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Some adaptations take a complex character or situation and greatly simplify it, removing elements the producer believed to be unnecessary. This effect is more common when adapting from a long-running series, especially if it hasn't had a singular vision over the years. This trope is very closely related to the Ultimate Universe as that is a main reason for its creation, but is generally in a different medium than the original. Contrast with Pragmatic Adaptation: in a distillation, a complex story is simplified, without much substantive change. In a Pragmatic Adaptation, the story is changed with the shift in medium. See also Adaptation Expansion.
This does not mean "adaptation that's better than the original".
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Rebuild of Evangelion seems to be going this route, if the first movie is anything to go by.
- To elaborate: not only does the animation in general have the benefit of a lot more money and a decade of technological progress (even if there's Conspicuous CG in a few places), but the plot has been streamlined, the Mind Screw segments are much more evenly spaced out and relevant to what's happening to the plot at that moment, and several characters have been reworked to be notably less grating, Shinji most of all. I mean, he's even willing to confront Misato directly and demand to know just why he should put himself in harm's way time and time again (especially since he's been more or less conscripted for the role). This is all in just the first movie; if the other three follow suit it could well become the definitive Evangelion experience.
- In view of the original series, the second movie is best summed up as Off The Rails...
- The manga also counts in this category, as it removes a lot of the anime's more superfluous scenes (as well as adding some of its own), streamlines angel battles, and removes a high quotient of Mind Screw scenes. However, some of the characters have their personalities and backgrounds altered, so there is some Adaptation Decay to it.
- Many anime Compilation Movies are like this. The Mobile Suit Gundam trilogy, especially the third installment, Encounters In Space is a particularly good example. The Zeta Gundam films are a bit divisive on whether or not they are a case of this or Adaptation Decay due to having a different ending than the series, but it can't be denied that the production values are considerably higher and the animation is much more consistent, though the MS occaisionally venture into Conspicuous CG territory.
- The film version of Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999, which isn't so much a compilation as a new adaptation of the original manga series, which features drastically improved animation to the TV series and cuts out much of the unnecessary (& frankly, often overly melodramatic) elements of the original to focus on the core story-arc, while at the same time expanding on Tetsuro's quest to get revenge on Count Mecha. This has lead to it being widely considered one of the greatest anime films of all time.
- Astro Boy's long history is rife with examples. While the first anime series generally had low production values (it was the first animated TV series produced in Japan, so it took them a while to get the hang of it) and the heavier themes of the manga were often toned down for mass consumption, a few of the stories adapted from the manga were much tighter than the originals. The 1980s anime had the same problems as the first, but added the character of Atlas (actually an amalgam of three different characters from the manga), a complex recurring villain who tied several episodes together into a single overriding story arc. Then came the 2003 series which, while still fairly episodic by modern anime standards, had a continuous storyline revolving around the struggles between humanity and robotkind tying together classic stories from the manga, greatly expanded the role of Astro's father, Dr. Tenma and featured animation quality similar to that used in Tezuka Productions' acclaimed theatrical release Metropolis. In a non-animated example, the Sankei Newspaper comic strip version, originally a continuation of the story from the first anime, turned into a continuity reboot after Astro Time Travelled back to the (then) present, eventually died and then the time of his creation rolled around again. This version greatly expanded on Astro's backstory and his relationship with Dr. Tenma. And then there is the Ultimate Universe version created by Naoki Urasawa (of Monster fame) for his futuristic suspense-thriller manga Pluto.
- Then we have the GBA game, Astro Boy: Omega Factor. It takes almost every Osamu Tezuka character and weaves them into one giant, all-encompassing storyline. It manages to do justice to the man's entire career. And it plays well, to boot.
- Masaaki Segawa's Basilisk is a manga based off Yamada Fumio's historical novel "Kouga Ninpuchuu", which was so good it won the 2005 Kodansha manga award. Well, when it was adapted into a TV series, the additional Character Development given to almost all the characters on both sides of the Ninja fence made the anime just as good, and sometimes even better than the original manga.
- The director of the anime Ghost in the Shell turned 300-odd pages of manga into a 80 minutes of movie by removing everything not released to the main plot, changed some scenes, removed many of the characters while changing the personality of the characters that were left in, while managing to make the hit/miss manga into a wonderful movie.
- The live action films of Death Note keeps many of the best parts of the original story while changing several things for the better, including giving Soichiro Yagami more prominence and letting him live in the end, making Misa a deeper and more sympathetic character with a larger focus on her family's murder, and most of all cutting the Mello and Near arc entirely and having L win personally instead.
- Yu Yu Hakusho condenses the events of the first two volumes, in which Yusuke helps out spirits in stories completely unrelated to the battles of the later manga, into five episodes, all centered around the essential events; 1)Yusuke dies, 2)Yusuke finds out what he has to do to come back to life, 3)Yusuke helps his old rival Kuwabara, 4)Yusuke sacrifices his work toward resurrection to save Keiko and as a result 5)comes back to life. It also condensed the ending into a single episode, and actually showed Yusuke's fight with Yomi to its conclusion (when in the manga, it abruptly stops at the end of Chapter 169).
- Zero No Tsukaima's 1st season condenses the first few light novels into a fast-moving, lighthearted tsunderes and magic series, removing some rather awkward scenes. The VAs also define the characters well. Subsequent seasons... not so much.
- Dragonball Kai is basically Dragonball Z without all the excessive padding and filler.
- After the Jack The Ripper arc, and even in several details before then, the Kuroshitsuji anime moved in a very different direction from the manga, maybe for the sake of time and plot movement. Many fans seem to prefer it.
- This seems to be what Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is going for.
- As an added bonus, it tweaks many minor things and event orders, which shakes things up and keeps it from being a precise retread of the manga, without disrupting the overall spirit and character of the manga.
- The Tsukihime manga is noted for turning Arcueid's route into pure win, expanding characters without derailing them and fine tuning the emotions of key scenes.
Comic Books
- The Punisher MAX is an example of distillation, although it's arguably just a set of "hardboiled" crime stories with only Frank Castle (and an Ennis take on Castle's backstory) to make it "Punisher," which works very well. (In "The Slavers" though it works too well, especially when you see the Downer Ending.)
- The entire Ultimate Marvel line of comics was conceived as this; opinions differ as to how well it was managed.
- All-Star Superman is intended as Adaptation Distillation of the Golden and Silver Age Superman, and it's widely regarded as doing a great job at it. Alan Moore's run on Supreme does the same thing (albeit with a Superman analogue).
Film
- The film Batman Begins really messed around with Batman's established origins (trained by the League of Shadows?) but by being faithful to the core character and firmly establishing this as being in Real Life, it is almost universally considered among the best Superhero movies ever made.
- All of the film and animated versions of the X-Men comic book series have involved considerable amounts of both Adaptation Distillation and Adaptation Decay, but there is dispute among the fans over which changes count as which.
- The Lord Of The Rings series is often considered easier to understand in movie format as opposed to the written version, since many of the more complex nuances were omitted from the films, leaving only the core of the story. On the other hand, there have been loud grumblings from fans of the books about some of the things that were left out.
- Tom Bombadil, anyone?
- Opinions are also divided as to the shift in focus from the books to the movies. Particularly in that the movies spent a lot of time on the battles, while the books tended to spend more time on Legolas picking up unbroken arrows after a battle THAN on the battles themselves.
- The movie The Towering Inferno was based on two books, The Glass Inferno by Scortia and Robinson and The Tower by Stern, because studio executives correctly realized that the market would not have supported two simultaneous films about buildings going up in flames. There is enough material left out to make at least another whole story.
- The Disney versions of The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast, and Aladdin are often considered more accessible than their original versions, which either had a Downer Ending or just didn't make much sense.
- Not to mention that a lot of the original stories contained a Family Unfriendly Aesop or two that were removed by the adaptation. For instance, the moral of the original The Little Mermaid seems to be "trying to change your station in life leads to distaster." The movie's message is the exact opposite.
- Although, at the time of writing, the Aesops were relevant to the children of that time ("Don't try to change the status quo, you'll end up dead", "Don't mess about with royals, you'll probably end up dead", "don't be a mermaid...")
- Then there's the whole "if you misbehave, nice ladies like the mermaid you just read about might never get into Heaven" bit at the end...So Yeah...
- The movie version of Fight Club starts by reworking the first meeting of Tyler and the narrator to excise a Plot Hole. It strips away unnecessary subplots, takes advantage of the medium to experiment with the viewer's involvement, and replaces the original Downer Ending with one more fitting to the theme of the story (to the point the writer of the original novel prefers it).
- Perhaps the best example of this trope is the M*A*S*H franchise. The original novel was somewhat racist, breathtakingly misogynist, totally reactionary, appallingly callous and above all, generally unfunny. The film adaptation and subsequent TV series stripped out all the ugly bits of the novels while maintaining the central concept of madcap marauding surgeons finding humor in war.
- The 1980 Flash Gordon film cut out the extraneous parts of the original comic book and adventure serial, making for a better adventure movie. It also cut out racism against black people, but oddly enough, not Asians, although even that was done so over-the-top it had to be tongue-in-cheek, which, apparently, makes it okay.
- The comic book and adventure serials are Adaptation Decay of the original Alex Raymond/Austin Briggs/Mac Raboy Flash Gordon comic strip.
- The film adaptation of the graphic novel Road to Perdition made a few changes, many of which the novel's author admits are improvements. The biggest are changing the name of the (real life) Looney crime family to the less giggle-inducing Rooney, and merging all the anonymous hitmen sent after the protagonists into a single character. However, the author emphatically prefers his own more downbeat ending.
- To explain: in the film, the dad kills the last hitman to keep his son from having to Shoot The Dog. In the graphic novel, the kid has to do it himself and becomes a priest to atone.
- The film adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel Jaws stripped away most of the book's land-bound subplots and condensed the climactic shark-hunt to a single voyage. It also made the shark a far more shadowy nemesis in the early going, although this was due more to special effects restraints than artistic vision. All of this significantly increases the viewer's tension.
- Not just that, but it improved the characters tremendously, especially the three men at the center of the story, who Benchley wrote like he was trying to make them as unlikeable as possible.
- Layer Cake definitely comes across as a distillation of the novel, being much more tightly plotted, and notably, when the author of the novel, J.J. Connoley, attempted writing a screen play, it was several hundred pages long, and thus he wisely left this task to Mathew Vaughn.
- Kevin Costner's movie The Postman (which, despite being widely made fun of, is Better Than It Sounds) takes the basic idea of David Brin's novel of the same name and runs with it. The novel's author, David Brin, has gone on record
 saying for the most part he quite likes the movie, and understands that adaptation is unavoidable in going from book to film.
- Micheal Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead: in a supposedly serious and historically accurate retelling of Beowulf, the characters go to a colony of dwarves for advice. The movie, The 13th Warrior, wisely replaced this with a regular old woman.
- The novel of Children of Men had a great core idea with brilliant potential but ultimately failed to deliver and ended very flatly. The film adaptation took the core idea and changed it to be set in a much more bleak and war torn world as well as completely rewriting the second half of the story into a much more interesting result.
- Watership Down was a great book, but the animated feature film condensed the rather wandering storyline with its rabbit mythology and philosophising into a taut well-told feature jam packed full of Tear Jerker moments and Nightmare Fuel, partly due to some inspired voice casting and some rather imaginative animation styles. The TV series, on the other hand, was a textbook example of Adaptation Decay and Executive Meddling.
- This Troper would like to point out that the film, in putting Holly's route throught Efrafa rather than the Cowslip's Warren butchers the established geography, and makes one wonder why the hells the main group didn't bump into Woundword instead of Cowslip. The movie is more Decay than Distillation.
- The film version of The Godfather eliminates about two thirds of Mario Puzo's novel to concentrate solely on the core story of Michael Corleone, dropping most of the Johnny Fontane plot and all of the Lucy Mancini storyline (Lucy Mancini, Sonny's mistress has a tiny non-speaking part in the movie). The result is a much more fast-paced and interesting work.
- The original Conan The Barbarian stories were somewhat unsuited to adaptation to film, and the original script for the movie of Conan The Barbarian featured lots of huge fight scenes that would have been expensive to shoot. John Milius took both as inspirations for writing the movie, which turned out to be extremely entertaining and well thought out, preserving the feel of R.E. Howard's world without the unfortunate tropes. Don't talk about Conan The Destroyer, though.
- The Alfred Hitchcock version of Psycho is almost universally regarded as superior to Robert Bloch's fairly trashy novel, and is now treated as the definitive version of the story.
- The Twilight movie condensed the plot, added more foreshadowing and emotional complexity, and is considered by detractors of the book to be the superior version.
- The 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire changes the ending so that Stella leaves Stanley at the end. In the play Stella refuses to believe that her husband raped Blanche. That was due to the requirements of the Hays Code, though.
- Multiple reviewers of the film adaptation of Iron Man had claimed this, saying the film to be a distillation of everything that makes Iron Man intriguing: all the Jerk Ass with a heart of gold and male Bottle Fairy tendencies, with none of the crazy fascist Character Derailment that's happened over time.
- The original stage version of Rent is still, all in all, an outstanding piece, but because it's almost entirely sung-through (almost no talking between songs) there are some painfully forced bits of sung banter between the proper tunes. The film version mercifully just converts these to ordinary spoken dialog that keeps a lot of the original words in, but in a way that doesn't stretch suspension of disbelief nearly as much. It also drops the song Contact, which many people think is bizarrely oversexed and out-of-place, and consequently moves Angel's death to during "Without You," a far more respectful position for so tragic an experience.
- As an example of an adaptation of an adaptation, the Spanish version of the 1931 film of Dracula. Tod Browning didn't give his best effort for the English language version, and it shows when compared to the Spanish. The Spanish version also had the benefit of the English dailies, which allowed them to see what the other crew did and improve on that. The only place where the English film is strictly better is Bela Lugosi's iconic performance.
- Watchmen removed some of the more unwiedly elements that were in the original Graphic Novel, while keeping most of the complexity. Many periphery characters who originally served as world-builing were cut. The ending was also changed to something that doesn't rely so much on peripheral foreshadowing. As a consequence, the story is a lot more straightforward and fits the new medium much more.
- Many consider Watchmen to fall victim to literal distillation. The long film is forced to tell so much plot within 3 hours that you're left with no real sense of the passage of time or the weight of the story, with vital scenes being paraded past you one after the other.
- As Scott Ramsoomair said, it really needs to be seen as a companion to the book.
- The Shawshank Redemption takes a fairly average short story, fleshes it out, combines it with exceptional actors and wonderful cinematography and turns it into what is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. It's best known visual is arguably the pinnacle of execution of the trope that takes its name from the scene.
- At one point in the both the original story and the movie, Red explains something as being "because I'm Irish." What was a throwaway line by a redheaded Irishman in the novella became laugh-out-loud funny when delivered by Morgan Freeman.
- The Name Of The Rose also stripped away all of the description of dreams, historical lessons and useless scenes when going to film, and presents a much more intense and fascinating crime story then the book ever did. Because let's be honest: Not all books make good films, and an audience might not want to sit down for a period detective movie and get a lecture on European history instead.
- Forrest Gump took a rather bizarre series of adventures in the novel (including a space mission with a gorilla named Sue and being stranded in the jungle with a chess-playing cannibal), brought it to some level of plausibility and turned it into the sentimental hit film we know today.
- The first Left Behind movie makes the opening attack less of a non-event (by condensing the amount of time between it and the Rapture), plays up the mystery in the first half, puts Buck in a position where he has a lot more influence over the nation, and streamlines the hell out of the book's rather ping-pong opening sequence. That said, it still falls prey to Christian movie-making traps (Brad Johnson and Chelsea Noble's make-out is barely shown, nobody swears and the only real violence is when Carpathia shoots Stonagall and Cothran).
- A History of Violence: The original graphic novel featured a finger in a jar on a boss' necklace, an overly-devoted wife who immediately had no problem with her husband's previous life, and a brother being kept alive while having parts of him cut off. Cronenberg's take on the story removed the more "comic-book-y" aspects of the graphic novel, while adding more depth to the characters, and replacing the They All Lived Happily Ever After ending with a more Bittersweet Ending.
- The Cider House Rules is a considerable distillation of the original novel by John Irving — who also wrote the screenplay of The Film Of The Book.
- The Silent Hill movie is pretty much this applied to the plotline of the first game. The psuedo-Christian elements were kept but highly simplified, the protagonist is functionally a mix of the heroes from the first three games (Radha Mitchell looks exactly like Heather from 3) and retains the "All that matters is the person I love" mentality of Harry and James, and the diabolical force running the whole show was tremendously simplified, but no less evil for it.
Literature
- Literary/film example: William Goldman's The Princess Bride claims to be "the good parts version" of an earlier novel by Simon Morgenstern, turning what was a digression-laden, politics-heavy slog into a fun action-adventure story. In fact, Morgenstern and his unabridged novel are entirely fictitious. This setup allows Goldman to lampoon such authors as Victor Hugo and his ilk. The film distils the story even further, into its purest essence.
- Which is to say, pure kick-assery.
- Similarly to the Warhammer 40000 PC games, the Gaunt's Ghosts series of novels by Dan Abnett do such a good job portraying the dog-soldiers of the Imperial Guard that the entire tabletop army was revamped to exhibit a competent, technologically-advanced army like that of the Ghosts. It would be so successful that this portrayal would go on to affect later novels by other authors, such as Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series.
- Thomas Malory, in Le Morte d'Arthur distilled an enormous mass of wildly contradictory Arthurian legends into a book that is often regarded as the definitive Arthur story.
- But his compilation work never really bothered to address the problem of vastly different power levels in vastly different sources and, a lot of the time, ended up resembling a bad crossover comic book because of it.
- T.H. White's Once and Future King is a distillation (and paraphrase) of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The reader is actually directed to read Mallory's version to find out the specifics of certain jousts, etc. Tom himself makes an appearance in the final pages, directed by an ancient Arthur to run away from the final battle so that he can record the Arthur's history.
- Subverted by The Sandman: The Dream Hunters a work by Neil Gaiman who claims it's an attempt to take various elements of various retellings of a certain pre-existing myth, and bring them together in a logical, complete way. It apparently works as the thing turns out great, and the illustrations are beautiful to boot... of course, as it turns out, the pre-existing myth didn't so much exist at all, which is pretty much standard for Neil Gaiman.
Live Action TV
- The titular hero of the 1990 series The Flash was an amalgamation of the Silver Age and Post Crisis Flashes in the comics. While his secret identity was that of Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, some aspects of the character (like his relationship with scientist Dr. Tina McGee) were incorporated from the character of the later Flash, Wally West.
- The miniseries version of Hogfather managed to retain most of the good material from the original novel, though it was apparently hard to follow for those who hadn't read the books. To be fair, it took a sort of You Should Know This Already approach to most of the backstory. But the distillation is probably because Terry Prachett was heavily involved in both productions, even having cameo appearances in the last scenes of Hogfather and the first of Colour.
- One specific example: They based the Patrician on his later appearances (including Wuffles), instead of his eventually rather contradictory appearance in the actual early books. The "Machiavellian Vampire Flamingo" Vetinari was introduced approximately at the same time as the name "Vetinari". In fact, if it wasn't for Word Of God saying that it was just badly written, people would still be arguing whether it was supposed to be the same Patrician or not.
- The J-Drama form of Hana Yori Dango managed to compress thirty-six volumes of manga written over a period of eleven years into a much smoother story, combining characters and editing plot arcs as necessary.
- The Nobuta Wo Produce J-drama was based on a book whose titular character was an overweight, unattractive boy, and the main character was a cold-hearted Jerkass who only wanted to produce Nobuta because he was bored. In the drama, Nobuta was a lovable Woobie girl who wasn't even capable of smiling properly, Shuji was misguided and selfish rather than a cold jerk, and the character of Akira was introduced. The resulting drama had an ending that was not saddening as the book, had beautiful cinemitography, and mind-blowing plot and characterization.
New Media
- Parodied with the in 5 seconds YouTube videos, which cut down the targeted film to its most important points. The quality varies somewhat widely from video to video though. This may represent an inadvertent Deconstruction, as some basic biology knowledge will tell you that it is unhealthy to remove all the fat from the body.
- A lot of Rule Of Funny goes into those, so it's hard to really call it "distillation", in the traditional sense.
Tabletop Games
- Parodied in the GURPS: Goblins RPG sourcebook; a sample adventure includes "The Abridged Macbeth, With Just The Witches and the Fighting". The entire script is one page long.
Theater
- When Edna Ferber's Show Boat was made into the famous Broadway musical in 1927, it wasn't common at all for such long and convoluted novels to be made into musicals. The result still ran very long for a Broadway show, and so has been subjected to various levels of Adaptation Distillation in all revivals (and in the 1936 movie, the only faithful film version).
- The play Auntie Mame is an Adaptation Distillation of Patrick Dennis's pseudo-autobiographical novel. To quote Patrick Dennis:
"Not every episode of my book is in the play. To get them all in - not that every one would be worth dramatizing - would require passing out box luncheons, blankets, and tooth brushes to a rough-and-ready audience of slavish theatre-goers weaned on Eugene O'Neill and the Ring Series. But an astonishing number of the episodes in the book are in the play; enough so that the casual reader is convinced that every word of the novel has been translated to the stage. If that isn't catching the 'spirit' of a book, I don't know what is."
- Victor Hugo's original Les Miserables novel contained, among other tangents, an enormous retelling of The Battle of Waterloo. Many critics agree that you can skip this section of the book and miss out on absolutely nothing. Fortunately, the extremely popular musical adaptation removed such elements and focused on the core story and characters.
- A double example: British playwright Christopher Bond took the most exciting elements of the Sweeney Todd myth (the razors, the chair, the pies) and added plot elements from The Revengers Tragedy and The Count Of Monte Cristo (as well as excellent dialogue) to create a first-rate melodrama with real character motivation.
- Herman Wouk distilled his novel The Caine Mutiny into the play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. A made-for-TV version of this play directed by Robert Altman appeared in 1988, but the more famous 1954 film version is a very different distillation of the novel.
Video Games
- Arcade game manufacturer Global VR lived on this trope by making arcade games that are distillations of Electronic Arts games. Examples include Madden NFL, EA Sports PGA Tour Golf, EA Sports NASCAR Racing, and three Need For Speed games: Hot Pursuit 2- which was rechristened "Need for Speed GT"- plus NFS Underground and NFS Carbon as well. They've also done distillations of UBI Soft games as well- witness Paradise Lost, a rail shooter based on Far Cry and Blazing Angels.
- Super Robot Wars will take the plots of the various series it crosses over, cuts out the filler and leaves only the important plots, all while mixing it up in subtle ways.
- Warhammer 40000 is an extremely large storyverse, with literally hundreds of novels, graphic novels, rulebooks, and other sources of backstory, some of which Ret Con older works. For the PC, they distilled this all down into the excellent Dawn Of War series of Real Time Strategy games, which manage to capture the gritty feel of the game perfectly.
- Those who have played both the original arcade version of Gradius III and its SNES conversion typically regard the latter to be superior, save for the much greater slowdown, and a much more forgiving challenge.
- Blast Works is, at its core, a port of the freeware PC Shoot-Em-Up Tumiki Fighters. The main focus of it is the extra-extensive editor, which lets you design many things such as the player ship, background objects, bullet patterns, enemies, and even entire levels. Making this feature even better is the ability to upload and download such creations via the game's official website.
- DJ MAX Portable, a PSP version of the DJ MAX Online series, found itself becoming its own subseries; while the online versions died off (though a new version, DJ MAX Trilogy, is slated for release this month), the Portable series spawned 4 additional titles, one of which is the first American release in a line of previously-South Korea-only titles, and even said Korea-exclusive titles have Japanese- and English-language options, which shows that Pentavision recognizes its international fanbase (and probably didn't have enough funds to make non-Korean releases until recently).
- When Sega developed Fantasy Zone II DX (the System 16 version of Fantasy Zone II), they took the multi-screen concept of the original and simplified it into a dual world concept.
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is an overly simplified version of and at some points directly contradictory to its source material, Vampire: The Masquerade. But in most cases it is pretty clear that its differences are for the better, since a video game that is completely faithful to its tabletop origins will have some obvious issues. The main problem is that the Word Of God states the video game's story is canon, which presents some setting issues as that means some characters (especially Caine) would have had to be in two places at once.
- It is never really established how far back from the end of the oWoD storyline the end of the game is, even a few days would give the characters ample travel time.
- The Darkness video game trimmed down the first couple of story arcs from the comic, altered several characters, removed the supervillains, got rid of that stupid looking armor, and gave Mike Patton the voice of the titular Darkness. The result is a damn good revenge story loosely connected to the comic canon, but doing a far better job of making the player feel for Jackie in a way the comic was never able to. When the game hits you it hurts.
Western Animation
- The DC Animated Universe, from Batman The Animated Series to Justice League Unlimited, was generally of this kind. Opinions are split as to whether Teen Titans belongs here or in Adaptation Decay, or rather which individual elements qualify as which.
- Relatedly, the Robin from Teen Titans is essentially an amalgam of Dick Grayson (Robin I) and the better aspects of Jason Todd (Robin II, who doesn't exist in the DCAU), along with the costume and general look of Tim Drake (Robin III).
- Cyborg and Raven were also a bit more interesting in the cartoon. Both had far less Wangst, and Raven also had powers that were actually useful in combat (in the comic, she became nothing but The Empath and was often the first one taken out by bad guys despite her considerable power in her earliest appearances).
- Batman The Brave And The Bold is a Lighter And Softer take on the greater DC Universe outside of the "Big Three," and gets the core personalities of the characters it features down pat while improving some others. Aquaman is a Large Ham Boisterous Bruiser in the show, unlike the comics, but it fits better with the tone. The show's also packed aplenty with Mythology Gags ranging from references to the relatively recent Infinite Crisis and 52 to long-forgotten Golden Age Batman stories. It's essentially the "good parts version" of the entire DC Universe but is still accessible to non-readers of the comics.
- The 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon is not only a much closer adaptation of the original comic than the late '80s show; in some ways it actually makes better dramatic sense out of a serial narrative that Eastman and Laird were just pulling out of their butts for the majority of the book's run.
- This may have something to do with the fact that Peter Laird is actively involved with the production.
- Despite the fact that the 1980s cartoon is pretty much Adaptation Decay, it did make one notable improvement, in this troper's mind. The comics by Eastman and Laird, and most subsequent adaptations, depict Splinter as a rat who learned ninjutsu by copying the movements his human master made while training, before mutating and gaining human characteristics. In the 1980s cartoon, the human master himself is mutated by gaining rat characteristics, and retains all his ninja knowledge, which he then passes on to the Turtles. This troper finds this version much more believable than the notion that a rat could somehow learn not only the movements but the philosophy of ninjutsu before becoming mutated. More than fifteen years after the fact, this troper can still recall the audience's laughter when he saw the first Ninja Turtles movie and it showed a pre-mutation Splinter copying his human owner's moves.
- The first season of the Animated Adaptation of WITCH was filled with Adaptation Decay, but the second season really managed to pull of a fairly complicated plot in an entirely comprehensible way.
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