the series isn't even consistent. In one issue, Ganon is the familiar pig-man we know from the games, but in another he's always covered in a cloak so you can't see his face.
Close Video Games to Comic Books
From Television to Movies
- Perhaps one of the worst offenders is the film version of Inspector Gadget, which took all the menace (the defining character trait) out of Claw and turned the Gadget Car into a (very, very irritating) character. Also, the movie screwed up in every other possible way too. It was just indescribably awful.
From Movies to Television
- La Femme Nikita: The original movie was about a violent, psychopathic, drug-addicted girl who kills a cop in cold blood (and then attacks several other people, including the judge at her trial) who is recruited by a government agency to be a cold-blooded killer, which has the side effect of dragging her through redemption. (Maybe, depending on how you read it. What can I say, it's French!) The TV series removed all the redemption plot garbage by making Nikita an innocent wrongly accused of a crime she did not commit in no need of redemption at all. Whether this counts as "decay" though is arguable, as the series did find its own voice and a different style of moral dilemma to focus on.
- Martin Scorcese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1973) was a heavy drama about a widowed housewife who tries to start a new life while supporting herself and her young son as a waitress, while dealing with (among other things) an abusive boyfriend and the bitterness of seeing her dream of a singing career put on hold. A couple years later the film was adapted as a wacky, lighthearted sitcom called Alice.
Webcomics
- Jennifer Diane Reitz's Pastel Defender Heliotrope began its life as a light-hearted short story for her husband's Kamishibai story viewing program, which still maintains a small community of authors to this day. In this story, Heliotrope is awoken by her "Papa" to stop the evil Chartreuse's rampage and generally wishing for the chance to remain activated (and thus alive). She befriends a young girl named Fuschia, defeats Chartreuse, and convinces her father to adopt her as his daughter. Everyone except the villain lives happily ever after. The webcomic...let's just say that buried somewhere in a heaving monstrosity of incomprehensibility, massive ego, and general Anvilicious attacks against the entire male gender and religion, some of the events from the original short story will eventually appear after having been run through the Deus Angst Machina filter the comic runs on.
- For just one example, in the Kamishibai, Chartreuse's battle helmet is defeated by Heliotrope's final attack and she goes to jail upset by her loss. In the comic Heliotrope's final attack turns Chartreuse, in this storyline already established as a rape victim and general chew toy of the universe's male population, into a naked, infantile girl that is immediately beaten to death because she was Too Good For This Sinful Earth.
Fictional treatments of Adaptation Decay
- Neil Gaiman's short story The Goldfish Pool follows a young writer struggling to adapt one of his novels to film. Due to Executive Meddling, he is forced to discard the title, plot, characters, themes and even genre of his original book; ultimately changing it from a psychological horror story into a romantic comedy. This is at least partially based on his own experience trying to adapt Good Omens (cowritten by him and Terry Pratchett) into a film. There's a screenplay out there, but the plot of the script and of the book bear very little resemblence to each other.
- Parodied in Homestar Runner with Limozeen: But They're In Space!.
- There was also a bonus Strong Bad Email where Strong Bad described how Hollywood would handle a Strong Badman movie: badly.
- An episode of Two And A Half Men involves a lot of Did Not Do The Research in the narrative: Jake feigns having read Lord Of The Flies (his book report assignment), while Charlie feigns having read the Oshikuru comic book (the Animated Adaptation of which he's writing the theme song). In the Oh Cisco moment, after a montage of Jake trying to help Charlie understand his source material, we get to watch Alan, Jake, and Charlie watch the premiere of Oshikuru. The show uses the exact same theme Charlie had originally written with a Lighter And Softer twist. Jake voices his incredulity, while Charlie simply says, "The network liked it."
- Parodied here with Watchmen.
- Fans' typical reaction was reflected here in Weregeek.
Close Fictional treatments of Adaptation Decay
Show Within A Show examples
- An episode of Blossom once demonstrated almost instant Adaptation Decay in action: Nick once had a chance to pitch a TV show concept about his family life to a pair of network execs. The concept was called "Rosie", and was essentially a recursive version of Blossom. By the time the network execs got done with it, though, "Rosie" had transformed from a gentle family comedy to a detective show starring chimpanzees.
- Married With Children also demonstrated this in an hour-long ep, where Christine Applegate's talk show went from being an edgy local cable show... into a show with practically no bite at all when a network picked it up. Example: heavy metal guitarists yelling "Sex!" replaced with nice accordionists saying "Book."
- The aptly named movie Adaptation portrays a highly self-referential example of this.
- Power Rangers played around with this type in the Dino Thunder episode "Lost and Found in Translation". In it, the Rangers discover a Japanese television show which seems to be based off of their adventures (which is really an episode of Abaranger, the show used to create Dino Thunder). Conner is initially upset with the show for, in his opinion, making a mockery of both the Rangers and America, but by the end of the episode he learns An Aesop about diversity.
- Briefly seen in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Lucifer Rising, when Bernice Summerfield sees the end of a 22nd century holo-drama in which a beautiful computer expert defeats the Martians and claims the handsome museum curator. She is surprised to realise that (despite the wildly anachronistic costumes) this is meant to be the Martian invasion of 2090... just as the readers (if they know their Who lore) are surprised to realise it's meant to be 1969 serial The Seeds of Death, in which the computer expert is a Spock and the museum curator is an elderly eccentric. And there's apparently no mention of the Doctor's involvement either.
- Mercilessly parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episodes featuring the Show Within A Show Wormhole X-Treme!, a television program based loosely on the "actual" events of the Stargate program which is allowed to go ahead by the powers-that-be in order to act as a cover for the real thing. Each episode that features Wormhole takes liberties with the original source material for laughs (Wormhole X-Treme! is so named because, according to the execs, titles with "X" in them are currently playing well with audiences), and hangs numerous lampshades on various plot holes and inconsistencies in previous SG-1 episodes.
- According to Les Luthiers, the Las Majas Del Bergantín routine (a Savoy Opera about a Spanish ship whose crew is attacked by pirates) is based on a novel... about a Bulgarian lumberjack and his parrot. The only character left from the original novel was the parrot. This is forgivable, considering that Les Luthiers are a comical group and Las Majas del Bergantín is one of their most hilarious performances.
- Peter Griffin of Family Guy took this to unseen levels with "his" play of The King and I — which, ironically, ended up being a huge success much to Lois's chagrin.
- One episode of The X Files centred around a film being made based on Mulder and Scully's work. The Big Bad is an insane bishop using a magical artifact to take over the world, his henchmen are gun-toting zombies, Mulder cracks cheesy one-liners during fight scenes and there is a romantic subplot between the two agents.
- Arrested Development: Maeby's film project goes from being an adaptation of The Old Man And The Sea to something called The Young Dude and the Beach, which certainly sounds like decay.
- One movie of iCarly involved their show being syndicated for television. By the end of the film, the cameraman had been kicked off, they added a zany mascot, the Deadpan Snarker sidekick was fired too, and when the lead quit, she was replaced by a sitcom family, and they changed the title. Yet the network considered it the same show, despite not even being In Name Only.
Close Show Within A Show examples
|
|
