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Adaptation Decay is a common and unfortunate side effect of adapting a work in one medium to another. But sometimes, it works in reverse. Some adaptations take a complex character or situation, remove all the random detritus that's been scotch-taped onto the concept over the years, and boil it down to what originally made it good. In other cases, the original work had a few good elements amid a lot of dreck, and is lucky enough to be adapted by someone with the talent to bring out those good elements and make them shine.
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.
Examples:
- 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).
- 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.
- Judging by the reviews so far, everyone likes its sequel The Dark Knight even more.
- 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.
- 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 then on the battles themselves.
- The Fist Of The North Star movie took a 100+ episode series and distilled it into an hour and a half. On the other hand, that sprawling series was itself a bad case of Adaptation Decay, with the franchise's immense popularity forcing the TV show to come up with extreme amounts of filler material. The lukewarm quality of the movie may be an example of these tropes cancelling each other out.
- The entire Ultimate Marvel line of comics, but especially Ultimate Spider Man. The writers mine 30 years of plots and character development from the classic comics, to update and reuse the good ones while ignoring or improving on the bad. While this line of comics created the Ultimate Universe trope, the recent release of OVAs based on it is now blurring the lines (but note that many consider these OVAs to be Adaptation Decay).
- Most notably the Clone Saga. In the 616 universe it was a bloated story line that almost every fan agrees was garbage, however the Ultimate Clone Saga is arguably the best in the Ultimate Spidey series.
- While this was originally the stated purpose of the Ultimate Marvel line, comparing various character's original and Ultimate version history on The Other Wiki quickly leads to the conclusion that "updated" and "improved" generally means Darker And Edgier when it's not (e.g. the Ultimate Defenders) just a big Take That.
- 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 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.
- Literary/film example: The book The Princess Bride claims to be "the good parts version," an Adaptation Distillation of an earlier, digression-laden, politics-heavy, boring novel into a fun action-adventure story. In fact, it's nothing of the sort, but this setup allows the writer to lampoon such authors as Victor Hugo and his ilk. The film distills the story even further, into its purest essence.
- Which is to say, pure kick-assery.
- The freedom this gives him to shamelessly praise his own work shouldn't be overlooked.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 film version of Matilda, while mostly panned as campy in the extreme, has a much more satisfying conclusion than the book in this editor's opinion.
- 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.
- Similarly, the Gaunts 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 the Ciaphas Cain series.
- It's worth noting that several fans consider the changes Abnett made to the background unnecessary and lazy, and preferred the Guard the way they were... making it Adaptation Decay if you believe them.
- 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.
- 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.
- The miniseries version of Hogfather managed to retain most of the good material from the original novel. Having not yet seen the recent film of The Colour of Magic, this troper can not yet give an opinion on it.
- This troper enjoyed The Colour Of Magic immensely (especially Jeremy Irons as the Patrician), but it was apparently hard to follow if you haven'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 distallation 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
- They still are. Just because Terry says it doesn't mean he's right 8-). In this troper's opinion Colour Of Magic qualifies as Adaptation Distillation mostly for pushing the plot of Light Fantastic backwards, making CoM itself something more than a series of loosely connected parodies.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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. Aside from the Wall Banger ending, this troper thinks the movie is actually better than the novel.
- The video game version of The Warriors. Most of the game serves as a prequel with the events of the film being contained in the last five missions. The game shows how the Warriors got started and worked their way up, and greatly expands the conflicts and personalites of the gangs. Basically, it takes everything the film had and builds on it.
- Rebuild of Evangelion seems to be going this route, if the first movie is anything to go by.
- 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 Spectacular Spider Man Animated Adaptation is widely praised by Spider-Fans for its strong characterization, clever plotting, and creative takes on many of Spidey's traditional concepts. There are no Spider-Totems, no Clones, or any of the other previously mentioned Scotch Tape stapled onto the Spider-mythos in the last ten years in this version of Spider-Man, something this troper, at least, is very grateful for.
- Bridge To Terebithia. Everything in the movie is almost exactly as how it goes in the book, if not better.
- In 1939, Superman got his first proper 'super-villain', the 'Ultra-Humanite', a bald scientist in a wheelchair, who had decided to use his great intellect to take over the world. As the first step in this plan, he was organizing a taxi strike for the Mob. Yes, really. Now look at what this character ultimately became: Lex Luthor. 'Nuff said.
- I thought the Ultra-Humanite became an albino gorilla with a big brain?
- To clear this up, Luthor and the Humanite where initially both generic mad-scientist super-villians, until an artist's error led to Luthor (who was introduced as a red-headed war profiteer) being drawn with the Humanite's bald head. Someone at DC liked it, so the look stuck, with Luthor eventually replacing the Humanite as Superman's number one foe. Later someone remembered Humanite, and (to redifferentiate him from Luthor) had him transplant his brain into an albino gorilla... god I love the silver age.
- Started back in the golden age, where he became a woman and giant insect in close succession.
- The first season of the Animated Adaptation of WITCH had a moderate amount of Adaptation Decay, but the second season really managed to pull of a fairly complicated plot in an entirely conprehensible way.
- Many anime Compilation Movies are like this. The Mobile Suit Gundam trilogy, especially the third installment, Encounters In Space is a particularily good example. The Zeta Gundam films are a bit devisive 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 & the animation is much more consistant, 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 & 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) & 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 sinlge overiding 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 & robotkind tying together classic stories from the manga, greatly expanded the role of Astro's father, Dr. Tenma & 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 & then the time of his creation rolled around again. This version greatly expanded on Astro's backstory & 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.
- 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.
- 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 2005 screen adaptation of Pride And Prejudice gracefully folded the novel's main story into 130 minutes of running time. (The previously most successful adaptation, the 1995 miniseries with Colin Firth, had run to more than twice that length.)
- 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.
- 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 original Conan The Barbarian stories were racist, sexist and 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.
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