You and a pal are talking about movies, and you happen to praise a film that has been your favourite for as long as you can remember. Your pal remarks that although he liked the movie too, the book was much better.
Hang on — there was a book!?
Adaptation Displacement is the phenomenon by which a derivative work becomes successful enough to overshadow the original work completely.
It can happen with any type of media, but it tends to happen most often when a little-known book is adapted into a successful movie or television show. Even popular works can disappear, if the adaptation is successful enough.
If writers of ongoing media surrender to Adaptation Displacement, it can result in Ret Canon and Lost In Imitation.
Compare with Older Than They Think, Popcultural Osmosis, and More Popular Spin-off. Contrast with Ink Stain Adaptation and First Installment Wins. The musical equivalents are Covered Up and Breakout Pop Hit.
When a work is displaced by a parody, this is known as The Weird Al Effect.
When a sequel is much more well-known than the original, and is mistakenly thought to be the first instalment, this is known as Sequel Displacement.
This trope is somewhat subjective: it depends on your personal and cultural fields of reference, and most importantly on your age. Just because there must be someone out there who is more familiar with the adaptation than the original, it's not automatically an example of Adaptation Displacement.
Examples:
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Displaced by Anime or Manga
The Anime boom in America took place well before the Manga boom. As a result, more people were familiar with anime adaptations than the manga they were based on. For a while, the only place to talk about a manga series was the forum of the people translating the manga.
AKIRA, being close to the first anime that shocked viewers out of the Animation Age Ghetto, became a popular movie but is certainly more well-known than its expansive manga.
Furthermore, the Visual Novel medium (a kind of non-linear, interactive, digital graphic novel, like a cross between a Video Game and a Novel), is itself largely unknown in the Western world.
A lot of anime that was based on written novels or stories, especially Japanese Light Novels, is often mistakenly thought of by the Western world as being original stories or based on manga. Some notable examples:
Legend of Galactic Heroes by Yoshiki Tanaka. 10 volumes of main story, 4 volumes of side story, none published in English.
Haruhi Suzumiya - particularly since the first manga adaptation was mediocre, and the light novels weren't available in the US until after the anime was popular.
Perfect Blue is a comparatively mild example; it's fairly frequently mentioned that it's based on a novel, including on the DVD case for the anime... but you'll be hard-pressed to find a Westerner who has heard of the novel outside that, or knows anything about it.
Possibly as an attempt to avoid this, the first Spice and Wolf novel was released in English around the same time as the first season of the anime.
The Slayers anime is based off of a Light Novel series; the anime came out in 1995, five years after the first couple of novels were published. Like most Light Novel-originated series, most foreign fans find the anime as the truest source of canon. It is rather unusual in this case because the first season of the anime was released in the states one year after the it completed its run in Japan, and, as a dub released by Central Park Media, was one of the few 90's dubs that didn't suffer from any form of Macekre, Dub Name Change, or any other edits. Both the novels themselves and most of its manga adaptations weren't translated until the mid 2000's.
This also happens with the characters as well; in the novels, Lina and Gourry are the only protagonists; the chimera Zelgadis and the princess Amelia were their allies for the first eight novels, and they were replaced by treasure hunters Luke and Millina for the remaining seven. However, both Zelgadis and Amelia became extremely popular, and when newer anime seasons and manga were made, they were in them, quintessentially making the "Slayers" a four-man band instead of a duo. Very few fans outside of Japan know who Luke and Millina are, especially given that the Alternate Continuity manga The Hourglass of Falces has all six heroes together.
Battle Royale is originally a novel, but not everybody knows this. In fact, when Battle Royale was mentioned in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, the Swedish translation included a footnote telling the readers that Battle Royale is a movie and a manga.
There are many fans of the Studio Ghibli movie Howl's Moving Castle who are entirely unaware of the children's novel by Diana Wynne Jones on which it is based. It veers off into its own plotline and themes rather quickly. Those who take the time to read the book tend to be shocked by the difference. However, Diana Wynne Jones was apparently expecting this, and told them to do whatever they wanted with her script.
Same goes for Yu-Gi-Oh!, whose manga wasn't even about card games at first. Once the anime got to the US, it took a few months for the card game to show up as well. It doesn't help that 4Kids deliberately picked up the franchise because of the card game plot after how much money they'd made on Pokémon and its various components. The makers of the second anime did this too, so it's also not a surprise they sold it overseas on this — even elements of the storyline they adapted that had little card game elements in the manga had the Duel Monsters segments played up for the anime to sell the cards.
A shame too, since the manga had consistent artwork, the plot made much more sense and had a better Suspension of Disbelief, and it lacked the Merchandise Driven aspect that the anime had. Most people view the series as a joke BECAUSE of the anime and its dub.
A variation of this is the case of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, a Spin-Offthat greatly outpaced the original in terms of popularity. Reading through this wiki, you may get the impression that the Triangle Heart series only consists of the third game, which spawned Nanoha. This is also a straight example since Nanoha was originally a mini-scenario of the Triangle Heart 3 game. People still mistake clips from the original as a video game adaptation of the anime instead of the other way around.
Aside from a rather bizarre case of two first games getting an official release in Russia, of all places.
Sakura Wars 5 got a US release, and the ADV cases did all say "based on the hit game"... although ADV's translated TV series credits say "original manga by Ohji Hiroi" despite the fact that the manga version of Sakura Wars hadn't even started in Japan yet.
Few fans outside of Japan knew that there are Vampire Hunter DLight Novels until recently. And that they came first.
Love Hina is one of those cases (in the United States) where people very often know that a book/manga series exists, yet haven't really read it, and far more often have seen the anime.
Similarly, Mahou Sensei Negima! (whose manga is made by the same author as Love Hina above) has several anime adaptations, and most fans know about the first one the most (and it's a rather mediocre adaptation). The manga was being translated by Del Rey's manga division (now by Kodansha USA due to the latter going under) since 2005, and it wasn't until recently that fans have noted that an official translation was available, widely, for that long.
Another example is the When They Cry series, consisting of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni and Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. With Umineko it's managed to be somewhat averted, though, since a fan translation of the visual novel began before the anime first aired.
Show of hands, paws, flippers, or tentacles: who here knew that Digimon was originally conceived and designed as the Spear Counterpart of Tamagotchi? Or that Taichi was actually borrowed from an earlier manga wherein he and his (different) Digimon partner traveled the Digital World alone?
While both the Sailor Moon anime and manga are relatively well known, not nearly as many people are as familiar with its sister manga, Codename: Sailor V which stared Minako as Sailor V. It started before Sailor Moon did and Toei saw potential and asked Takeuchi to expand it with more characters. The end result was Sailor Moon.
This did change somewhat when Sailor V was finally published in America in 2011. However, it's sometimes treated as more of a spinoff.
There are fans of Sailor Moon in the US that don't even know the series was based on a manga.
For a long time, it was not too well known in English-speaking countries that Dragon Ball Z was a sequel series to Dragon Ball, or that it was based on a Japanese manga (without the Z in the title). Even when the original Dragon Ball did make it's US premiere in 2001, many believed it was merely a prequel to DBZ, a Babyfication of DBZ's characters, a spinoff of DBZ for a younger audience, or something OTHER than a proceeding show. While the manga was met with some success in North America, there are those who think it's an adaptation of the anime, and those who doesn't know it exists at all. There are also folks who don't even know Dragon Ball Z is Japanese.
It's easy to assume that BB Senshi Sangokuden is a SD Gundam take on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, even though the story itself is set within the existing BB Senshi continuity - region names that aren't the same anymore are still referenced i.e. the Nanban region to the south corresponds to Albion. Even character names are sometimes inherited: Moukaku Gundam carries the title of Ashurao from an actual Gundam Ashurao from earlier in the toyline.
It's hard to guess that Gungrave, a crime drama with some sci-fi mixed in for good measure actually originated as an adaptation of a lukewarmly received PS2 shooter. It's even harder to believe it after you find out about it, just because of how the action sequences in the show took a definite backseat to characterization and drama, and its overall heavy, depressing feel.
In the west, a few years ago if you told someone Fullmetal Alchemist they'd think of the iconic 2003 anime. Nowadays though, a lot of people know of the manga thanks to the new anime.
Azumanga Daioh, or really anime based off 4koma 5period.
The anime Basilisk is based off a series of novels of the same title.
The 1985 series Robotech is a Cut-and-Paste Translation of Superdimension Fortress Macross, Superdimension Calvalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. Despite modern anime fans bashing its redundant narration and clumsy translation, Robotech continues to surpass the popularity of Macross in the USA, which was the only popular anime of the three in Japan. Southern Cross was a total flop, and Mospeada is largely forgotten. Original Macross continues, more or less, with sporadic sequels and prequels of which Macross Plus has become a classic in its own right and Macross Frontier was one of the most successful anime series on its release year. Even ADV's recent attempt to market the original Macross series on DVD (including a non-Robotech dub) failed due to lack of interest, probably because unlike Robotech, it was never shown on American TV and for younger audiences it's too old.
While not as universal of a displacement as many examples due to the popularity of the original show, there is a fair amount of people that don't realize Powerpuff Girls Z is based on an earlier American cartoon The Powerpuff Girls, or think the anime came first.
Whilst Oldboy was a rather successful story about revenge following imprisonment, most people have only heard of its award-winning Darker and Edgierfilm counterpart. Originally a mystery/thriller story about protagonist Yamashita trying to discover why he was locked up for ten years, the Korean adaptation instead traded a lot of the tension, drama and reveals that probably wouldn't work in a 2 hour film, instead opting for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge approach. Considering the movie is infamous for having its protagonist remove a man's teeth with a claw hammer and eat a real living squid, it really isn't surprising people have a tendency to know and remember the movie version.
Unless you're French, you probably know Lupin III better than the Arsčne Lupin stories it was very loosely based upon.
Displaced by Comics
Today, Little Lulu is mostly known as a comic book despite debuting as a series of one-panel cartoons for the Saturday Evening Post.
The Barry Allen Flash and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern — and their relative legacies — are far more familiar to Joe Average than the Golden Age Jay Garrick and Alan Scott due to the Animated Adaptation of each (they were sort of displaced by their Silver Age versions even before the cartoons, but Super Friends cemented the newer heroes in popular culture).
In that same vein, the popularity of the Justice League animated series pushed the John Stewart version of Green Lantern into the minds of the mainstream audience. It got to the point that when trailers for the 2011 Green Lantern movie were released, many people wondered why the Green Lantern wasn't a black man.
Marvel Comics has a similar example with the Human Torch. Johnny Storm is the name most comic fans associate with the Human Torch and thanks to cartoons, video games, toys, and movies, even non-comic fans know about Johnny. There was, however, an unrelated Human Torch in The Golden Age of Comic Books published by Marvel's forerunner, Timely Comics. This character spent decades in limbo but had a stint on The Avengers, was in the WWII-era team The Invaders, and shows up on occasion.
Speaking of DC Comics, many of the properties they bought are now more closely connected to them rather than to the companies that created and popularized them — The Question and Captain Atom from Charlton Comics, Plastic Man from Quality Comics, and Captain Marvel from Fawcett Comics, who were ironically driven out of business by DC.
Robotman was actually a children's toy in the beginning, which later became a merchandise-driven comic strip. The toys fizzled out, but the strip was doing well, so it continued as an increasingly bizarre and subversive strip. Eventually the character was written out and the strip was retitled Monty.
Another DC Comics example: Many comics fans are aware that Caine and Abel of The Sandman were originally the narrators of two of DC's horror comics (House Of Mystery and House of Secrets). But do they know that the same goes for the three sisters (The Witching Hour), Lucien (Tales From Ghost Castle), Destiny of the Endless (Weird Mystery Tales), Eve (Secrets of Sinister House, in which she has a raven said to be the soul of a dead human) and ultra-obscure Dreaming denizen the Fashion Thing/Mad Yuppie Witch (The Unexpected as the Mad Mod Witch)?
And are they aware that in Starman, Mason O'Dare's girlfriend Charity used to be the host of Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion?
And how many people know that Jed Walker was originally from the 1970s Sandman stories his introduction deconstructs?
In a similar vine the Marvel character Hellcat actually was actually a Golden Age character from the comic 'Patsy and Hedy' before she immigrated into the Marvelverse and the superhero genre.
Displaced by Films (Animated)
Most classic fairy tales and works of children's world literature have been eclipsed by the Walt Disney film versions. (See Disneyfication.)
Almost every retelling of Snow White since 1937 has the dwarfs described as individual characters, while the original story doesn't describe them that way. The original story has the Evil Stepmother try two other tactics to unsuccessfully kill Snow White, before she finally tries to use the poisoned apple. In Disney's version he only focused on the apple narrative. Also, the Prince doesn't kiss Snow White back to life, but decides to take her coffin with him, whereupon the thing drops on the ground making the piece of apple that Snow White swallowed fall out of her mouth. Give all this, it's ironic that the tale's one most remembered line ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall...") was worded differently in the Disney version ("Magic mirror on the wall...").
Most of Disney's films are based on previous sources, even less obvious ones like 101 Dalmatians (which was originally a book). The most notorious of these displacement sources is Dumbo, which is based on a experimental children's book (a scroll with pictures) that had an insanely low print run that Walt himself hand-picked out of a bookstore for a couple bucks. They share a basic plot and not much else.
Also unusual, because (in the first film, at least) Gopher wants you all to know that "he's not in the book".
Believe it or not, Bambi is also based on a book - which is hilarious when you consider the original poster was a picture of the book. Also an example of Disneyfication: the novel was intended for adult audiences.
Even Lady and the Tramp, which was based on a short story called "Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog". Walt read it in Cosmopolitan, bought the rights, and actually had the author write a novelization of the planned movie which came out two years before the film itself. This was so people would be familiar with the story, since most people associated the Disney studio with adapting famous tales, and it was thought that people wouldn't watch the film if they didn't know there was a book. How many of you knew there was a book? Thought so.
Disney's The Jungle Book is so well known, some people aren't aware that there really were Jungle Books. Or that Baloo was the serious one, and Bagheera the playful one. And Kaa was Mowgli's third mentor.
101 Dalmatians is based on the 1950s British junior novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, which also inspired a sequel, "The Starlight Barking". Many believe the animated Disney movie was the story's source.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?? by Gary Wolf. The original novel is about comic strip cartoon characters who speak in word balloons, and Eddie Valiant is in fact investigating Roger's murder. Even Wolf acknowledged that the movie was superior to the original, and wrote two sequels to the film, in which Jessica says that the original novel wasa dream.
How about Pinocchio The Story Of A Marionette by Carlo Collodi? This was possibly for the best; the original Pinocchio story was just plain weird, as Roberto Benigni unfortunately proved by making a more faithful live-action adaptation. The original was also an extremely irritating and tedious Author Tract about obeying your elders, a moral that definitely would not sell will in this modern age of pop-culture rebellion.
While not entirely Disney's fault, their 1951 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland forever linked the events of Through The Looking Glass with the very different book it was a sequel to. However, several adaptations in film and theater before it had been doing this well before. In fact, very few people even realize that characters like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum never appeared in the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it's not uncommon to hear people complain about their absence in works that are more faithful to the source material because they have become so accustomed to seeing the two books presented as Alice in Wonderland. It doesn't help that the two books are often published as a single volume under that title.
The Great Mouse Detective was also based on a book series, Basil of Baker Street (which was obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes). Ratigan's Basil doll closely resembles Basil from the original book's illustrations.
There are those who think that Disney created Peter Pan from whole cloth in 1953, with their still-classic animated motion picture. People (usually children, it must be said), are surprised to hear it was a book back in 1904... based off the original stage play that debuted in 1902. There is a rather larger section of the populace who believe that Disney currently own the copyright on Peter Pan. They don't, that belongs to Great Ormond Street Hospital in perpetuity; note in the UK; it's in the public domain in the US they get royalties on all derivative works, but cannot stop anybody from making something they don't want made (hence Disney rolling out its new Tinker Bell movies).
The Little Mermaid doesn't have a happy ending. The mermaid becomes part of the sky and never marries her prince. Also, the Sea Witch is, in contrast with the Disney movie, not a real villain and more of a simple, amoral saleswoman who grants magical favors for a hefty price (like in the Disney movie, the price here is the mermaid's voice...but it's done by taking her tongue away!)
A number of Disney movies only displace their original counterparts to children or intensely undereducated people, but it still happens. For example with Robin Hood, and Aladdin.
A curious example, but still true - outside of America, you'd be surprised how many people will act shocked that Pocahontas and John Smith were real people and met and interacted in real life.
How many of us know — and how many of our kids will know in the future — that The Princess and the Frog was based on a 2002 children's novel called The Frog Princess (itself a variant on "The Frog Prince", a story collected by the Brothers Grimm)? The novel only has a few similarities with the movie, such as the New Orleans setting, voodoo as a plot device and the heroine turning into a frog as well after kissing the prince. The novel has multiple sequels, too, collectively known as Tales of the Frog Princess.
The original concept for The Emperor's New Groove was based on Mark Twain's novel The Prince And The Pauper. It's understandable that nobody remembers this, since the original concept was ditched and it was turned into a meta-parody of itself, full of Lampshade Hanging, instead.
Disney's animated short version of The Three Little Pigs is another example that's completely taken over the original fairy tale. The pigs all flee to the third pig's house, while in the original the Big Bad Wolf just eats the two of them.
While not part of the Disney Animated Canon, Recess Schools Out is starting to turn into this. The show it's based on isn't currently in reruns, but whenever Disney Channel or Disney XD feel generous, they'll show the movie, and it being aired on the premium movie channels sometimes, and some stores still carry the DVD (Store such as Walmart don't sell it in the store, but do sell it online, and stores like f.y.e. or BJ's sometimes carry it). And then Disney might want to rerun the show itself, leading to younger children to think the show was based on the movie.
The Shrek series of films is based on an obscure picture book by William Steig which has overall little to do with the films. (Steig's son Jeremy Steig, a jazz musician, shows up in Shrek Forever After as the Pied Piper playing one of his tunes — known to younger listeners through the Beastie Boys song "Sure Shot," which samples it.)
The Iron Giant is based on a book (The Iron Man by acclaimed writer and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes) bearing almost no resemblance to the movie.
How many viewers of Over the Hedge know about the newspaper comic on which it was based? We do see characters checking out the comic during the credits, but it's hard to make out on the screen; besides, many viewers don't stick around for credits.
FernGully: The Last Rainforest is a frequent target of mockery of the early 1990s enviromania craze; few realize that it was based on an Australian children's novel.
Many people are unaware that The Secret Of NIMH was based on a book called Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien.
How many of you have heard of or read The Brave Little Toaster by Thomas M. Disch? Now how many have seen the three animated films?
Rock-A-Doodle is based on a fairly obscure play by Edmond Rostand (more famous for Cyrano de Bergerac) called Chanticler. To name a few differences, the Edmond character isn't there, there isn't any magic, the Grand Duke is only a minor villain, and the Aesop of the play is centered around how, even though the rooster hero's crowing doesn't make the sun rise, he is still important to the farmyard by waking everyone up and keeping away predators.
Though J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings may be a influential work of fantasy literature and beloved by fans for decades, it took the 2001-2003 movie trilogy to introduce it to the vastly wider general public. His earlier work The Hobbit was a children's literature classic on its own but the prequel trilogy it inspired (the first part having been released in 2012) is having the same effect. Within the fandom there is a huge debate between fans who only like the books or the movies and those who like both.
Because the audience for Hollywood films is much larger than those for comic books, this trope comes into play almost by default. It is particularly true when relatively obscure comics are adapted to into major films, including:
Men In Black is loosely based off a relatively obscure comic book. The characters names and relative roles are there (Zed, K, and J, though J wasn't black and Zed was a computer), and they're MI Bs; that's about it.
A lot of people didn't know Hellboy was a comic before a movie, and that in many ways they're drastically different.
Everyone knows about the movie 300; not so many know that it's based on a Frank Miller comic book from the late 1990s. Both were also (very loosely) based on a real, historical battle.
The Crow. The 1994 film was a critical and commercial success, but how many people have read the original graphic novel, first published in 1989?
Wanted was not widely known to film audiences, who wouldn't have noticed that the film has almost nothing to do with the original comic.
James Bond is more famous as a movie icon than as a novel series, with the "Bond formula" being exclusive to the movies. However, the release of the 2006 version of Casino Royale was accompanied with a marketing push for the original books.
Many people who can quote the script of The Princess Bride by heart have never touched the novel it was adapted from. William Goldman wrote both.
The Godfather series is widely known as some of the best films ever made. The books, which were actually bestsellers when the first film was written, are best known for having been adapted into films.
Jaws was based on a best-selling novel that is almost completely forgotten today. Ironic, as the original posterreminds you that it's based on the book.
Jurassic Park is an impressive example. The book is the most popular novel of one of the most popular modern novelists, yet the film is one of the highest grossing films of all time, and ushered in the reign of the CG-driven blockbuster. The film was so popular that Crichton used its plot rather than the one from his own novel when writing the novel's sequel.
The Untouchables had a television show that is nowhere near as popular as the film. And before that it was a 1957 book written by Eliot Ness with Oscar Fraley.
Epic Korean revenge thriller Old Boy is based on a Japanese manga that it has since overshadowed.
Some people react the same way to Buck Rogers, which was based on the novel, Armageddon 2419 A.D.
Scarface began as a novel by Armitage Trail, and was adapted into a film directed by Howard Hawks and produced by Howard Hughes. Both have been completely displaced in popular consciousness by the 1983 Brian De Palma reimagining.
Ben Hur was based on a book by Lew Wallace (it was the best-selling American novel until Gone with the Wind), but has since overshadowed it as well as the other three film adaptations, including an animated one.
Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho famous as a movie, but it was originally a novel by Robert Bloch. Some of the displacement here may be attributed to Hitchcock himself: the story goes that he bought all the copies of the book he could find so that the ending of the movie wouldn't be spoiled.
Fight Club was based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk. The book popularized Palahniuk as an author, but the film's cult success and social impact cause almost everyone to think of the film first. In a print edition of Fight Club that came out after the movie, Palahniuk relates a tour in which the tour guide quoted the movie. Palahniuk said, "You know, I wrote that book", and he responded, "There was a book?"
When most people think of Planet of the Apes, they think of the classic 1968 film starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, and Maurice Evans, or perhaps the ultimately forgettable 2001 remake starring Mark Wahlberg — not the novel by Pierre Boulle. This may largely be because the original novel was written in French. Despite what you might think, Tim Burton didn't make up the ending to the 2001 movie; it's actually closer to the original book than the 1968 movie. But in the book, it made a kind of sense and followed naturally from the events in the story, instead of being tacked-on surreal randomness.
Pierre Boulle also wrote The Bridge Over The River Kwai (and its sequels) - which also suffers from adaptation displacement, as most people can only recall the famous movie starring Sir Alec Guinness.
The vast majority of people who have seen Forrest Gump aren't even aware that a book exists. (If you thought he got up to a lot of hijinks in the movie...)
The classic 1931 film Little Caesar gets a permanent mention in all accounts of film history for practically creating the whole gangster genre (making it the great-granddaddy of The Sopranos). What every account leaves out is that it's based on a novel by W. R. Burnett.
Movies based on Alan Moore's work for DC usually follow this trope pretty well, though, because of his disgust with working with them (and hence Warner Brothers Films); he often insists his name be taken off the projects.
Watchmen has mostly avoided this due to its origin as a graphic novel being heavily advertised and accompanied by a huge surge in the comic's media attention and popularity.
The Naked Gun film trilogy, starring Leslie Nielsen and written by the famous Zucker/Abrams/Zucker (ZAZ) team, was based on a short-lived TV series called Police Squad! that was canceled after 6 episodes due to low ratings. The TV series had every joke in the movies, plus a large number of bizarre additional running gags (impossible to replicate in a movie), and had very high joke density (blink and you'll miss three) — best watched on DVD, but aired before home video recording became common.
Most people outside Germany, where it remains a literary classic, have no idea that The Neverending Story was in fact a bestselling book first - and that the original movie only adapts the first half of it. The author, Michael Ende, was not pleased with the changes made for the movie adaptation and wanted his name to be removed from the credits. (The second movie uses bits and pieces of the book's second half, and the third film even less.)
Wolfgang Petersen's miniseries/film Das Boot is an icon of the war genre, but most people don't realize it was based on a novel written by a man who actually served aboard a real-life U-Boat during World War II.
Not only is the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon an (incredibly faithful) adaptation of a novel, there were two other adaptations, one with the same title, before it. Dashiell Hammett is still widely known as a highly influential and often-imitated author, but The Maltese Falcon is considered one of the greatest films of all time.
Maybe one of the most magnificent examples of adaptation displacement is in the progression of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest — the story began as a Hardboiled Detective novel (Red Harvest), then became a Jidai Geki film (Yojimbo), and was then adapted once more as a Spaghetti Western (A Fistful Of Dollars) before being again adapted as Gangster Films ('Last Man Standing and Miller's Crossing). Any story in which a character plays two opposing sides against each other will be called a Red Harvest knock-off. Even still, much fewer people have actually read the book than have seen its adaptations.
Jerzy Kosinski's novella Being There is still in print, but it's with a picture of Peter Sellers on the U.S. cover and a tagline that it was the basis for a film on the U.K one. Arguments that the movie was an improvement on the book don't help.
A lot of Die Hard fans don't know that the first movie of the series is based on a novel (Nothing Lasts Forever, 1979). But wait — there's more!. The book that Die Hard was based on was itself a sequel to a 1966 novel, The Detective. The Detective had a film adaptation in 1968 starring Frank Sinatra which is unrelated to the Die Hard series. Moreover, Die Hard 2 was also based on a novel — a novel entirely unrelated to the novel on which the first film was based (but all Die Hard sequels started unrelated).
The same thing applies to the Rambo series (First Blood, 1972), which is also victim of the Oddly Named Sequel — most people forget that the first Rambo movie was itself called First Blood, not Rambo. The sequel was Rambo: First Blood Part 2, which was followed by Rambo 3 (there is no Rambo 2), which is then followed by the confusingly titled Rambo from 2008. Also First Blood was actually based on a book wherein John Rambo dies at the end. Bet you never knew that. Also, there has been significant displacement of the first film within the Rambo film franchise itself. How many Rambo fans remember that First Blood was a depressing film about a Shell-Shocked Veteran fleeing the law?
To put it in further perspective: the original casting choice was Dustin Hoffman, and had elements closer to a slasher film than an action flick, with the unique twist that the slasher himself was comparatively innocent. Sure, he was a threat to everyone around him, but only because the law provoking him to the point where he had flashbacks.
Colleges and high schools actually used to teach First Blood (Stephen King used in it when he worked as a teacher). The association of the novel with reactionary produces grows doubly ironic.
Mystery Men was (very loosely based on) a comic by the creator of Flaming Carrot before it was a movie.
Some youngsters think the cartoon version of Inspector Gadget was based on the 1999 movie, making their older cousins/siblings feel very old.
The Departed is based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. The Hong Kong film was very successful and spawned several sequels, but never got any mainstream attention in the west. An announcer at the Academy Awards ceremony went as far as to state that it was adapted from a Japanese film called "Internal Affairs".
Taxi was a remake of a French film by the same name. Few people knew it was a remake because the original Taxi and its sequels were never officially released on DVD in the US, although series director Luc Besson was a producer for the remake.
2001: A Space Odyssey was adapted from Arthur C. Clarke's short story, The Sentinel, which it swiftly overshadowed. Working in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Clarke wrote a novel version which Kubrick turned into a screenplay as they went. Then when Kubrick shifted the penultimate scene from the surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus to Jupiter orbit for ease of production, and invented the "open the pod door, Hal" scene, Clarke's novel was pushed to the back too (and ultimately retcanoned - when Clarke wrote 2010, he wrote it as a sequel to the movie, not the book).
Kubrick's controversial A Clockwork Orange, aided by a legendary score and a star-making performance by Malcolm McDowell, overshadowed the book, which has enjoyed much of its later success due to the film. Burgess later regretted the book and was particularly displeased by the film, in part due to the attention it continued to give the book.
The Ring is the American remake of the Japanese horror flick Ringu, which is an adaptation of a book by the same name, written by Koji Suzuki.
Although it wasn't a commercial nor a critical success, the Steven Soderbergh film Solaris is more famous than the Soviet classic cult film by Andrei Tarkovsky, if only because the Soderbergh version enjoys better distribution. And both movies are better known than the original Stanislaw Lem novel.
Likewise Stalker, the other Soviet classic cult film by Andrei Tarkovsy is loosely based on the short novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Curiously, the creators of the game, GSC Game World, have produced a proof-of-concept trailer for a STALKER television show. They're currently shopping it around.
Quite a few people are unaware that Steven Spielberg's film Munich, as well as the lesser-known Sword Of Gideon, are both adapted from a book "based on true events".
The same goes for The Nutty Professor — Murphy's popular 1996 film was a remake of a Jerry Lewis vehicle from 1963. Oh, and Flubber (remake of The Absent-Minded Professor), sans Eddie Murphy but with Robin Williams.
Most people who watched and enjoyed the Bourne movies are blissfully unaware of the books they're loosely based on. Whether or not this is a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is most remembered as the title of a 1953 movie starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. It's sometimes forgotten that this was loosely adapted from a Broadway musical (but not so loosely as to discard the show's most famous songs) adapted from a best-selling novel by Anita Loos.
Mrs. Doubtfire is actually based on the book Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine, re-titled Alias Madame Doubtfire in the US.
Both the 1963 black-and-white psychological horror piece The Haunting 1963 with Claire Bloom and its 1999 remake are much more well-known than the book they were based on—Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting Of Hill House.
The Exorcist. Yes, there was a novel before the film, which in turn was based on allegedly true events that took place in the Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. In Real Life, a young boy was allegedly possessed, but the novel's author changed it to a girl either out of respect or just for fiction's sake.
There are lots of people who love A Christmas Story who are unaware that: 1) It's only based on a few chapters of one Jean Shepherd book (In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash), and 2) Shepherd has a body of work about growing up in Indiana during the Depression, which he worked on for about three decades, spanning books, magazines, radio, TV and film.
The Third Man is a novel by Graham Greene, but almost everyone knows it as a film. This case is sort of similar to 2001. Greene wrote the short novel to prepare himself for writing the screenplay. He might not even have published it, but the film was a runaway hit.
How many people are familiar with the children's novel The Sheep-Pig, by Dick King Smith? How about Babe?
Midnight Cowboy was originally a novel by James Leo Herlihy.
Many people who have seen the extremely cinematic movie version of The Sound Of Music could swear that it wasn't an adaptation of a stage musical, and certainly not a star vehicle for an actress who wasn't Julie Andrews. Some who are familiar with both the movie version and the original Broadway version say that the movie version was an improvement; a few elements of the movie version have even made it into licensed productions and revivals as Ret Canon. And then there's the autobiography The Trapp Family Singers Rodgers and Hammerstein were Suggested By, but that's obviously not as similar.
The autobiography had already been eclipsed by the West German movie Die Trapp-Familie (1956), which also was fairly successful in America and had spawned a sequel - Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958) a year before The Sound of Music opened on Broadway.
The film Soylent Green was inspired by the novel Make Room Make Room by Harry Harrison. In the novel, "soylent" is not made out of people and only warrants a passing reference. The novel is, in turn, an expansion of the short story "Roommates" by the same author.
All About Eve was based on a short story "The Wisdom of Eve", which was only later adapted into a play and a musical.
Before Babes In Arms was a famous MGM musical starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, it was a Broadway hit by Rodgers and Hart. The film version retained and popularized the original show's premise of kids putting on a show in a barn; what it did not retain, sadly, was more than a couple of Rodgers and Hart's songs.
The Andrew Lloyd Webber version of Phantom of the Opera rendered every other adaptation of the fantastic book of the same name completely invisible.
Nanny McPhee was originally a series of books, called Nurse Matilda.
Mary Poppins was a series of books, and Miss Poppins was not 'Practically Perfect in every way', as evidenced by the stage play. Furthermore, while the books are set in the 1930s, the Disney film has inextricably associated her with Britain's Edwardian era of 1910.
Most people who saw the film Slumdog Millionaire aren't aware it's an adaptation of a book by Vikas Swarup (Q&A). Which is a shame, because that fact appears on screen during the Academy Award-winning song-and-dance part of the closing credits. Before the actors are named.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is another movie musical that displaced the original stage version (known as The Rocky Horror Show).
You know the The Mothman Prophecies? Yeah it was a book. And a non-fiction book, at that.
Likewise, The Graduate was originally a book by Charles Webb.
Grand Hotel was adapted from a play, which was translated from a German play, which was based on a novel.
The German children's novel Das doppelte Lottchen by Erich Kästner, translated into English as Lottie and Lisa, isn't nearly as well known as The Parent Trap and its remakes (except in German-speaking countries, where the book is considered a classic and where film adaptations tend to stick closer to it).
The 2001 version of Ocean's Eleven overshadows the original 1960 version by the same name to the extent that people who see the Ocean's Eleven Casino near San Diego think the casino was named for the 2001 movie, not the 1960 version.
Freaky Friday was originally a novel with three sequels. The screenplay of the first film adaptation was written by Mary Rodgers, the author of the novels.
There Will Be Blood was based on (part of) Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, though most do not know that the film is even an adaptation. It is understandable that most would assume that this is an original creation from Paul Thomas Anderson, because each of his works prior to this one are all his original properties.
Clive Barker's Hellraiser, as well as its 9 sequels, are so popular with horror fans that there are probably some people out there who don't realize that it was based on a novella called "The Hellbound Heart", which was also written by Barker.
Few people realize that The Warriors is based on a 1965 Sol Yurick novel of the same name. The novel is, in fact, considerably darker and more realistic than the fantastical setting of the movie.
The classic romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner is based on an obscure Hungarian play (Parfumerie), which also served as source material for the Broadway musical She Loves Me.
You've Got Mail was loosely based on one or more of the above, modernized for the 1990s. In certain circles, the ones more into Meg Ryan than old films, it has displaced them.
Fantastic Planet is based on the novel Oms en Serie by Stefan Wul. That it's never been translated into English, well, didn't help.
His Girl Friday is the most popular version of the story which originated in the play The Front Page, which had an earlier film adaptation. Long stretches of The Front Page are still recognizable in His Girl Friday, despite substantial alterations including a gender flipped protagonist.
Some people don't know that Mission: Impossible was originally a TV series (which was loosely inspired by the film Topkapi, which was based on an Eric Ambler novel).
The silent science-fiction film Metropolis, which codified many sci-fi tropes, was written concurrently with a serial novel of the same name by the screenwriter, Thea von Harbou. English translations of the novel have been reprinted over the years, but the reason was mainly because previously available copies of the film were incomplete; the only way people could piece together the original plot was by reading the novel. Now that a (nearly) complete cut of the film has been found, the novel might fall into obscurity again.
Relatively few people have heard of the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", which was adapted into Finding Neverland.
Disney managed to displace itself with Pirates of the Caribbean, which is better known than the ride in Disney Theme Parks that inspired it. They have since modified the ride to feature Jack Sparrow animatronics in place of some of the generic pirates they had before.
Likewise, the ride displaced the film it was based on: the 1950 version of Treasure Island. Hence, the film series is based on a ride, based on a film, based on a book.
In the US at least, more people have watched the Battle Royale movie adaption instead of the 600+ page book by Koushun Takami. Opinions are split on whether the film does the novel justice or if the alterations are far too drastic.
Zathura seems like a space-themedJumanji knock-off. Not only is it based on a book by the same author, but it's a sequel to Jumanji.
Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris is based on a 1998 South Korean film by Kim Ji-Woon called The Quiet Family. That it's so loosely based on it is probably the reason why The Quiet Family isn't even mentioned on the TV Tropes page for the Katakuris.
Alexandre Dumas fils (Alexandre DumasJr.) novel/play La Dame Aux Camelias about a consumptive courtesan who falls in love was overshadowed first by Verdi's opera adaptation La Traviata and then by several film adaptations, including Camille (1936) starring Greta Garbo.
The 2001 musical film Moulin Rouge! also borrows heavily from Dumas' novel. Early drafts of the script included even more plot parallels to Camille/La Traviata, including an intervention by Christian's father.
The manga Ichi The Killer has been displaced by its live action adaptation. Especially odd since the manga was Banned InJapan. Even more so than the manga though, is the anime.
In a rare case of a film displacing another film, David Cronenberg's remake of the 1950's film The Fly is more famous than the original. That first film was based on a short story by George Langelaan, but good luck trying to find it.
Single White Female was originally based on the novel SWF Seeks Same by John Lutz.
The Serpent and the Rainbow was based on the novel by Wade Davis. Well, loosely based actually, as the original novel was more like a documentary and nothing at all like the horror film Wes Craven directed. Furthermore, Davis was not at all pleased with the film.
Hardly anyone remembers the Patricia Highsmith novel that Strangers on a Train is based on. (Though the novel gets a reference in Castle.)
And speaking of The Great Kate, how many classic cinema fans today are aware that The African Queen is actually based on a novel by C.S. Forester?
The 1961 kaiju film Mothra is loosely based off of the obscure novel The Luminous Fairies And Mothra.
The 2002 Christopher Nolan film Insomnia is a remake of the much less-known Norwegian film Insomnia from 1997. The original is said to be much darker, in particular the dead dog that Al Pacino fires a bullet into in the remake was alive in the original.
True Lies completely eclipsed the French film on which it was based, La Totale!.
The Producers has a long and convoluted one. The musical movie based on the broadway show (itself satirized in Curb Your Enthusiasm), based on the 1960s hit film that launched Gene Wilder's career, was itself based on Mel Brooks' unproduced musical, Springtime For Hitler.
Annie is a famous musical from The Seventies about a little red-headed girl who goes through a Rags to Riches story. This became a movie in The Eighties. The musical is based off a long-running comic strip called Little Orphan Annie, who most people probably only recognize from A Christmas Story or Robot Chicken. It's arguable whether the musical or the strip is more well-known, but they're both displaced by the movie.
Night at the Museum was based on a children's book. Bet you didn't know that.
The Childrens Hour is best known as a 1960s film, not a play. The earlier Bowdlerized version of the play, a film adaptation named These Three, is somewhat well-known though it's typically known in connection to the former two.
The Disney Channel movie (and later band) The Cheetah Girls was based on a 13-book series by Deborah Gregory that lasted from 1999-2001.
The Beastmaster combines this with Adaptation Decay. The original Andre Norton novel takes place in the future and involves Earth being destroyed, and the protagonist is Navajo. Nobody wears a loincloth, and there isn't any Human Sacrifice.
One, Two, Three is based on the obscure Hungarian play Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnár.
42nd Street is based on some novel by Bradford Ropes.
The Blade movies were pretty sucessful but they overshadow the comic character to the point that even comic fans seemingly prefer the movie version since none of Blade's comic series lasted very long.
To say that this trope happens often in Westerns would be an understatement. Who remembers that Three Godfathers, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and True Grit were based on novels or stories (by Peter B. Kyne, B. H. McCampbell, Dorothy M. Johnson, and Charles Portis, respectively)? And it is a pretty good bet that few people will have read or even heard of Stage to Lordsburg by Ernest Haycox, Massacre by James Warner Bellah, The Blazing Guns of the Chisholm Trail by Borden Chase, The Search by Alan LeMay, The Tin Star by John W. Cunningham, or The Stars in Their Courses by Henry Brown but almost everyone knows the movie versions, Stagecoach, Fort Apache, Red River, The Searchers, High Noon, and El Dorado.
Whenever someone mentions Titanic most people will think of the famous James Cameron film.
Meet The Parents, the 2000 film starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, is a remake of a little-known 1992 independent film of the same name, which featured Emo Phillips in a One-Scene Wonder role but otherwise didn't have anyone well-known in the cast. The names of main characters and the general premise of a man having a disastrous first meeting with his girlfriend's parents are all that remained from the original film.
Most people (especially if they're younger) know Starship Troopers from the Paul Verhoeven film, not the Robert A. Heinlein novel. Though the book and the movie are sufficiently different enough for one to get away with treating them as two different entities with a similar plot (the book focuses more on political commentary of the society the story takes place in, while the movie is more of a straight action-adventure flick).
Hairspray: Everybody knows the 2007 musical... which was adapted from a Broadway show that was based off of a much better movie released in 1988 which wasn't actually a musical.
"Herbert West: Reanimator" was a series of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft. Its 1985 film adaptation is better known by far. While the title character of Lovecraft's stories was explicitly blond and blue-eyed, all adaptations after the movie came out more closely resemble the film's lead Jeffrey Combs.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was originally a wuxia novel written by Wang Dulu, part of a pentalogy released between the years of 1938 and 1942.
While not completely displaced, The Little Rascals movie from 1994 is a better-known than the original series of theatrical shorts with modern audiences.
The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High is remembered for many things today—Sean Penn's breakout performance as Jeff Spicoli, his "Hey bud, let's party" Catch Phrase, his battles with Ray Walston and the poolside scene with Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates. It has been almost forgotten that it was based on a novel by Cameron Crowe, which was itself based on his year undercover at a Southern California high school.
Fatal Attraction was based on a short film called "Diversion" by James Dearden. Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing saw it and thought it could be a feature film. So they hired Dearden to adapt it, and he got the unusual credit "Screenplay by JAMES DEARDEN, based on his original screenplay." When it became a huge hit, most people didn't realize it was a derivative work.
There are probably many people who've seen The Thin Man films and are unaware of the fact that the original film is based on a novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. There are also plenty of other people who are aware that the film is based on the Hammett novel but then wrongly assume that the entire series is based on a series of Thin Man books. They're not. Not only was The Thin Man the only Nick and Nora Charles story Hammett ever published, it was also the very last novel Hammett ever published. Hammett did co-write the screenplays of the next 2 films in the series (he supplied the mysteries while others supplied the jokes) and those screenplays were much later posthumously adapted into novels, adding to the confusion.
Doctor Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, widely recognized as one of the best movies ever, was taken from Peter George's non-satirical book Red Alert. (George subsequently wrote a novelization.)
The film Beaches is much better known than the 1985 novel it was loosely based off. There was even a sequel to the novel entitled I'll Be There, though it has never been adapted.
Grease is much better known as the 1978 movie than the original Broadway musical, and a lot changed when the story was adapted to movie format. Both the movie and Broadway show also displaced the early, off-Broadway Grease musical that had run at Chicago's Kingston Mines theater.
Not many people know that Withnail And I was based on a novel (written by the director) - though whether it qualifies as this trope is debatable, since said novel was never actually published.
Lifeforce, aka the "Naked Space Vampire Movie". While the movie is mostly cult, the book on which it is based is even more obscure nowadays.
Everyone knows the first two lines of Felicia Hemans' Casabianca ("The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled"), but hardly anyone knows the rest; parodies have displaced it. Probably the best-known is Spike Milligan's Casabazonka, the one which ends simply "—Twit."
How many people have read Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere? How many knew the book is in fact a novelization of a British mini-series written by Gaiman?
The original Merlin was a Welsh bard who had nothing to do with King Arthur. Additionally, all prior characterizations of Merlin were displaced by newer myths, culminating with the Lancelot-Grail cycle.
In 1982, Sue Townsend wrote a radio play called The Diary of Nigel Mole, Aged 13 1/4. Later that year it became a book called The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4.
A lot of people know some longish literary classics only from the versions abridged and somewhat re-edited for children that they had read when they were young. Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are common examples of this, as is Gulliver's Travels ("you mean Gulliver traveled to places other than Lilliput and Brobdingnag?").
A lot of people are familiar with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (and film) but how many are familar with the webcomic in which it originated?
Displaced by Live-Action TV
Not only was Little House on the Prairie based on a book, Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy preceded its publication.
The science show Beakman's World has proven so popular, very few people know that it was adapted from a Sunday comic strip - which is still running, even though the show is long over.
M*A*S*H: Everyone knows the series, and some remember the movie it was based on. How many know the movie was adapted from a series of novels? Not that you'd recognise Hawkeye from the books to the show.
The original Match Game had two celebrity panelists, four contestants, and no double entendres. It's the second version, Match Game '73, that everyone remembers. It doesn't help that virtually all of the original series no longer exists on tape. To an extent, not many know that Family Feud was derived from the end game of the original Match Game.
Try bringing up Bill Cullen as host of The Price Is Right (which he did from 1956 to 1965), and you'll get people born within the last thirty years ask "You mean Bob Barker wasn't the first host?"
The British version of The Office was popular in America before the American version started airing. Due in part to British Brevity, the American version has lasted much longer and has been one of the most popular sitcoms of its era. Although the American version is well known and fairly well received, the British version is still the best known. However, Ricky Gervais often makes self-deprecating jokes about Steve Carrel being more famous than he is. The German and French versions also have better ratings than the original in their respective countries.
By this point, when people think of Mr Belvedere, they're most likely thinking of Christopher Hewett's '80s sitcom, little realizing that the title character was once played on the big screen by Clifton Webb...or that before that, he was a character in a novel by Gwen Davenport.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now best remembered for being the silly and not particularly good film that was later adapted into a very successful franchise anchored by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Creator Joss Whedon launched the TV show due to dissastisfaction over the Executive Meddling in the film's production.
These days the Dexter TV series is much better known than the Dexter book series. It also affected the font on the front of the books, changing the capital "T" in DEXTER to "t" to resemble the show.
Stargate SG-1 is far more popular than the film that spawned it, Stargate. SG-1 lasted for ten seasons, spawning two TV sequels, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe; two direct-to-DVD-movies, with one more in the works; a remastered version of its pilot episode; numerous novels; and an MMORPG (though this seems to be stuck in Development Hell).
Also an FPS, Online TCG, another FPS, and other direct to DVD movies for the spin off that are supposedly going to happen if MGM is ever solvent again.
Andrew Davies changed the ending of the novel House of Cards in his BBC adaptation. The programme was so much more successful than the (still modestly successful) book that author Michael Dobbs wrote a sequel, To Play the King, and retconned it to fit with the ending of the programme. Then Davies adapted To Play the King and exactly the same thing happened again.
Although Barry Sonnenfeld claimed his film of The Addams Family was directly based on the original comics; every significant detail was taken from the TV series (for example, the original comic strip never named the characters).
The 60s TV adaptation of The Green Hornet has displaced the original radio series on which it was based. This is most obvious in the characterization of Kato: in the original radio series Kato was merely Britt Reid's valet and the Hornet's companion, and had no notable martial arts skills. Bruce Lee's portrayal of Kato as martial arts master and all around badass is now so firmly entrenched in the audience's expectations that all subsequent adaptations of the property have that as a prominent part of Kato's characterization.
In the 1990s NOW Comics adaptations, the writers went so far as to make the entire Kato family (Ikano Kato, companion of the 30s-40s Hornet, Hayashi Kato, son of Ikano and companion of the 60s and 90s Hornet, and Mishi Kato, half-sister of Hayashi and companion (for a time) of the 90s Hornet) proficient martial artists
The above displacement of Kato is so famous he got his own Expy without Green Hornet (the 90s martial arts film, Black Mask, has people comment upon the characters' similarity).
Many Japanese tourists, upon seeing the "Backdraft" attraction at Universal Studios, wondered why they were playing the theme music to "Ryoori no Tetsujin" (known elsewhere as Iron Chef).
Telly Savalas first played Lt. Kojak (listed in the credits as "Kojack") in an Abby Mann-scripted teleplay about a real-life miscarriage of justice called The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which was itself based on a book by Selwyn Raab.
However, Raab wrote that book as a non-fiction work, not a novel, so Kojak did debut for television.
The Adventures Of Shirley Holmes was adapted to TV from a series of books produced by Winklemania Productions, UK. If you grew up in The Nineties, it's almost a guarantee you've heard of the series: it aired in over 80 countries and was translated to 8 languages. The book is nowhere near as well-known.
The original book Deep Love had a large cult following in Japan and while there was a series of popular manga (with multiple spin-offs) the live-action drama was by far more popular.
The book actually started out as a series of web novels (keitai shousetsu, i.e. a web novel that was published on a site that was made for cell phone vieweing) which got so popular they got novelized.
Tales from the Crypt was based on a 1950s EC horror comic of the same name, complete with Crypt-Keeper.
The British crime TV series Midsomer Murders has hugely overshadowed the book series by Caroline Graham that it was inspired by and that early episodes were adapted from.
Life started out as a manga however the TV drama is considerably more well-known for whatever reason.
Dinotopia. Fewer people know about the novels now because of the crappy TV series.
Highlander falls into this to a point-not everyone realizes there were movies first.
The Six Million Dollar Man is one of the prime examples of this trope. The TV series was extremely popular and generated many iconic images and sounds; most people are unaware that the TV series was originally based on the novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin (despite it being named on the end credits), and the book has become almost entirely forgotten. In this troper's opinion, just as well; the Steve Austin of Cyborg was considerably more a Jerkass than the hero of the TV series.
It's not as bad as others, but when most people think of The Odd Couple, the TV series starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman is usually the first version to come to mind instead of the original play (Klugman actually played Oscar on Broadway before the series) or the movie.
Many people outside the USA don't realise that the Hulk was a comic book character that got turned into a TV series.
666 Park Avenue: This series is based (very loosely) on a book by Gabriella Pierce. Chances are you have never even heard of the book.
Wheel of Fortune is a weird example of a show displacing itself. The original version ran from 1975 to 1991 on daytime network television (primarily NBC, except for a stretch from 1989 to early 1991 when it was on CBS instead). The nighttime, syndicated version began in 1983 and has continued ever since. Given that daytime ended so long ago, and given that most of it before the mid-1980s was wiped, the lack of references to daytime is understandable.
Mr. Freeze was a The Batman villian created in the comics at Batman # 121, 1959 as a Flat Character with TheGimmick being able to freeze things. He appeared few times until the Batman tv show came, and he became a Canon Immigrant for the first time when they did a Rewrite and named him Mr. Freeze at detective comics 373, march 1968.
Displaced by Music
The Elvis Presley song "Can't Help Falling in Love" is a rewritten version of the French song Plaisir d'Amour, written in 1780 by Jean Paul Égide Martini.
Similarly, Elvis' song "It's Now Or Never" uses the melody from the Italian aria "'O Sole Mio".
...and "Love Me Tender" uses the melody from the Civil War song "Aura Lee".
Frank Sinatra's "My Way" is rewritten french song "Comme D'habitude".
"Pictures at an Exhibition" is less well-known as a piano piece by Modest Moussorgsky than in the orchestral version by Maurice Ravel.
Speaking of Rimsky-Korsakov, his arrangement of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" completely eclipsed the original, which is nearly extinct nowadays. In turn, R-K's version was rearranged by Leopold Stokowski for Fantasia.
This is often the case with literary works that have been used as sources for far more famous classical vocal works. For example, the Carmina Burana manuscript of medieval German poems and dramatic texts that was used for Carl Orff's famous cantata, or Schiller's poem "To Joy" which was used for the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
There are plenty of cases in music where a re-make of a song has eclipsed the original version. For example, few people know that Otis Redding first recorded "Respect" as it's been eclipsed by the Aretha Franklin version. And younger people are more likely to know the versions of "I Want Candy" recorded by Bow Wow Wow or Aaron Carter than the original by The Strangeloves.
Another Kanye example, in that most don't realize the "Stronger" is essentially him singing along to Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Or that the video for "Stronger" is a giant reference to AKIRA.
Many Rock and Roll pioneers, like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, made their careers performing covers or re-workings of blues songs originally written and recorded by black artists; many of whom are long forgotten by all but the most stalwart fans. Few of the original creators were ever compensated, or even acknowledged, for their work; and those that were, were typically hired by the music labels at very low pay, and their songs re-recorded by the more popular white artists. All of which constitutes a substantial Old Shame for the American music industry. A few artists, such as Elvis Presley, did attempt to make these black musicians better known, but the institutionalized racism of the time greatly limited their ability to do so.
Arguably Jimi Hendrix's remake of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" is an example of this.
As is The Byrds' version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", which includes only the intro, chorus and second verse of the original.
All cover versions of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" use a tune for the chorus which is slightly but very noticeably different from the one she wrote. The printed title also usually omits the comma.
Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt has been displaced by the incidental music Edvard Grieg wrote for it, except in Norway, where it is his perhaps most famous and popular play. And few people have heard any part which didn't make it into the two suites, which includes the lyrics to "In the Hall of the Mountain King," heard here.
"Twist and Shout" wasn't written by The Beatles, nor was it first performed by them. But after listening to their version, it can be hard to remember that.
"Mack the Knife" (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer in the original German) has been covered so many times that it's probably no doubt become more recognizable than the musical it was written for, Die Dreigroschenoper. Also, Die Dreigroschenoper itself was based on The Beggar's Opera by John Gay.
Smokey Robinson's "Who's Loving You?" was overshadowed by The Jackson Five cover.
"Black Magic Woman" is today mostly known as a Santana song - few people remember that it was originally Fleetwood Mac's debut single, and was indeed written by their founder, Peter Green.
Only ardent Nine Inch Nails fans mention that frontman Trent Reznor originally wrote "Hurt" for his 1994 album "The Downward Spiral". Everyone else assumes that Johnny Cash created the single, despite Cash acknowledging that it was a cover song, and credited Reznor for writing it. Oddly enough, Reznor doesn't exactly mind the confusion. Although Reznor still plays "Hurt" in NIN concerts to this day, he was so thoroughly impressed by Cash's cover, he outright stated, "[Hurt] is Johnny Cash's song now."
At least one cover of "Tainted Love" is clearly a cover of the Soft Cell version, rather than The Sixties original.
Ever since The Fifth Dimension did a version of "Aquarius", the opening song from Hair, which for some reason tacked on the "let the sun shine in" finale of "The Flesh Failures" (the closing song), every cover of "Aquarius" has done the same.
There are some who reckon that "You'll Never Walk Alone" was written by Liverpool FC supporters, not realising that in fact it's the closing number of Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Few people realise that "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix was a cover of a Tim Hardin song — which was itself a cover of a song by The Leaves. (And that's simply the earliest known version. It's likely much older.)
The Uncle Remus stories written by Joel Chandler Harris were later displaced by the Disney adaptation Song of the South, which itself is more famous for the fact that, since the 1980s, Disney has suppressed the film because of racial sensitivity. The Oscar-winning song from the film, Zip-a-dee Do-dah, however, has outlived both the film and the Harris stories.
There are people out there who are unaware of "I Will Always Love You" being a Dolly Parton song before it was covered by Whitney Houston for the 1992 blockbuster hit The Bodyguard. Even though Parton's version was only a number-one single twice.
There are also people out there who are much more familiar with Bananarama's "Venus", instead of the early '70s version by Shocking Blue.
Nirvana sang "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" during their famous Unplugged performance in the 90's and it ended the show so well Cobain refused to play any more songs, convinced he couldn't top it. Unless they've checked Wikipedia or paid close attention during the performance, any random person would likely think it was written by Cobain and not the blues artist Leadbelly.
While the version Cobain sang is based on Leadbelly's version, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" itself is older than Leadbelly. It's also called "In the Pines" or "Black Girl", and it dates back to roughly the 1870s.
The same happened with David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World". Those who ignored Bowie released the song in 1971 believed David Bowie was covering a new Cobain composition. Bowie bemoaned the fact that when he performed the number himself he would encounter "kids that come up afterwards and say, 'It's cool you're doing a Nirvana song.' And I think, 'Fuck you, you little tosser!'"
The song "One Night In Bangkok" was a hit in the 1980s, and is one of the prototypical examples of songs from that era. Few people realize it's from a rock opera, "Chess", and fewer still realize it's probably the least plot-critical song, simply summarizing the petulant singer's walk around Bangkok when he gets frustrated in a chess match. Though "Chess" has been rewritten extensively in its many stagings, this song is the only one all but certain to remain in for the popularity alone.
Rossini's "William Tell Overture" is arguably his most famous piece, but has long since become more known in the United States as the Lone Ranger's theme.
Not counting devoted folk-blues fans, few people seem to realise that "The House Of The Rising Sun" is a very old traditional. Most people who are aware of the song at all seem to think that the Animals version is the "original".
Typically Tropical's smash hit "Barbados" has been obscured almost completely by the Venga Boys' cover, which substituted Ibiza for Barbados as the singer's destination.
You know Liebesträum No. 3 by Franz Liszt, that extremely famous piano piece that's on all the "Piano Favorites" collections? It's actually a transcription of Liszt's song O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst, which was originally for voice and piano. Same goes for the Petrarch Sonnets found in the second book of Années de pčlerinage. Today, the piano versions are extremely famous, whereas the original songs are barely known.
More people know Here Comes the Bride as a "trad." instrumental tune played at weddings than as a chorus from Lohengrin by Richard Wagner. (You sometimes even see it listed as "traditional" in film soundtrack credits).
The song "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" has been covered by a number of english musicians such as the band Cake, Doris Day and the Pussycat Dolls, but few people seem to know that it was originally written in Spanish, composed by Cuban musician Osvaldo Farres. The song was first adapted into English by Joe Davis.
The MK Nocturnal Dub (and the slightly edited Dub of Doom) remix of The Nightcrawler's "Push the Feeling On" (with its characteristic indecipherable resampled vocals) completely outshone the original lyrical version, and all later remixes were therefore based on it. This occurs alot in dance music, where a sometimes completely different remix ended up eclipsing the original, such as Age of Love's "The Age of Love (Jam & Spoon Remix)", Underworld's "Born Slippy (NUXX)", Brainbug's "Nightmare (Sinister Strings mix)", Art of Trance's "Madagascar (Cygnus X remix)", and Ayla's "Ayla (Taucher mix)". Can also happen with softer and slower versions, such as the unplugged versions of DJ Sammy's "Heaven" and DHT's "Listen To Your Heart" (covers of Bryan Adams and Roxette, respectively).
Luther Vandross's famous hit "A House Is Not A Home" was originally a song by Dionne Warwick.
Animotion's song, Obsession, was actually a cover of a song of the same name by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight released one year prior.
Othello was originally the Italian short story "A Moorish Captain" by Cinthio, in which Disdemona [sic] is the only named character. Compared to the original, Shakespeare's version was very Fair for Its Day.
Measure for Measure is from Cinthio's work: "The Story of Epitia"; and also some borrowing from George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra.
As You Like It is based on Thomas Lodge's "Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy", which in turn was derived from "The Tale of Gamelyn", wrongly attributed to Chaucer and printed in some editions of The Canterbury Tales.
The Phantom of the Opera musical has displaced the original Gaston Leroux novel in the minds of many. And also — though not quite to so grotesque an extent — the old Lon Chaney movie, which was relatively faithful to the book.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's first two musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel, are legendary works of American theatre, whereas the plays on which they are based, Green Grow the Lilacs and Liliom (by renowned playwright Ferenc Molnar), are all but unknown in America. In Europe, Liliom is more popular than Carousel
The operatic adaptations of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville are both far better-known than the Beaumarchais plays that they're based on. Also that the Rossini version of Barber is at the second (popular) version. Which makes sense if you consider that he wrote his opera 30+ years after Mozart wrote the sequel. Rossini's version completely displaced the earlier opera treatment of the same play by Paisiello; which makes the attempts by Paisiello's admirers to wreck it by disrupting its first performance appear Harsher in Hindsight.
The famous opera Porgy and Bess was faithfully adapted from a once-famous play called Porgy, which itself was adapted from a novel of the same name. DuBose Heyward wrote or helped write all three.
Colm Wilkinson, who starred in Les Misérables on Broadway and the West End, has spoken publicly about his shock at people who didn't know the musical was based on a novel. Liam Neeson, while working on the 1998 film version, was reportedly annoyed with all the people asking him if he was going to sing. He might have been better off if he had; the musical is a far better adaptation.
Even fewer people are aware that the book is partially based on real history - there really was a student-inspired republican rebellion in France in 1832, sparked by the death of General Lamarque.
The famous ballet The Nutcracker is actually based on a book with a slightly different plot and a different backstory for the Nutcracker himself. The ending is also different — many productions of the ballet have Clara awaken at the end to learn it was All Just a Dream, whereas the book ends with Marie discovering that it was all real and her love for the Nutcracker breaking his curse. Some productions of the ballet actually include elements of the original ending anyway; Mark Morris' tongue-in-cheek Setting UpdateThe Hard Nut spends much of the second act telling said backstory.
Puccini's opera La Bohčme has handily displaced Henri Murger's novel Scčnes de la Vie de Boheme (interestingly, there was a rival operatic adaptation by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, composer of Pagliacci; this is also forgotten). It, in turn, is probably displaced with the masses by Rent.
Maurine Watkins' play Chicago was highly acclaimed when it was first produced in 1926, but now remembered only as the source of the musical adaptation written half a century later.
The musical Little Me seems to be better known than the Patrick Dennis book it was based on — which is somewhat odd considering that the show was neither a Broadway hit nor made into a movie.
Before Kismet became a musical, it was a play by Edward Knoblock popular enough to have been filmed more than once. Since "Stranger in Paradise", the non-musical original has been forgotten. The melody for "Stranger in Paradise" comes from the "Polovtsian Dances" from Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor. While the opera itself is fairly obscure, the Polovtsian Dances are a popular symphonic favorite - but people still always think of the melody as "Strangers in Paradise".
And other tunes in the show are also pillaged from Borodin's portfolio, including his 2nd Symphony ("Fate"), his String Quartet No. 2 ("And This Is My Beloved") and In The Steppes of Central Asia ("Sands of Time").
Hello, Dolly! is only arguably more popular than Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, but that in turn was a revision of Wilder's earlier play The Merchant of Yonkers, which was adapted from a 19th-century Austrian farce.
And many fans of WALL-E are unaware that the latter's title music is from Hello, Dolly! — even though the relevant clip is included in the movie.
So maybe the film hasn't completely displaced the musical, but how many people knew that everyone's favorite Ax Crazy barber Sweeney Todd originated in The String of Pearls, a serialised of penny dreadful novel from Victorian England? Even the musical's immediate source material, a play by Christopher Bond, is obscure in comparison.
Wicked is probably the most infamous example there is - due to the book being much Darker and Edgier than the stage show, most fans of the stage show haven't read it, and many aren't even aware of its existence.
Displaced by toys
Two of the most important Hasbro franchises did this (both cases are toy displaced by other toy):
The well-known 3 3/4G.I. Joe figures took their name from an old 12 figure (in fact, the first action figure).
Even odder, the "original" GI Joe (the one from the 12 line) actually appeared as a character in the 3 3/4 line named Joseph Colton.
The toys were named after the 1945 film The Story Of GI Joe, which they have by now thoroughly displaced.
Transformers began as a reuse of the molds for the Takara collections Diaclone and Microman. The original Diaclone collection was about piloted mecha, while the Transformers took the Mechanical Lifeforms approach we all know.
Displaced by Video Games
The vast majority of 1980s arcade games are displaced by any adaptations or sequels on home consoles. This is rather understandable, mind: When was the last time you saw a functional 1980s or 1990s arcade game... anywhere?
Anyone here know or remember that the original Donkey Kong has a 4th level? Probably not, since when Nintendo has the game pop up, they use the NES version that left off the Pie Factory level (the 2nd level).
Most people seem to think the NES version of Bubble Bobble (that is also out on Virtual Console) is the original. There was an arcade version, and it didn't include a compulsory crystal ball!
Contra and its sequel, Super Contra, were originally arcade games that were adapted to the NES. The NES versions were more successful than the coin-op versions, and all the subsequent sequels were released specifically for home consoles.
The arcade version of Gradius was released in North America and Europe under the name of Nemesis, while the NES version kept the original title. This led many fans to believe that its NES conversion is the very first title in the series. Gradius III is a similar case; the Super NES conversion is far more well known than its Nintendo Hard arcade counterpart, though said arcade original did have a prior American release to Collection, in Gradius III & IV, which was released in 2000.
Punch-Out!! started as an arcade game which even had an arcade sequel titled Super Punch Out!! Most players are more familiar with the console versions, Punch Out!! for the NES and Super Punch Out!! for the SNES, both which were completely different games from their arcade counterparts. Even the official site for Punch Out!! for Wii doesn't acknowledge the arcade games.
Which is bizarre not only because these games not only introduced many of the opponents, but the entire Title Defense level, which is nothing more than a souped-up version of the "Top Ranked" matches you had after winning the championship.
The NES version of Super Dodge Ball is a cult classic, with most people not even aware that it was based on an arcade game of the same name.
As little as it's remembered today, Legendary Wings is much more known for its NES port (who made quite a few changes to scenery and gameplay) than its arcade original.
Kickle Cubicle was based on an arcade game which had identical gameplay but a completely different plot.
The NES version of Bionic Commando displaced the arcade version, which had a rather bizarre aesthetic and no sign of Those Wacky Nazis.
ICOM's adventure games Deja Vu, Uninvited and Shadowgate are most widely known in their NES forms, though they were all originally for the Macintosh.
Whenever somebody mentions playing Warcraft, most people would automatically assume this being World of Warcraft MMO, not one of several RTS games preceding it that, you know, actually were called simply Warcraft.
Lampshaded by Blizzard during one of their April Fool's jokes. They proudly announced the creation of the new RTS game Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth and proceeded to list details and show screenshots of Warcraft III. Needless to say, not everyone got it.
And how many people have heard of King's Bounty, the original TBS that wasn't set in the Might And Magic universe?!
After Kings Bounty got a remake by 1C/Katauri, many players of the new games were surprised to learn they were based on such an ancient DOS game.
Few Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune players are aware that it is based on the still-running manga series Wangan Midnight. Most think it's the other way around.
Even less players have heard of the original Wangan Midnight arcade game, released in 2001 and published by the same publishers of Maximum Tune, as well as its update Wangan Midnight R. These two games, however, bear little resemblance to the Maximum Tune series; they play more like the Tokyo Xtreme Racer/Shutokou Battle series, in that you and your opponent have life meters, an unusual feature in a racing game.
The cult Game Boy RPG Magi-Nation was made to advertise a card game made during the TCG fad. The game is more fondly remembered then the cards.
While quite a few fans of the Persona video game series know that it is a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series, some of them do not know that Shin Megami Tensei is a spin-off of another RPG series (Megami Tensei) that was in turn based off the Digital Devil Story novel trilogy. Most don't even know that there were regular Megaten games that were released before Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne yanked all the Cyberpunk tropes from the series and got translated.
Some gamers may suspect that the Xbox version of the Ninja Gaiden series is having this effect upon the original NES series, especially in terms of their Nintendo Hard reputations. Whether or not this is true, both have certainly displaced the original, almost completely unrelated Beat 'em Up arcade game from everyone's mind.
The arcade and NES versions of Ninja Gaiden were made simultaneously, but they don't really have much in common other than the main character in both games being a ninja.
Any song that gets covered on a Dance Mania album and brought into Dance Dance Revolution (Konami relies on the Dance Mania series for much of its licensed songs). And for that matter, any song that gets ported from another Bemani series into DDR gets mistaken as a song that debuted in DDR.
Many have no idea about the Gauntlet series prior to Gauntlet Legends.
Ditto Xenon II Megablast. It consigned the original to a reasonable obscurity.
The Squaresoft game(s) are sequels to the novel, while the movie is an adaptation.
However, it's worth mentioning that one of the reasons it's relatively unknown outside of Japan is because they weren't released outside of Japan for awhile. The 1995 novel was actually not published in English until 2007. It's pretty rare.
Marth is far better known in the west for appearing in Super Smash Bros then for being the star of his own game. As such, outside of Japan he is more associated with Roy and Ike who aren't in the same universe as him rather then characters from his own games such as Jeigan, Caeda, and Ogma.
Similar to Marth, Morrigan Aensland is starting to be far better known for appearing in Marvel Vs Capcom than Darkstalkers. The fact that there hasn't been a Darkstalkers since Vampire Savior probably contributes to this.
Zero Wing. Many forget that the Sega Genesis version was actually adapted from an arcade game (which didn't feature the infamous "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" intro... but had its own screwed up ending), and everyone forgot that there was a Turbo Grafx-CD port (which had a completely different plot).
Strider Hiryu is a subversion, since it was actually a three-way collaboration between Capcom and manga studio Moto Kikaku. Moto Kikaku artist Tatsumi Wada drew the manga version, which was published first in 1988, while Capcom produced two separate video games for the project: an NES version which more or less followed the manga (but oddly enough never came out in Japan), and an arcade version which deviated from the other projects completely in terms of story. A common misconception is that the manga was made first without any intention of turning it into a game, but this really wasn't the case at all.
Area 88 is a Displacement Food Chain; it started off as a manga, which got adapted into a somewhat more well-known anime, which got adapted into the kinda-more-well-known arcade game (the international title, U.N. Squadron, only made the connection between the games and the manga/anime even more obscure), which got adapted into a well-known SNES port.
Turok, Son of Stone was a comic book in the 1950s, alongside such other well-known Gold Key titles as Doctor Solar Man Of The Atom and The Occult Files of Dr Spektor. Valiant Comics got hold of a load of Gold Key Comics properties in the 1990s, and relaunched Turok as Turok, Dinosaur Hunter. In 1997, a video game was released based on this incarnation. The Turok series of games is now much better known than either comic book version.
Little Nemo isn't one of the most well-known animated films, but the game Little Nemo The Dream Master resided in many an NES of people who'd never even seen the cartoon. It's likely that few fans of the cartoon (which was a Japanese/American co-production) know that it was originally a comic strip in the first decade of the 20th century.
The situation became more confusing when the video game was released in America before the movie was released (even though the movie was released first in Japan and is what the video game is based on).
And like the Area 88 example mentioned above, there was an arcade version of Little Nemo (simply titled Nemo) that came out before the NES version.
Metro 2033 is an interesting (US only) case. It's not so much that the book is less well known, but that it has never been released in the US.
Most people didn't really notice that the obscure SNES platformer Dino City is based on the Made-for-TV MovieAdventures in Dinosaur City.
Shuma-Gorath's a strange example, he was originally from a short story for the 'Kull' series, but the short story was unpublished. When they published it after the Author's death, it was adapted into the Dr. Strange series.
The Darkness; depending on the circles you orbit in, you may encounter people who are either unaware the comic exists besides the unlockables in the game, or unaware it came first.
The original Neverwinter Nights was a MMORPG on America Online that was operational from 1991 to 1997, and used SSI's "Gold Box" engine. The 2002 game by BioWare is much better known now.
Notable especially is that the original was the first modern MMO, predating Ultima Online by several years. Previous games in similar veins were typically text-based, with few or no graphics and little depth in comparison to console and computer RPGs of the same timeframe.
The original Tetris was released on an Elektronika-60 in 1985, followed by a release on IBM computers (as well as every other Home Computer in existence). However, it wasn't until the Game Boy version, released in 1989, that most fans around the world got into Tetris.
This also started the phenomenon of the melodies of Korobeiniki and Dance of The Sugar-Plum Fairy being "Tetris Themes"...
A subversion: the Nintendo Entertainment System was a success in North America because of the popularity that the arcade version of Super Mario Bros. (Vs. Super Mario Bros.) enjoyed. Nowadays, not many people are aware that Super Mario Bros. had an arcade port.
And if they're aware that Super Mario Bros. was itself a sequel, it's probably only because the original Mario Bros. is a frequent minigame/easter egg in other games.
One of the designers for the arcade Spy Hunter deliberately took the theme music from Peter Gunn, an old, obscure detective show, most likely to stave off any "ripoff" (or worse, copyright) issues. The game became so popular that the song is now far more closely associated with Spy Hunter than Peter Gunn.
Subverted by the original Metal Gear. The NES version was the only one available in America for many years and the fact that it was a port of an MSX2 game wasn't even common knowledge prior to the release of Metal Gear Solid. Since then, Kojima has saw fit to release the original MSX2 games in various formats (most notably as embedded precursors in certain editions of Metal Gear Solid 3), whereas the NES Metal Gear (and its sequel Snake's Revenge) had never been properly reissued since their original releases*
except for a limited edition of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the GameCube released only in Japan, which included a bonus disc featuring the Famicom Metal Gear
, not even on the Virtual Console.
A lot of people are familiar with the game The Witcher, but not with the series of fantasy novels it is based on, especially in English-speaking areas.
Only the most avid of fans of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer are aware of the fact that the Bomberman franchise started on this computer in 1983 (actually, this version was concurrently released on various Japanese computers), with a rather different look from the iconic NES version. Not even most of them realise that in the same year, on the same platform, Hudson tried out the concept that was to become Pang (as Bubble Buster).
Wolfenstein 3D (1992) is widely known as "the first FPS" (it's not), but a lot fewer people are familiar with Castle Wolfenstein (1981), an Apple II game that might be considered the first stealth-based game.
One of the biggest complaints about the Re-Shelled edition of Turtles in Time were the omission of numerous stages and bosses from the SNES version of the game. However, the Re-Shelled version was actually based on the original arcade game and the "missing" stages and bosses were simply extra stuff added to the SNES port.
Chaos Legion is an obscure enough Hack-and-Slasher by itself, but is apparent based on an even more obscure series of light novels.
The Valis series was originally released for various PC platforms, but the series did not gain its cult following until the second game was ported to the TurboGrafx CD. Oddly, the No Export for You TGCD port of the first game wasn't made until after the fourth game, which (save for a watered-down SNES version) didn't make it overseas either.
Ys was another PC 88 game series which gained a cult following only with the TurboGrafx CD ports.
Below the Root is the best-known of the Windham Classics games and a minor Cult Classic among platform gamers. The books it was based on (and is the canonical sequel to, making it possibly the first of its kind) are terribly obscure and were out of print for years.
Monster In My Pocket was originally a line of toys, but nowadays, it's more well known as a classic NES game.
Once upon a time, a webcomic called Prodly the Puffin was created as a parody of Pokey the Penguin. The webcomic is long since gone, but an Interactive Fictionadaptation of it has lasted better.
The NES version of Nuts & Milk displaced the original version for the MSX, PC 88 and other Japanese computers, which plays quite differently and in Japan is largely ignored.
Soul Calibur was only meant to be the sequel to Soul Edge (Soul Blade for home release) but ended up becoming a series. This meant that only a few people know about Soul Edge/Blade due to it not being a numbered entry in the series.
Because all of the games after the original "Soulcalibur" had "Soulcalibur" in the title, most people think that it is the name of the franchise; it is actually the "Soul" series.
Few people remember that a game called Starsiege was the foundation for the Tribes franchise. Fewer remember that Starsiege was a sequel to the EarthSiege games.
Jojos Bizarre Adventure for the Sega Dreamcast was released in America before the anime ever made it stateside. Most people either: A) Think that the anime is based on the game, or B) Only know of the Dreamcast game.
The 1997 Macintosh RPG Task Maker is an adaptation of an obscure 1993 black-and-white Mac RPG of the same name, which itself was adapted from a tabletop RPG. What little fans the obscure 1997 version has probably know it only by that version, and not its predecessors.
The obscure Dreamcast game Stupid Invaders was actually based on the also-obscure cartoon Space Goofs (or Home to Rent as it was known in the UK).
The Mech Warrior game series is part of the BattleTech franchise, which began as a tabletop wargame. When Mech Warrior Tactics was announced as an online adaptation of the tabletop game, complete with hexmaps and turn-based gameplay, there were immediate complaints that the game was "not real Mech Warrior."
A rare self-inflicted example. Homestar Runner is one of the most successful web animations ever, and it started out as a children's picture book. References to that book appear in some animations.
Displaced by Webcomics
A minor case, but though the characters of Final Fantasy I had no defined personality apart from their character class, the work of webcomic 8-Bit Theater has largely determined their roles in any future parody.
Likewise, Bob and George has done the same thing for Mega Man, to the point where certain fan-characters are often mistaken for canon, and a good chunk of the fandom takes the "Zero kills everyone" version of the end of the Classic timeline as fact, despite its fanon status and Word Of God later debunking it.
Many people don't realize that Pastel Defender Heliotrope, a webcomic that defines True Art Is Incomprehensible, was based on a light-hearted, straightforward Pinocchio story for the Kamishibai program that Reitz and her husband produced. It's quite jarring for those few souls who read the Kamishibai story first and then tried to read the webcomic.
Though this stretches the definition of "adaptation" a little, Girl Genius is probably much better known for being a webcomic than it ever was as the print comic it began its life as. Taking it to an online format from a relatively indie comic book publishing operation has greatly expanded its audience, such that only a small amount of its followers started following it when it was print-exclusive.
Displaced by Website
Cracked was a humor magazine trying to copy the success of MAD, and while it proved to be the longest-lasting of the many MAD imitators, never did match MAD's success, and eventuallly faded in relative obscurity in 2007... but not before launching Cracked.com, which became the most visited humor website in the world and is generally what people mean when they mention Cracked nowadays.
Displaced by Web Video
While Pride and Prejudice is much more well-known than its modernised adaptation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the Adaptation Name Change of Mr Darcy's first name into William has caused some fans to believe this was his name in the original, thanks to the novel almost never mentioning that his first name is actually Fitzwilliam. Although lots of fan fics did use William prior to this adaptation.
FimFlamFilosophy, the man behind My Little Pony The Mentally Advanced Series, mentioned in this blog entry that so many people have seen Rainbow Dash Presents: Captain Hook the Biker Gorilla (a comedic adaptation of the grimdark fanfic Rainbow Factory) that some people believe that he created the concept, to the point of accusing Aurora Dawn (the writer of Rainbow Factory) of stealing the idea from him. FimFlamFilosophy is trying to rectify that by linking to the original fanfic and crediting Aurora Dawn when characters that originated from that fic are used in future works (such as the character Aurora in the short "Investment Losses").
Displaced by Western Animation
The '80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon is vastly more familiar to the public than the original black-and-white comics. An example of this is that in every Turtles-related review by The Nostalgia Critic, he constantly criticizes an adaptation for not being "faithful" when its actually using something from the comic instead of the 80s series (such as his constant complaints about April's lack of yellow jumpsuits in the films, or that Judith Hoag looks nothing like April, when her portrayal did in fact resemble the original comic's version).
This Adaptation Displacement was taken into account by the creators of the second film who originally intended to stick closer to the comics and have the mutagen be the creation of a brain-like alien race called the Utroms. Professor Perry, who still appears in the movie as the man who created the mutagen, was going to be revealed as the last Utrom still on Earth. However, the cartoon featured a villainous alien brain named Krang who bore a strong physical resemblance to the Utroms but little else. Since the movie was being marketed to fans of the cartoon, the Utrom subplot was ditched because of concern that viewers would assume the brain was Krang.
Splinter's backstory. In the original comics, he was the pet rat of a murdered human ninja who was later mutated into a rat humanoid form. In the 80s cartoon, he's a human ninja mutated into a rat. All other adaptations stick to the original backstory, yet the 80s cartoon version worked so well that people who were first introduced to the turtles by the cartoon (which until the release of the equally successful 2003 cartoon, meant most people) tend to reject Splinter's origin out of hand when they see it in the later adaptations as "stupid", not realizing it is in fact his original backstory.
The 2012 cartoon does go back to his 1987 cartoon origins.
A very localized Turtles example: Roger Ebert, in his reviews of the original two Turtles movies, refers to the Turtles as being from a Nintendo game with no mention of the comics and TV series that pre-dated the NES video game. This confusion likely stems from his review of the Wizard, a movie that references (well, okay, let's face it, advertises) the NES Turtles game. This was likely the only exposure Ebert had to the Turtles before seeing the movie.
In the case of DuckTales, it depends on where you live. In the US and the UK, the cartoon is still remembered, while the comics it was based on have mostly fallen into obscurity. In many other countries, however, Disney comics, especially those by Carl Barks and Don Rosa, are still widely popular, much more so than the cartoon.
Up to the point that Duck Tales comics were released to promote the show and they flopped because kids didn't get why the continuity was all different from normal Disney comics.
Before Arthur was a cartoon, it was a series of children's books by Marc Brown.
Which is strange since after every episode you're told to visit your local library for more Arthur adventures.
Before the Arthur Cartoon, Bionic Bunny was Marc Brown's first picture book.
Many more people know about the cartoon series The Magic School Bus than the picture books it was based on.
Then there's Little Bill, which was heavily advertised as being created by Bill Cosby, but many people didn't know it was for the fact that he created the original series of picture books, not the actual show.
U.S. Acres (A.K.A. Orson's Farm), the middle segment on Garfield and Friends was actually based on a short-lived comic strip Jim Davis did during the 1980s.
Ace the Bat-Hound was a Batman supporting character in the Golden and Silver ages. However, many more people remember Ace as Ol' Bruce Wayne's dog from Batman Beyond.
You'd be surprised to know how many people are unaware that the "My Little Pony" franchise originates from the toys, and not the 1980's cartoon. The cartoon was actually made to promote the toys.
A Charlie Brown Christmas has arguably begun to overshadow everything else in the Peanuts universe, including the actual newspaper strip, which is ironic because most of the special's dialogue is taken verbatim from the strip. For example, a lot of people think that Linus is supposed to have a lisp because of Christopher Shea's voice acting in A Charlie Brown Christmas. This carried over into the 1999 Broadway version of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Many people are familiar with Rankin Bass' stop-motion animation classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and more are familiar with the song by Johnny Marks. But many don't even remember the original story/poem by Robert May that inspired both the song and the special.
And almost NOBODY remembers that the character was originally created for an old Montgomery Ward ad campaign.
Similarly, many people are familiar with the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Year Without A Santa Claus, but have never heard of the original poem it was based on. Wikipedia doesn't even have an article about the original book.
Speaking of Christmas specials, while the animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! hasn't exactly displaced the book — partly because Dr. Seuss is one of the most famous authors of children's books in the world — we challenge anyone to read the book to himself and not hear Boris Karloff narrating it.
Or remember Chuck Jones' animation of the Grinch's expression during the "awful idea" more so than the lower-key one in the book.
Notably, the original book was entirely pen-and-ink, with red highlights. The Grinch wasn't even green until the animated version came out, but now nearly everyone knows he's supposed to be.
Relatively few people are familiar with the classic Space Ghost, Birdman and SeaLab cartoons. More people are familiar with the Williams Street productions that took those characters and turned them into something completely different.
Everyone knows or remembers the Popeye cartoons; not so many know the Thimble Theatre comic strip (which actually started nine years before its Breakout Character was introduced).
The W.I.T.C.H. TV series is much better known in the US and UK than the comics, though the comics are well-known elsewhere.
This is probably because the US publisher Hyperion didn't release the comics as such at first, but rather novelizations of the comics, with a few pages from the respective comic bookending the text. As with the animated series, Hyperion only got as far as the Nerissa's revenge arc (total run: 26 volumes). (They did eventually release graphic novels, essentially two comics per book, only getting as far as the 8th volume).
While (one hopes) most people realize that Batman's sidekick Robin originates in comic books, many fans of the animated Teen Titans don't realize that the rest of the show's main characters, the team and its headquarters, most of the villains, and many of the plotlines on the show, as well as its title, originated in comic books as well.
As the series progresses, however, this becomes increasingly less likely. Several characters are implied to be sidekicks as well (most notably Speedy, Aqualad, and Kid Flash), and more noticeably the entire final season of the show relies heavily on Beast Boy's backstory. Lampshaded when people react with surprise when they find out Beast Boy's been a member of a team previously, and apparently has more experience as a hero than anyone but possibly Robin. Possibly.
One of the main criticisms of the animated special of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer lies in the awkwardly implemented songs. The title song everyone is familiar with, but not so much the other Dr Elmo Christmas songs, believed by many to be written for the movie, when they're all just horrible covers not involving Dr Elmo despite him narrating the special and voicing Grandpa.
The cartoon version of The Tick is vastly, overwhelmingly better known than the original black-and-white indie comic.
Thomas the Tank Engine is best known for its TV adaptation that's been running since the mid-1980s. Less well known outside the UK is that it was based on a series of books that's been running since the mid-1940s...
The Ben-10 follow-up Man Of Action created series, Generator Rex, is based on a fairly unknown and crazier comic from the same creative team titled M.Rex. Considering the comic only lasted two issues, this can also be considered some seriousAdaptation Expansion.
Martin Mystery is possibly best known for the Western Animation show, that is almost an In Name Only version of the original comic ("almost" because they changed "Mystere" in "Mystery").
"Isn't Destro supposed to be Black?" is a common question asked by those who questioned the casting of Christopher Eccleston as Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In the original comic, he was caucasian and a Scotsman. In the memorable 80s cartoon, he was voiced by African American actor Arthur Burghardt, hence the confusion.
The Pink Panther movies are very often displaced by the cartoons, to the point where people have complained about the 2006 movie being about an inspector instead of the panther. The Pink Panther mascot is actually a personification of a diamond within the series.
Certain DC superheroes are better known in their cartoon versions. While with characters like Superman and Batman it's debatable whether they're more displaced by cartoons or movies, characters like the Green Lantern's and Aquaman are displaced.
This also applies to villains: Mr. Freeze was a The Batman villian created in the comics at Batman # 121, 1959 as a Flat Character villain with TheGimmick being able to freeze things. He appeared few times until [[Series/Batman the Batman tv show]] came, and he became a Canon Immigrant for the first time when they did a Rewrite and named him Mr. Freeze at detective comics 373, march 1968. He then was showed in each Batman cartoon, but the comics forgot him completely and a issue of Animal Man showed him in Comic Book Limbo until his second reinassance at Batman The Animated Series, where Dine made him into a Tragic Villain and the comics Rewrite completely his story to this version.
The original Symbiote arc in Spider-Man was almost indistinguishable from future versions, as the costume was portrayed as nothing more than a parasite that unknowingly sapped energy from Peter, slowly weakening him. However, all subsequent adaptations have taken more from the Spider-Man The Animated Series version where the costume actually increases his powers and brings out his dark side, as well as establishing Eddie Brock as a chracter before revealing him as Venom.
The Looney Tunes 'Goofy Gophers' are well known for their excessive politeness to each other - "After you!" "No, after you!" - known more than early 20th-century comic strip duo 'Alphonse and Gaston' who established the routine.
More people are familiar with the Bucky O'Hare animated series than the comic book it was based on (probably because it was originally just a back-up strip in an anthology book).
The Pagemaster was originally based on a well-illustrated children's book.
Displaced by Merchandising
Most Brits, and many from further afield, will be familiar (perhaps overly so) with Quality Street sweet assortments. Far fewer will be aware that the brand name, along with the scene depicted on the packaging, were taken from a play by J.M. Barrie, written three years before he wrote Peter Pan.
... which was adapted from the novel Wind In The Willows, naturally.
It's often believed that the Coca-Cola Company created the modern image of Santa Claus in his red-and-white garb, displacing earlier portrayls in which he wore other colours (green was a favourite) and styles of outfit, but this is only an urban legend; depictions of Santa in his red suit existed long before Coke thought up their ad campaign.
Santa Claus himself is an adaption of the Dutch and Flemish holiday figure Sinterklaas, which is based on the Catholic St. Nicolas.
Betty Boop. She's been quite popular with merchandise however most people that like her have only seen her in animation once, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
Intentionally invoked in a Denny's commercial. A girl tells her grandmother that Denny's has a Hobbit Menu. The grandmother responds, "I know. Apparently, they based an entire movie off of it," causing many of the restaurant's other customers, dressed in costumes, to turn around and look at her.
Displaced by All of the Above
Almost no-one reads H. P. Lovecraft, but you'll find references to his work everywhere.
Cthulhu is a geek cultural symbol◊. In fact, a lot of people are under the impression that Cthulhu is not a creation of Lovecraft, but an actual mythical being from an ancient religion. Within Lovecraft's actual works, he's pretty insignificant, appearing in only one story and not holding a particularly high position in the pantheon. Some don't even realize he's copyrighted, which leads to some issues.
Many authors have used Lovecraft's mythos, which he encouraged, to the point that many readers might be more familiar with stories and content that was created by other people.
The Necronomicon was a fictional book merely cataloguing the monstrosities in Lovecraft's mythos. It's been so widely used as a literary reference, however, that people have made real life versions (including a visual one that inspired the Alien movie franchise), and some amateur "occult experts" treat these as a serious work on demonology.
Displaced in Real Life
Hydrox cookies are the original mass-produced chocolate-and-cream sandwich cookie, predating Oreos by a couple years. Most people believe Hydroxes to be the knockoff.
The Czech Budweiser beer are sold as Czechvar in the US, even though it predates American Budweiser, which is made by another company entirely. It's Budvar in the UK. It seems to be Budweiser everywhere in mainland Europe.
Neufchatel cheese is often marketed in America as reduced-fat Philadelphia cream cheese, even though Philadelphia cream cheese was created as an imitation Neufchatel.
More people have probably heard the wordless chorus from the song Centerfold by The J. Geils Band chanted by football supporters than have heard the actual song.
Almost nobody seems to be aware of the fact that Beanie Babies are not the only plush line created by Ty, Inc. They had stuffed toys in 1986, seven years before Beanie Babies existed. Many of the Spin-Off lines (Pillow Pals, Attic Treasures, Beanie Buddies, etc.) are also relatively unknown.
An amusing example of this form of semantic drift is that the original word referring to a woman's makeup table has shifted so dramatically that it now refers to a different piece of furniture, with a different function, in another room of the house. This gets rather jarring when reading stories that take the original meaning, and have women stepping out for the night in style by splashing themselves with toilet water (now known as perfume).
Related to perfume, the older a word is, the more negative its connotation becomes (one time, when given a list of words related to smell [stink, stench, odor, perfume, smell, etc.] and asked to rank them from most negative to positive, my class put them in almost perfect chronological odor.) This can be interesting when reading older works and hearing about something having a stench and needing a second to realize that it was supposed to smell good.
Everyone who started using the Internet after the mid-1990s seems to think that the Web and the Internet are synonymous.
Have you heard of Japanese singer/voice actress Fujita Saki? If you're in the anime-watching crowd you might know herroles, but if you aren't, you will probably only know her as the person whose voice is the base for the virtual diva Hatsune Miku, if you know her at all.
The Tandy 1000 was designed as a clone of the IBM PCjr, but by the time it reached the market the PCjr had become an Edsel-class fiasco. The Tandy 1000 succeeded where the PCjr failed, and later PC clones that featured similar graphics and sound capabilities were commonly called "Tandy-compatible."
The word 'Caesar' has been displaced several times. Originally it (as with all Roman third names) was a nickname to distinguish between two or more people with the same first two names. Gradually these nicknames became part of a person's family name. For the first five Roman Emperors, Caesar was their family name. However, subsequent Emperors simply called themselves Caesar anyway, until it gradually simply became a way of addressing the Emperor (like 'Your Majesty'). Later monarchs simply adapted into their language and made it synonymous with the term Emperor (e.g. Kaiser, Tsar, Czar).
Similarly, the term 'Emperor' comes from the Latin 'Imperator' which simply refers to the commander of any Roman army, not the entire armed forces. The term 'Prince' comes from the Latin 'Princeps' which is usually translated as 'Chief' but in the context of the early Emperors meant 'First Citizen' - a role analogous to President or Prime Minister.
