I don't see any Stars and they sure aren't Trekkin.
Holmes: That's not a clue Watson, that's your jar of jam.
New Watson: JAM!
Old Watson: Holmes, please....
Holmes: New Watson likes jam. We're very happy.
— "
The Case Of The Two Watsons,"
Kate Beaton
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).
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.
This does not mean "adaptation that's worse than the original". There are many cases of this that show
Tropes Are Not Bad, as sometimes the derivative work can be good for its own merits, or the changes are genuinely for artistic reasons that work well.
Tropes
Distantly related to
Sequelitis.
They Just Didnt Care is most of the times related to this trope.
Adaptation Decay is among the
Tropes Of Legend.
Now divided into:
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
- In Neil Gaiman's short story The Goldfish Pool, 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.
- Extras "Are you havin' a laugh? Is he havin' a laugh?"
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.
- Hellboy: All of the in-universe adaptations of the life of 1930s pulp hero The Lobster are said to be massive examples of this, utterly rife with Stylistic Suck. Worst of these are a series of Mexican movies in which he is not only given the name "Lobster Johnson" (the last name taken from the Pulp Magazine version's secret identity), but is also portrayed as a Masked Luchador. Hellboy still enjoys the stuff, though.
- The show-within-a-show in The Band Wagon starts off as a musical adaptation of the Faust legend. Decay and Stylistic Suck rapidly ensue.
- In Californication, David Duchovny's character wrote a book called "God Hates Us All". The movie adaptation became a romantic comedy called "Crazy Little Thing Called Love". His daughter points out that that shows his work reflected his deeply-buried idealistic side when trying to sweet-talk him.
- The original novel Logan's Run was about an anti-Utopian novel where people lived in Jetsons-style hedonism but were euthenized at age 21; this became a movie about a post-apocalyptic society where people lived inside a hedonistic domed city and were killed at 30 but believed they were "renewed" or reborn. This then became a television series where the main characters (played by different actors, naturally) went outside and freed other societies from similar fates each week... until it died a horrible, slow death through cancellation.
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