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Subjective Trope
Adaptation Decay
Mercutio: Will's writing a novelisation of the Lord of the Rings movies?
Ophelia: Yes! Can you talk to him about it?
Mercutio: You bet I will!
Ophelia: Good, I knew I could count on a real fantasy fan like you.
Mercutio: I'll see if he can put in some catgirls!
— Irregular Webcomic #768

I say Yugi, that plotline made a lot more sense in the original manga.
—Bakura, Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series

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.

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 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 only takes a few paragraphs in the book but is blown up to a mega-battle in the film, 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 predominate exception of shows like Beyblade and Yugioh 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.) 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:

Contrast with Adaptation Distillation. Distantly related to Sequelitis. If done especially badly, it can lead to Epic Fail.
Examples:

From Literature to Movies or Television
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • Note however that everyone involved with the Brett adaptations - starting with David Burke and Edward Hardwicke, the actors who played Watson - has been upfront about their desire to subvert this one all along. Throughout the series, Watson is portrayed as noticeably more intelligent and on-the-ball than is standard.
      • In a newer remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson is the main focus of roughly the first third of the movie, and is shown to be eloquent, charming and an all around intelligent fellow. Contrast this to Holmes, who has been living up in a stone shack with no hygienic facilities for roughly a month, and who did not know, prior to meeting Watson, that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
  • 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.
  • The film version of Robert A Heinlein's Starship Troopers completely removed the philosophical questions of the book while transforming the all-male power-armored Mobile Infantry who go to extreme lengths to recover their own wounded and dead into a co-ed showering Redshirt Army who see nothing wrong with ''killing'' their own wounded. Director Paul Verhoeven subverted the entire book, seemingly in order to satirize what he (and a great many other readers) felt to be Heinlein's fascistic tendencies. Whether adaptations that parody their source material really count as Adaptation Decay is a question for another day.
    • Verhoeven admits that he never got more than a few chapters into the book, which raises the question of whether lazy adaptation can count as parody.
      • The reason Verhoeven never bothered to read much of the book is that the film wasn't actually intended to be an adaptation or parody of Starship Troopers itself, but instead a satire of that kind of gung-ho militarist Sci-Fi. The studio optioned the rights to Starship Troopers and made Verhoeven change character names.
    • The main enemy, the "Arachnids", was, in the book, a highly technical race. In the movie, they are just bugs who breed into missile throwing mutants. It's never quite explained how they manage to be a real threat to humanity, how a planet based species manages to send asteroids across light years to hit Earth without technology is never explained. It's perhaps worth noting here that it's implied in the movie, however, that the bugs are merely scapegoats and it's in fact the humans who are the evil invading aliens.
    • As for the all male Mobile Infantry becoming co-ed in the movie, to be fair the book was published in 1959, an era where the idea of women being soldiers in the United States was unheard of. In the book, while the Mobile Infantry was all male, all space pilots were female. The book explains that women, in general, have faster reflexes and handle g's better. Heinlein's later works had female soldiers (and male space pilots) and he would have likely approved of the Mobile Infantry becoming co-ed (while decrying the rest of the movie).
    • And of course the animated series based on the movie weirded it up again, focusing a lot more on the whole fighting giant bugs in space thing by combining all the awesome military things - powered armour, explosive CGI firefights - and throwing about half the philosophical social commentary out the window. Surprisingly, the series was still quite good. Unfortunately, the studio ran out of funding.
  • 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).
    • This troper thinks that there was a perfectly good reason for changing the title - Walden Media butchered things so badly that the film was not worthy of sharing a name with its putative source material.
  • I Am Legend. Three times and counting. The most recent was originally the most faithful one, but last minute ending change removed the twist that was the entire point of both the novella and the movie, making it the least faithful.
    • 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 (quite often deliberate) Adaptation Decay — compare and contrast, for example, the original book versions of Bedknob and Broomstick (no plurals in the book title) and Mary Poppins with their 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.
    • This troper is a fan of both the book and movie Mary Poppins and finds the decay actually isn't too bad in that case; Mary manages to retain a surprising amount of her edge. Bedknob and Broomstick, on the other hand, is mangled really badly.
      • This is likely because Poppins creator P. L. Travers had some say in the movie's script, and stubbornly fought Walt Disney at every turn. Whether any specific idea was good or bad is left to the viewer, but the result was the best live-action film Disney ever made, and, as noted, something that captured the spirit of the books.
      • This troper notes that Disney bought the Bedknob and Broomstick rights as a plan B measure because getting the rights for Mary Poppins was so difficult, so they probably were conceiving that movie from the beginning as a poor-man's Poppins. Once it was made and became a huge hit, it probably made sense for the company to do the poor-man's version too in hopes of having a similar hit.
  • 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 (transforming Rudyard Kipling's rather savage Mowgli stories with rather racist under-tones into a cheerful musical with a skat-singing orangutan), and Pocahontas (completely rewriting the actual life story of a real historical figure to give her a romance that never occurred and a pack of Empathy Pets). Hercules is even worse, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the original Greek myths.
    • 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 was even filmable in the first place as a cute kiddie extravaganza boggles the mind.
      • This was actually a subtle nod to the book, where Quasimodo talked to the gargoyles to keep himself company. Now notice who is the only character in the movie to see the talking gargoyles, and they take on a much more disturbing connotation.
    • 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). And let's not get started on the talking dragon.
      • ...who was actually in the original. His part was smaller, though.
  • 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 (which this editor unfortunately no longer owns) reveals this to be something of a justified trope: 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.
    • 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.
  • 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 name of the Big Bad, and the name of the show they appear on.
  • 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. 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 actually resembled its namesake...
  • This editor, who read Oliver Twist, remembers being 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.
    • The worst offenders would be the anime Hellsing and the 2004 Hugh Jackman film Van Helsing. In the former, Hellsing is isn't a person so much as an entire organization devoted to killing monsters (although there is a Hellsing family at its core related to Stoker's doctor). In the latter, the titular Van Helsing 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...In theory.
      • Van Helsing also changes the character's first name from "Abraham" to "Gabriel", and proceeds to imply that he is the archangel of the same name.
      • This troper has heard that the name change was because the original character is public domain, but a new character could be copyrighted.
    • Hellsing is more of a far in the future sequel than an adaptation of the novel, Is implied all the events in Dracula happened more or less the way described in the book except for Dracula´s death, the Hellsing organization was founded by Van Helsing himself probably after the end of the affair, to be prepared for future attacks of vampires and continued after his death by his descendants.
  • 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).
      • Dahl did write an early draft of the script for the first movie, sticking very closely to the book, but it was rejected on the grounds that none of the characters (not even Charlie) were sympathetic.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.)
  • 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.
    • 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 actually 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.
    • Another, more minor but still annoying, point about the animated version 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 movie version of Eragon. Even fans of the book hated it.
  • Howl's Moving Castle: In the novel by Diana Wynne Jones, Old Sophie is a much stronger character, Howl is a drama queen and womanizer (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) and turns into a bird, Michael is a child, 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.
    • Strangely, the actor who voices Howl (Christian Bale) in the English dub is actually Welsh, but he uses his American voice in the film.
  • 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 (who almost became the next James Bond, to note).
    • Having read the book, the thing this editor found most disturbing was the complete removal of the character of the creepily titled "Warden of England", who served as the story'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.
    • Even worse is the following: They switched the attack on Bolvangar and the Svalbard incident thus creating a whole new plothole. If Iorek Byrnison is king of the bears, why the heck didn't he bring some of them to Bolvangar to crush the Magisterium's soldiers? Lord Asriel is now free and sitting in a laboratory he got from bribed bandits instead of being kept prisoner by the bears and Billy Costa is still alive. They even cut the Downer Ending.
    • Worst by far is the films treatment of the whole concept of dæmons/souls. Apparently, if you lose yours, you can run along and get a new one. Yes, that's right, you can just get a new soul.
      • Where in the film did this occur? This troper just saw it on DVD and saw no mention of getting new souls, and even though Billy Costa lived it is still falls within the context of the book I.E. people living without daemons/souls.
      • I agree with the above; I'm pretty sure Ma Costa said something along the lines of 'we'll find your dæmon', not 'we'll get you a new one'.
      • But it didn't even happen to Billy in the book; it was a different character. Which of course makes it even more of this trope.
  • 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.
    • Tell this troper about it. Any time his brother re-reads the novels, he watches the movie and alternates between pissed off beyond all reason and scarily sad. You should hear said brother rant about how the scene in the Cracks of Doom was changed. (Not that this troper doesn't AGREE with his brother, it's just that he's so goddamn vocal about it.)
    • Faramir is not a villain, dammit!
  • The anime version of Metropolis was inspired by a comic that was inspired by briefly glancing at the poster for the original Metropolis. Aside from the fact that they are both set in a futuristic city that is building something called The Tower of Babel and they both involve a female robot, the two films have nothing whatever in common. To catalogue the plot departures would be an endeavour to madness, but the most jarring omission was the entire socialism of the original film, in favour of something about mecha.
    • Taking a snappy name an adaptation does not make.
  • The Temperance Brennan novel series by Kathy Reichs features a worldly, recovering alcoholic, single mother as the main character who splits her time between teaching in North Carolina and serving as the forensic anthropologist for the province of Quebec, in Canada. Bones features a Tempe Brennan who's at least ten years younger and an almost textbook TV Genius who has no concept of how to operate in society. Oh, and she works out of Washington, teamed up with a bunch of CSI lab rat clones and a ridiculous magic crime-solving holodeck. Bitter, me? Not at all, where would you get such ideas?
    • This troper, a native of Washington, D.C., has her own complaints about CSI-DC Bones, which is (except for a few aerial shots of the National Mall at night) set not in Washington, but very clearly in the United States of Generica.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • This troper, being a sci-fi geek, was appalled upon watching the I, Robot movie for the first time. It bore no resemblance to the actual collection of short stories, or anything by Isaac Asimov, for that matter. ( The fact that the robots manage to break the Three Laws and rebel against humanity completely ignore that Asimov hated the idea of evil robots, and created the unbreakable Three Laws solely so such a thing would be avoided.)
    • That's because it wasn't supposed to be an adaptation.
    • Asimov did come up with the zeroth law, a concept very similar to the one that makes the robots rebel in the movie. Still, he avoided that conclusion because he hated the idea of evil robots.
      • There exists an unfilmed (and very likely never-to-be-filmed) script for I, Robot, liberally but respectfully adapted by no less than Harlan Ellison. Try and find its serialization in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, then read it and weep for the great movie that will never be made.
  • The movie adaption 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.
    • This troper does not recall a heavy-handed, preachy environmentalist subplot in the original story, to the point that it could be considered the root cause of the events.
  • In the 1930's 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, changing 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 text books 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 this troper views the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice 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 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.
  • How on earth has the 1931 version of Frankenstein not been mentioned here?!
  • Robin Hood has somehow become a "champion of the poor" who "stole from the rich to give to the poor"... 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).

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. It's sort of hypocritical on Moore's part, as the original was also a means to express his political beliefs even if it is more subtle about it.
      • Not entirely true; 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.
      • It's also worth noting that Moore wasn't against them expressing their political beliefs, but felt that V for Vendetta spoke very specifically to the audience it was written for in the time of its writing. When you change the core themes of the story it stops making sense to adapt when you could just as easily tell a new story that truly speaks to the audience you are aiming at, as V for Vendetta the graphic novel itself did.
  • 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 but in the film was given vampire powers. Dr. Hawley Griffin, who was a psychopathic rapist, was changed to Rodney Skinner, a rather noble thief who stole Griffin's invisibility formula (although to be fair 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.
    • Funnilly enough, Stan Lee actually liked it... If only I could find that video interview, that was pretty interesting.
    • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
      • What, you mean the Negative Space Wedgie? I was so busy waiting for the robot to show up, I must have missed it! Oh, and the once awesome Silver Surfer gets weaksauced in this, relegated to basically destroying the Space Wedgie and doing a lot of moping.
  • Dostoyevsky Comics was a comic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. With Raskolnikov as Batman. I Am Not Making This Up.
    • Author actually said it was a joke.
  • Batman. Entire entries could be filled with this character's oscillation between tough, pragmatic Anti Hero and gadget-centric, optomistic 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.
  • Let's not forget Catwoman, as much as we'd like to. 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 with the films, but the 1982 film actually restored characters like Punjab and Asp that weren't in the stage show, and the climactic scenes are rather more...exciting than onstage.
  • Constantine adapts Hellblazer, replacing bisexual, English, Magnificent Bastard, Technical Pacifist magician lead John Constantine with an American, Catholic, straight Church Militant played by Keanu Reeves. After that, the other changes seem so small...
  • 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.)
  • The upcoming adaptation of Wanted seems to be doing this, shifting the narrative from a group of world-controlling supervillains to an order of assassins that kills those who need to be killed. Then again, we've only got the commercials to go on at this point.
    • To be fair, Mark Millar personally reviewed and approved of the changes in the script. Unfortunately, he confirmed and expressed some regret over the fact that "the superheroes are dead" setting was not included in the film.
    • Having watched the trailer and seen the advertising blurb, this troper can partially confirm that the only thing that the adaptation has in common with the original is the name of the lead male and female characters. Expect more complete confirmation tomorrow when I've been to see it.
      • Yup, went to see it and I can confirm this, although they did use a couple of lines from the comic, mostly in the wrong place. The main character is changed from the amoral bastard into a sympathetic hero figure with special adrenaline-related powers that let him move and react faster. Everybody else has these powers as well. And don't even mention the bullet curving...
      • Especially jarring since the first part of the movie actually does follow the comic fairly faithfully, before going off on it's 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 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.
  • Spectacularly averted the only way it really can be by the TV version of The Middleman- aside from a few pop culture references being made a bit more mainstream, the first episode is pretty much word-for-word, shot-for-panel identical to the comic miniseries it's adapted from. Except that Wendy doesn't have red hair on TV.
  • 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.

Anime and Manga
  • Tsukihime... just... *sob* What anime?◊
  • 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 actually is.
    • The original author directed it... you can't say they didn't try.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Mai-Otome manga has severe differences from its anime counterpart. This was likely intentional on the part of Sunrise, as they don't want all entries in the Mai-HiME project to be completely similar to each other. Since it was Anime First, an identical manga adaptation would basically be the original without color, sound, or motion. Sunrise comes up with a setting and characters, then the writers of the anime, and the writer of the manga tell completely different stories using those characters. Both anime are shonen Magical Girls shows (with Otome also being a yuri series), while the mangas are generally intended for older audiences, with far more fanservice and a partial focus on Love Triangles (Mai-HiME) and Unwanted Harems (Mai-Otome).
  • Excel Saga parodies this; the beginning of the first episode starts with a signed statement by Koshi Rikdo, the