Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"Not everything in a book will work in a movie... I think it's the director's duty to keep what he can use and throw out or change the rest."
Sometimes when you're doing a version of a story, the writers are smart enough to know that for whatever reason — budget, censors, pacing issues, et cetera — there are things that just aren't going to make it through. So they make the best of a bad situation and explore other aspects of the story. Hopefully, this will put a new and interesting spin on the series. If not, you'll just get Adaptation Decay.
Time is often a factor in this. When you're adapting a 600-page book (or, for that matter, a seventy-year old comic series) into a two-hour movie, something's gotta go.
Fan Dumb tends to be rabid about this kind of change, although the rise of DVDs and bonus production commentary often include rationalization (or guilt-passing) at this sort of thing.
Various signs of this include:
- Composite Character: Combining character roles (and subsequently enlarging the role of one character) to make a simpler narrative to follow.
- Woolseyism: Dramatically altering key points but holding to the spirit of the original.
- Cue Cullen actor: Choosing an actor who may not immediately embody a character in the minds of the fans but who proves to have a brilliant performance in mind.
Contrast with Adaptation Distillation: 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
Anime and Manga
- The anime of Death Note has a bit of this. There are several things left out. However, while nothing too important to the story is omitted, several bits of information that would help explain things a bit better are in the manga. This causes a problem in that the manga is left feeling wordy and droning, while the anime feels abridged in which the characters pull information from nowhere. For example, when Near detects that Mikami is X-Kira, the manga lays out his entire thought process. The anime makes it seem like he just had a lucky guess.
- Some fans of Death Note are already complaining about changes being made to the last names of the characters in the American upcoming movie. Exactly how would it be possible for writers to avoid this without either a) setting the film in Japan and having it in subtitles, in which case how is it different from the Japanese film?; b) setting the film in Japan and having everyone speak in English, which is ridiculous; c) setting the film in America as intended but straining Suspension Of Disbelief when you wonder why all the main characters "happen" to be Japanese immigrants. With these options in mind, you can't not change the names to standard English ones!
- The anime of Berserk certainly toned down much of the series's violence, but is perhaps more well known for emphasizing themes of friendship and ambition — and not in an optimistic way — more than the manga did. This was a compromise with Berserk 's long supernatural plotline; most of the series is actually a flashback. The changes are usually accepted by fans, seeing as creator Kentarō Miura gave his approval.
- Also, the anime did away with all the slapstick and face faults, which created a more consistently dark and adult mood, which a number of fans actually prefer to the manga where it can actually vary wildly in tone. Some also believe that removing things like Gut's emotional breakdown during his sex scene with Caska and making it look like he got out of the Eclipse without Skull Knight's help actually made the main character more strong and likable.
- Zoisite of the Sailor Moon anime is a fairly standard foppish, gay shoujo villain. When he was inevitably adapted into a woman in the North American dub, his character became quirky, flamboyant, and actually more interesting.
- By the same token, Haruka and Michiru's lesbian relationship is glossed over from many dubs, such as the North American dub which changed them to cousins. Amusingly, the dub seemed primarily concerned with modifying only the most blatant comments; the two are still unusually affectionate, if not outright unplatonic.
- In the live-action series Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, numerous alterations to the setting were made to make the show a little more plausible. The talking cats are replaced with talking stuffed toys, a toyetic decision to rationalize carrying a stuff animal is more likely than an actual cat; the Sailor Senshi themselves look like normal Japanese girls when they're not transformed; and many settings and accessories that were typical of an early 90s teenager are updated to what a modern teenager would be associated with. The plot also dealt more strongly and harshly with the implications of their past lives. Not that it didn't indulge in some of the campy stuff...
- It was also more faithful to the manga. Oh Shitennou, I'm looking at you...
- Of course, the Shitennou WERE pretty Flanderized here (Jadeite's loyal to Queen Beryl to the point of being in love with her, Nephrite's so impulsive and angry that it makes him a Butt Monkey, Zoisite's more feminine than ever before, and Kunzite's colder and more powerful) but seeing as each trait Flanderized was pretty much the full extent of their original manga personalities, this isn't really that big a deal.
- The first Galaxy Angel video game was delayed enough that The Anime Of The Game would have to be aired at least a year beforehand. Rather than risk Adaptation Decay with the little information they had, the writers turned Galaxy Angel into a Gag Series that parodied Adaptation Decay, using even less source material than they had and stepping up Character Exaggeration to outrageous limits. It worked. Galaxy Angel Rune, on the other hand...
- The Suzumiya Haruhi Light Novels' narration are one of the things that people like most about them. Unreliable Narrator Kyon tells us the story in a unique way, but adding the visual media to it destroys this naturally, since you aren't told what happens anymore. And still, the anime is a very good adaption, maintaining the sarcastic style of Kyon as narrator and/or commentor, despite having a visual medium, even maintaining the occasional narration/speaking ambiguity with strategic camera angles. In fact, some things are downright better suited for, or improved in the anime, such as the episodes "The Day Of Sagittarius", "The Adventures Of Mikuru Asahina" and "Live Alive".
- Especially Live Alive, where we get God Knows.
- A good example is how Kyon does not have quotation marks when he talks, so it is ambiguous if he's talking or narrating. You can assume he is narrating for the most part, but sometimes character will reply to his supposed narration, much to the surprise of the reader. The anime actually manages to keep this by changing the camera perspective away from Kyon's mouth, so you don't actually see if he is narrating or talking.
- FLCL: The manga adaptation isn't so much a retelling of the story in the anime as it is taking the same premise and characters and telling a completely different story.
- The first Fullmetal Alchemist anime was put into production when only a few chapters of the manga had been released, and the writers had to not only come up with a conclusion based on the existing material, but make a story that would span about 50 episodes. So, in addition to expanding on certain scenes from the manga, most of the characters were given wildly different characterizations, and the entire plot was changed. (The original mangaka even encouraged them to do this.) In addition, the tone became much less optimistic, and the focus became much more about themes like sacrifice and the value of life. The result was an anime that is widely praised by critics, but is very different from its source. Whether or not it's as good as (or better than) the manga is subject to much debate. Obviously, Your Mileage May Vary.
- Of course, it must be noted that the mangaka of FMA asked the anime production to be different to the manga, along with approving of them. Try telling the manga fanbase that...
- They also added in characterization earlier in the anime for characters who became important in the manga later. Also of note, the anime team worked extensively with the mangaka on the ending—what tone should it have, what feeling should the audience leave with—she didn't write any of it, but she had a lot of input.
- Excel Saga in manga form is still ongoing and actually has become a lot more serious. The anime on the other hand...
- The Mexican dub also toned down Excel's genkiness a little bit, because in the Japanese original she screams so much, that American dubber Jessica Calvello ended up destroying her vocal cords.
- Mexican? Actually, the dub for Latin America is from Venezuela. Excel´s voice is Rebeca Aponte (Sam in Danny Phantom).
- Persona -Trinity Soul- supposedly takes place in the same universe as Persona 3. (At least, the presence of Akihiko implies that much.) However, the rules for Persona summoning are drastically changed for pragmatic reasons. In the games, a Persona has to be repeatedly summoned for every skill you use. This works wonderfully for a turned based game, but it would lack the same effect in an animated series. So in Trinity Soul, the "rules" for Personae were changed so that the battles would look more visually engaging. Your Milage May Vary of course, but the reasoning still exists.
- Some of the other changes to the series probably fall more under the Adaptation Decay side of things (statements that are contradictory to the games, such as that adults can't have Personas).
- Many, many things were shortened, or taken out, of the Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni anime. The manga mostly subverts this by leaving in most of the details, just shortened since most arcs are two volumes long.
Film
- Most comic book inspired movies are like this, though many fans can't get past They Changed It Now It Sucks (or whatever it is). Examples:
- The Batman movies, mainly the 1989 movie (to some Batman Returns) and Batman Begins and its sequel, The Dark Knight, are generally well received despite making up various plot points (that, in the case of Batman 1989, eventually became Fanon). The others, not so much.
- The Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man 2 in particular being praised. Not so much Spider-Man 3.
- One item that certainly caused controversy at first was the change from I Love Nuclear Power to Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke in regards to Spider-Man's Super Hero Origin. But the point of doing so was that it was slightly easier to Hand Wave a scientifically altered spider than a random million-to-one chance of an irradiated spider.
- Fans also initially balked at Peter having organic webshooters in the movie. The comic book's artificial one's were dropped because the movie didn't have time to believably show Peter inventing them. The comic book version has followed suit (though the artificial ones are still a part of his past.)
- Writer Peter David sometimes likes to remind fans that he first came up with the idea of organic web shooters in Marvel's Spider-Man 2099 series.
- The X-Men movies, which focus on the human-mutant conflict, greatly simplify the Marvel universe, cutting out the magic powers, scheming alien empires, and the like, and taking place in a continuity separate from the other Marvel films. Several characters who aren't mutants are made into mutants for simplicity's sake, the Phoenix Force is a destructive aspect of Jean Grey's personality which was psychically repressed by Prof. Xavier, and almost none of the characters are referred to by their "superhero" names except in passing. The films are generally praised for being great interpretations, especially the second movie. The third movie and X-Men Origins: Wolverine... well, Your Mileage May Vary.
- The Iron Man movie was very well received, likely due to almost entirely to being directly produced by Marvel Studios and Robert Downey Jr.'s brilliant performance. One key change was Obadiah Stane being an old friend of Tony and his father to heighten the sense of villainy and betrayal.
- Say what you will about the Fantastic Four movies, but at least they had a legitimate reason for Johnny and Sue to go out to space.
- The Watchmen film has numerous changes to the source material, most of them extrapolated from the comic. However, two significant changes — ( Dan Dreiberg seeing Rorschach's death and subsequently beating up Ozymandias, and changing some of the dialogue for the ending) — were most likely done to prevent the audience leaving with a complete and horrible Downer Ending.
- Your Mileage May Vary. The
fascist psycho Heroic Sociopath got killed, the good guy ended up with the lady and the world was saved. Doesn't sound downer to me.
- So you have absolutely no problem with the leftist emotionless bastard who deliberately gives people cancer as part of a plan to murder millions of innocent people as long as the "fascist psycho" dies and two characters get married? Oh, I forgot. Veidt is a touchy-feely kinda guy. It's okay that he committed mass murder to prevent . . . a mass murder because he "feels'" every death.
- Protip: If you're conservative and a Heroic Sociopath, you're a facist. If you're liberal and believe the Utopia Justifies The Means, then you're a leftist. Learning is fun with TV Tropes!
- As for the climax, they decided upon a device that emulated Dr. Manhattan's energy signature, allowing the world to scapegoat him, rather than the alien squid. People are undecided as to which works better overall, but it's definitely the best they could have done with that ending in film.
- It has been announced that the upcoming Thor film will not use the pseudo-Elizabethan English that the character has historically been known for in the comics. This is almost certainly an example of this, but fan outrage has already begun, despite the fact that the comics themselves have already dropped this highly campy element.
- Since Thor is supposed to be a Norse god from a much, much older culture, the Elizabethan English was never appropriate in the first place.
- Adaptation is this trope on MetaFictional steroids. In essence, faced with the task of adapting the un-adaptable Susan Orlean novel The Orchid Thief, a nonfiction book which is essentially simply about flowers, screenwriter Charlie Kauffman instead wrote a script about himself trying to adapt ''The Orchid Thief'', and ending up writing a script about himself trying to adapt the book instead. The film features Orlean as a major character, but largely discards the content of the novel. Most viewers seem to think this was a great improvement over the original.
- Pragmatic, or simply hallucigenic...given that the entire final third of the movie is the punchline to a joke made in the first fifteen minutes.
- American Psycho by necessity had to be streamlined, as most of the excruciatingly detailed murders in the book would not have a hope in hell of being let through by the MPAA (for those who have read the book: the use of the rat in particular).
- The well-known 1980 film, The Elephant Man, while generally held very highly as a good movie, has little to do with the events in the title character's life. However it has earned good standing with most Joseph Merrick aficionados.
- The Lord of the Rings movies were an excellent example of this, and indeed makes up a majority of the Director's commentary.
- At the start of the movie, several years of time in which Frodo has the Ring in the Shire are left out.
- Arwen has a much more active role in the first movie than in the book. This caused some controversy but generally works well.
- One of the most reviled changes in the movie, alterations of Faramir's actions and motivations in The Two Towers, are a result of this. The Shelob scene that provided the cliffhanger in the book doesn't chronologically take place until the battle of Minas Tirith, so something else had to form the climax of the second movie for Frodo and Sam. Further, it was noted that every other character in the films had what might be generally called an "adverse reaction" to being in the presence of the Ring, and for Faramir to say, "All right, off you go" without a second glance felt off to Jackson and company.
- Understandably so; even fans of Tolkien, when pushed, have to admit that the original Faramir was basically a Gary Stu self-insert. (A less-egregious one than usual, given that he doesn't do much heroic saving of the day, but still undeniably a Gary Stu.)
- An Author Avatar doesn't have to be a Gary Stu. Faramir isn't a plot-hogging, character-swooning, god among men like true examples of the trope are. The scene also helped show that Boromir and Faramir were not Not So Different.
- Just about all adaptations of The Lord of the Rings omit Tom Bombadil; most people see this as a painless way to save screentime, not to mention that his scenes were much more suited for the books than for movies.
- The Scouring of the Shire was entirely cut out, both because it would have added another hour to the films, but also because it would have ruined the pacing of the end sequence; ring gone, Big Bad gone, now let's get to the Where Are They Now— for twenty minutes in slow motion.
- In a subversion, much of Tolkien's "poetry" actually did remain in the films, though it was often adapted to the point where, instead of being an annoying distraction as in the prose work, songs blend so seamlessly that some viewers think all or most of the songs were excised for the film. For example:
- "The Road Goes Ever On" is sung by both Bilbo and Gandalf
- The song Pippin sings to Denethor is adapted from Bilbo's "Walking Song"
- The first drinking song sung by Merry and Pippin is adapted from one of Tolkien's poems.
- "All That is Gold Does Not Glitter" is recited by Arwen about Aragorn
- Not to mention the iterations of "One ring to rule them all", etc. in the Black speech and in English.
- Some of Jackson's additions are rather bizarre, though. He spends time bringing Elves to Helmes Deep as reinforcements, then has them all die in the first part of the battle so that they have no actual impact. The new stuff with Faramir makes sense, but adds at least a half hour to the film when he had to cut original content for time. The theatrical release doesn't even finish off the Uruks, leaving the viewer wondering why they don't just regroup and attack again. Actually, I guess that's the point of the extended cuts, to include as much cut content as possible without worrying about time restraints.
- The most bizarre change was giving both Aragorn and Elrond an insane degree of fake character development. Aragorn was hiding from his past and Elrond turned into a real Jerk. In the book, Aragorn was eager, even anxious, to claim his throne, and Elrond didn't hate humans.
- That is made more weird because Elrond is half-human, indeed a descendant of Beren who, when all the great lords of the Elves were unable to defeat Morgoth for no other reason than bickering amongst themselves managed to break into Angband and take a Silmaril from Morgoths crown, bringing hope to Elves and Men alike. That's not to mention the men of hithlum who fought and died so that the Elves of Gondolin could escape the battle of unnumbered tears, or the fact that it was Elves, not Men, that raped Elrond and Elros' home when they were just kids. Also the first King of Numenor was Elrond's brother, so to sum there is no logical reason for Elrond hating Humans.
- The Harry Potter films have some instances of this, depending on the movie and on the director.
- Despite Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix being the longest book of the series adapted into the shortest movie so far, the choices of what and how to cut and add has made it possibly the best film in the series. On the one hand, everything related to the Quidditch B-plot was cut, but partially cutting it instead would have no doubt made things choppy and awkward. A nice touch was also significantly emphasizing Harry's Not So Different fears — which in the book take the form of fears of being possessed — and cutting back on the Wangst.
- One could say that cutting the Wangst removes the book's emotional strength because a pivotal moment of the fifth book is when Harry lashes out at Dumbledore, which shows how the relationship between the two is somewhat strained, a plot point built upon in the sixth and seventh books.
- You also have to consider that leaving out the so-called "wangst" leaves Harry a rather flat character.
- In a minor (for the moment) aversion, they wanted to cut out house-elf Kreacher of Order of the Phoenix — JKR herself stepped in and told them to leave him in. It wouldn't have hurt OotP at all, but would've left giant holes in subsequent films (particularly for The Deathly Hallows).
- A good example from Goblet of Fire was how they cut down the book's Xanatos Roulette. The plan revolved around chance encounters, backstories, and things we don't know about until the book basically pauses for 100 pages to explain it. Voldemort himself, in the graveyard scene with Harry, spends quite a few pages detailing much of his plan (though even then, there are depths yet to be revealed until we get to Dumbledore and Barty Jr). The movie omitted almost all of that: the explanation of how Barty escaped Azkaban is ignored, nothing is stated about how Barty assumed the form of Moody, nor the status of Voldemort before Wormtail found him. This leaves a few things unexplained, but considering the sheer mass of plot they had to work with, they did a pretty good job.
- On the other hand, they left in most of the World Cup sequence but cut the actual match, and had the first task for whatever reason lengthened (and the dragon badly injured or killed), and parts of the Rita Skeeter subplot but cut the resolution to it - so they're not exactly 100% on that movie. Luckily they improved for Phoenix.
- They also spent an inordinate amount of time upon things which were subplots in the overall progression of the book. The Yule Ball and its lead-up comprised about half a chapter but took up nearly 25 minutes of the 2 hour film, while the lead-up to the second task and the task itself took about 3 chapters, and was condensed to about 5 minutes in the film. I would hardly call that a useful or pragmatic use of time. The worst offender was the resurrection of Voldemort and the encounter in the graveyard, which was given very little time despite it being the climax of the novel.
- In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, they figured out how to work around the non-visual aspect of everyone reading and talking about the attacks by the Death Eaters: they scrapped all the scenes with people reading about loved ones being attacked and/or killed, and created one with Harry being attacked at the Weasleys. It also gave Ginny Weasley a lot more Character Development and made her seem like less of a Last Minute Hookup for Harry.
- The filmmakers also destroy the Burrow in this scene, which would seem to indicate that there won't be a wedding scene in Deathly Hallows.
- Probably not, seeing as how Charlie and Bill don't appear to exist in the movie continuity.
- James Bond:
- Goldfinger is a case where the filmmakers top Ian Fleming himself with a better story than the original book. For instance, they condensed an extended golf game scene to just the critical point where Bond thwarts Goldfinger's cheating. Furthermore, the film changes the book's ridiculous plot to physically steal the gold of Fort Knox (which the movie Bond points out is impossible) which includes poisoning the soldiers through the water system before they can react to such a slow method and using a nuclear bomb to open a door with everyone suicidally close. The movie changes the scheme into a genuinely ingenious plan to have the poison as a gas sprayed from a quick aerial pass over the fort and then Goldfinger's troops raid the fort just long enough to use a high power laser to open the vault building's door to place a nuclear bomb in the main vault. Then the villains get away for the bomb to detonate and whatever gold survives the blast would be radioactive, and thus worthless, for decades while Auric Goldfinger's own gold's value jumps at least tenfold.
- In a bit of Fridge Brilliance, anyone who scoffs at this new plan working should remember that the Fort personnel were warned about it by Bond and they played along to make it seem to work so they could ambush the invaders.
- The part about the gold becoming radioactive is stupid, as it would be vaporized.
- That would still push the value of his gold up, if the rest was gone.
- The made a point of mentioning that it was a "dirty bomb" meaning it was designed to release radiation using conventional explosives. However, the plot fails to take into account the likelihood of the plot simply being covered up by the U.S. government. Had it been successful and made public, the resulting economic collapse and skyrocketing inflation would have pretty much negated the gains in the value of Goldfinger's gold because everything would end up costing 10 times more, as well.
- Casino Royale (the straight adaptation starring Daniel Craig, not the David Niven sendup from the 1960s) featured one in the change of the card game from baccarat to poker. While admittedly playing into the fact that Texas Hold 'Em is wildly popular these days, it also allowed a level of psychological warfare between Le Chiffre and Bond during the game that isn't possible in baccarat, and allows the audience to understand what's going on without an explanation (as more people are familiar with poker than baccarat).
- This is a noteworthy example, since it removes the Wall Banger that, considering Baccarat is almost completely a luck-based game, there was no reason MI 6 needed to send Bond himself so badly by saying he was their "best gambler". The movie actually turns Bond's gambling skill into a relevant plot point, as he and Le Chiffre are seen trying to manipulate each other throughout the game. This troper saw the movie with his friends, some of whom were totally unfamiliar with Texas Hold 'Em but still managed to pick up on much of the psy-war between the two.
- The Battle Royale movie is generally considered as good as or better a work than the novel it's based on, by removing most of the more ludicrous political justifications for why a school class would have to fight each other on a deserted island, giving the Big Bad a more sympathetic relationship to the class, and generally attempting to focus on fewer characters. The Manga on the other hand is condensed Rule Of Cool, to the point where it almost parodies itself.
- On the other hand, they also cut out the backstories and development for several characters, glazed over their deaths, and completely changed some of the characters. No longer is Kiriyama a classmate without emotions who chooses to play to win — he's just some random guy who volunteered for fun. Same with Kawada; no longer a classmate, but a stranger who got pulled back in. Your Mileage May Vary.
- Most of the Transformers cartoons have Hammer Space to explain the Transformers gaining or losing mass between forms. For the 2007 movie, director Michael Bay insisted upon avoiding this, which lead to changes such as Optimus Prime being a Peterbilt rather than a more standard tractor-trailer, which would have given him a much smaller robot form, as well as not using the magically-appearing/disappearing trailer (which has also been picked up in Transformers Animated). Whether you consider this Pragmatic Adaptation or outright heresy varies from person to person.
- The comet protoforms were created for the first movie partially to work on a Fridge Logic they had with the Transformer spaceships, which is why would robots who can transform into vehicles need a spaceship? The comet protoforms keep the action focused on Earth and not turning the story into Star Wars. In the Expanded Universe and Revenge Of The Fallen they've introduced the Transformer spaceships but continue to downplay their role to focus on the planet-bound story.
- Of course then there is the nature of having humans playing a major role in the battle between the Autobots and Decepticons because this is a Live Action Adaptation.
- James Ellroy's books are good examples since the outrageous number of subplots and characters make them pretty much unfilmable (Ellroy has admitted that he does it on purpose).
- The scenarists who made LA Confidential into a movie were aware of the difficulty, and ended up cutting part of the plot while keeping the complexity of the story, focusing the movie on the evolutions of the three main characters and reorganising scenes from the book (with the climax of the movie being the first scene in the book), making the movie almost a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in itself.
- The scenarist who worked on the adaptation of The Black Dahlia, however, tried to keep every single detail of the book in. It didn't work that well.
- The novel of Hard Core Logo took a "scrapbook" approach (telling the story through character monologues and documents such as journal entries and phone messages) that would have been difficult to convert to film. The movie is a Mockumentary with an Unreliable Narrator. The movie script also added lots of Ho Yay and substituted a main character's suicide for the rather anticlimactic ending of the book, creating a more emotionally compelling work.
- A particularly good Made For TV Movie adaptation of Gulliver's Travels does this a lot. One excellent example is how they handled the Aesop that people covet immortality without seriously considering just what that might really entail. In the book, this is conveyed through the plight of the Struldbrugs, who have eternal life without eternal youth becoming decrepit and senile for eternity — and this along with the usual immortal problem of losing everything they knew, and social penalties designed to keep the country from collapsing under the weight of supporting them, or their abusing their immortality in an attempt to gain disproportionate power; however, this is conveyed in a monologue that doesn't translate well to television, so they dropped it and substituted a new scene with the same moral.
- The stage musical version of Little Shop of Horrors (itself a distilled adaptation of an overlong Roger Corman comedy horror) finished with a rave-up ending. The action breaks off when Seymour Krelborn confronts Audrey II, the Greek Chorus announces that this scene is being repeated in places up and down the country, and the cast file on and perform the final number — "Don't Feed the Plants!". The writers knew that this wouldn't work in a feature film, even if it was a musical, and so ditched it and wrote a new final number, "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" against which the final confrontation could play out to its conclusion.
- At first, the writers wrote an even more extravagant ending, also set to "Don't Feed the Plants!" that was already filmed and ready to go. The film's current ending is a result of test audiences rejecting an ending in which the main character and his innocent girlfriend get eaten alive by Audrey II.
- The Bourne movies revitalized the spy thriller genre, making it popular and profitable again, even displacing the books to most. However, it outright discarded significant portions of plot from all three books (especially the last two) - most would argue that this was a straight-up improvement, though.
- In original In The Heat Of The Night novel, Virgil Tibbs is a quiet, deferential African American detective who never seems to lose his temper or ever seem annoyed working in a deep south town even as the racial slurs are thrown at him. For the film version, director Norman Jewison realized that this would never fly in the late 1960s, nor would the star, Sidney Poitier, would want to play this kind of character yet again. So, the film was rewritten with Tibbs being someone who does not hesitate to assert his status to bigoted neanderthals with a hearty "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!" or instantly striking back at a bigot slapping him, a bold action for an African American hero to do on film at that time.
- The film adaptation of The Prestige directed by Christopher Nolan has very little in common with its source material, the lesser known novel by Christopher Priest. The changes are so many, it would be pointless to list them all here, changing everything from the plot to characterization, going so far as to actually leave out the main characters from the book. Without detracting from the original work, all the changes make for a film far better than your usual adaptation, and despite the wild differences it's obvious the Nolan brothers love the novel and prioritized respecting its spirit and originality instead of the superficial details.
- After the premiere, Priest himself said that the film was better than anything he'd written.
- The film version of The Mask differs significantly from the original comic book version in that where the former takes a mostly clean-cut, slapstick approach, the latter is much more violent and dark overall.
- In About A Boy, the ending of the book is centered around Kurt Cobain's (the character Elle's favorite musician, and the guilty pleasure of Will) suicide. In the movie, Will's guilty pleasure is changed to hip-hop music, as the novel was written in the early 90s and the movie made nearly a decade later. The end of the movie also focuses on a talent show instead, completely different than the novel version- yet it still plays out rather well.
- There's quite a difference between Field Of Dreams and the book it's based on, Shoeless Joe. For instance, the movie omits lengthy subplots about Ray's twin brother Richard and an elderly ex-Chicago Cub named Eddie Scissons; and the movie uses fictional writer Terrence Mann as a replacement for J.R. Salinger from the book (undoubtedly for various legal reasons). Plus, the movie saves the bit about Ray's late father joining the team as a big reveal for the end, when it actually is revealed pretty early on in the book and is significantly less poignant.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit differs significantly from its source material, the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?. For one thing, the book deals with comic book and comic strip characters, not cartoon characters, who all speak in physical, tangible word balloons. This is clearly unadaptable to film, wherein all Toon characters would have had to be mute, so they received the power of speech. Additionally, they became animated cartoon characters and the story was set in 1947, smack-dab in the middle of the golden age of American theatrical animation. Not to mention that Toons went from being just as vulnerable as humans but possessing an elaborate method of faking their own deaths for theatrics' sake (it's complicated) to really being as unkillable as they seem.
- The Silent Hill movie features a drastically simplified backstory for Alessa Gillespie, a major character in the movie and in the first video game. Since a lot of viewers still didn't know what was going on, this was probably for the best.
Literature
- The Warcraft novel Tides Of Darkness is an adaptation of a Real Time Strategy with two opposing campaigns with conflicting storylines, consisting mostly of generic "destroy the enemy base/capture an object" missions and scarce on memorable characters at the Alliance side. So the novel took the most memorable and significant parts of the campaigns, forming them into a cohesive narrative, interleaved them with heavy references to later canon, and "enlisted" the Five Man Band from Beyond the Dark Portal for the protagonists. Whether it ended up condensing the war too much or not is debatable.
- The novelization of Revenge Of The Sith was written by Matt Stover. Obviously, a book of the film loses the visuals, the music, and any appeal from various actors. Most novelizations are basically phoned in, since they'll be bought because of the title. But Stover didn't phone this in. Most of the dialogue is the same as in the movie, it ends the same way, scenes go in the same order and directions, but the whole thing is considerably darker and more thoughtful. The mood is intensified; lows are lower, highs are more fleeting, there is a sense that things will get better but it will take a long, long time. This, plus the near-total axing of Narm and the addition of quiet Continuity Nods to the Star Wars Expanded Universe, makes a number of fans prefer the book.
Live Action TV
- The phenomenon of many people preferring the The Incredible Hulk TV show to the 2003 big budget CG-fest movie. While the former removed and simplified elements from the comics original, the latter added whole layers of story that were never there - the "more is less" principle at work. (Agony Booth recap
 )
- The Dresden Files TV series replaced the talking skull Bob from the books with a ghost inhabiting said skull so they could have an actor providing a visual component and emotions to the character. The result was well-liked even by those who did not think too much of the series, and the airing of the previously unaired two-hour pilot which did feature Bob as a talking skull showed pretty clearly to everyone why the ghost was a better idea. Of course, the brilliant portrayal of the character by Terrance Mann helped a lot.
- The Dexter novels eventually get a lot darker and weirder than the first book, with Dexter's "Dark Passenger" turning out to be a fragment of an ancient god of murder. The series maintains the balance of dark humor and creepiness evident in the first book, and keeps things realistic by comparison.
- Most Dexter fans want to forget that the third book even exists, and the author is reportedly pretending all the supernatural crap never happened in the fourth book. Most of the reviews I've seen tend to agree that the TV series is much stronger and more coherent than the book, with better characterization and development.
- To be fair, This Troper found that a Monster Of The Week format with an overarching storyline as portrayed in the Show worked a lot better than the books, because it doesn't seem as jarring to see him murder someone new every week, rather than ever chapter.
- David Cronenberg's adaptation of the unfilmable Naked Lunch took story elements from the book and melded them together with parts of William S. Burroughs' biography.
- In the transition from The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries book series to HBO's True Blood; cutting out Sookie's (often Wangsty) first-person narration and adding in occasional snatches of thoughts Sookie catches made Sookie instantly a more sympathetic protagonist.
- MASH does this, to the extent that many are unaware that it began as a book. This is not surprising, however, seeing as how the original novel from which MASH sprang was horrible; full of hornball JerkAsses boasting about how much sex they get/how good they are at sex, and more sexism than you can shake a stick at. For example, the doctors not only know a whore in the local brothel is being forbidden to seek treatment for her epilepsy because the fits she throws make her so popular with the customers, but actually approve of this state of affairs and regularly vist her themselves. For another, "Trapper" John's nickname stems from an incident that is implied to be borderline rape, and all the other doctors care about is the fact he managed to "get some". It should be noted that one of the two co-writers who created the original novel absolutely hated the TV series and added several Take Thats to the future novels he wrote (for example, M*A*S*H Mania has Hawkeye commenting on how enjoys going to State University to "kick the shit out of a few liberals), which probably only contributed to the relative obscurity of the novels.
Video Games
- Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War was quite well-received for capturing the "grim and dark" feel of its source material. Of course, there are fanatics who claim it was not close enough to the tabletop game and either prefer the earlier title Final Liberation, which followed the system even more closely, or are working on mods that attempt to replicate the tabletop's style.
- Mostly the game mechanics: Space Marines are supposed to be super soldiers... and you can take them down with Guardsmen or Orc ranged fire easily. And the SM build bases, even though they are the equivalent of special forces. In all fairness, they are changing this for Do W 2. We hope.
- Okay, so how is that a Pragmatic Adaptation? What elements were changed but generally accepted because they just couldn't stay the way they were originally and were replaced by something interesting?
- Primarily, the core game mechanics. The rules of the tabletop version just don't translate well to an RTS, even in loose adaptation. Thus, they didn't even try to do a direct adaptation, and just made a new framework that borrowed elements of the tabletop. Most people agree this worked out well, and led to one of the best 40k games to date. They also tweaked the core army abilities a bit to make things more balanced — The Imperial Guard from the expansion was hit with this pretty heavily, gaining a lot of perks they don't have in the tabletop, where they're even more of a vehicle-focused army than in Dawn of War.
- They also changed the functions of many of the special weapons and abilities considerably, as well as the summon process for demons. They also dropped the psyker's "Perils of the Warp" check. Overall, the changes were good; since, although these things tend to work well in slow-paced, turn-based tabletop play; they would be complete game-breakers for an RTS game.
- To be honest even the tabletop rules themselves qualify for this trope as the fluff implies that even 10 or so Marines are more then a match for regular sized army; but that wouldn't make for a particularly fun game if the rules reflected that. A totally 100% Fluff based game would have everyone else totally decimated by small amounts of Space Marines. Balance wins the day.
- You really can't do Fate Stay Night justice by just following the Fate route, but the episode/continuity limits don't really let you do two and tell a coherent story. So they took Fate and add a little UBW to it and came up with something that's pretty good, even if it doesn't match the original in quality.
- They also threw in the odd reference to Heaven's Feel as well- namely the revelation that Rin and Sakura are sisters.
Western Animation
- Several Disney Animated Canon movies differ from their sources for this reason.
- Nearly every adaptation of Wolverine in a Marvel TV series tends to focus more on building his characterization (notably X Men Evolution) than on his violent berserker rages, because of Media Watchdogs and their attitude towards violence in children's TV.
- Wolverine And The X Men takes elements of the vast, contradictory mythology surrounding the Pheonix Force that look like they might work well together, and constructs a basically new story out of them. Likewise combining the various Bad Futures of the comics into one.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a violent and gory (if satirical) black and white independent Comic Book with an ongoing storyline. (Shredder dies messily in the very first issue; later his surviving minions feed what is left of him to a colony of worms that take his form and his intelligence. Worm-Shredder destroys the Turtles' and April's home, and nearly kills Leonardo. After a year of healing, Leo heads back to New York, chops off Worm-Shredder's head, and burns him.) In the early process of licensing and adaptation, the Turtles developed a litany of catch phrases, color coded costumes, a Garfield-like food fetish, and an army of ineffective recurring villains; Raphael changed from a sociopathic Jerkass to "cool but rude", Baxter Stockman was changed from a homicidal black man to a feeble white guy, Splinter's whole backstory was rewritten to avoid the question of death; they abandoned character and plot development for syndication-friendly standalone episodes... and yet it all kind of worked. The 2003 series is a much closer adaptation of the comics (even bearing some traits of Adaptation Distillation); any carry-over from earlier adaptations (such as Michaelangelo's use of lingo from the earlier show) is generally Lampshade-hung. There's still much conflict over which cartoon was actually better — ratings and profit wise, they did the same.
- In the comics, Splinter is the mutated pet rat of a ninja murdered by Shredder. In the (first) cartoon, Splinter is a human ninja (and rival to Shredder) mutated into a rat. This change feels less like a bowdlerization (even though it is) and more like an Adaptation Distillation. It simplifies Splinter's back story, gives the turtles a more direct tie to ninjas (trained by an actual ninja as opposed to the pet rat of a ninja), and gives scenes between Splinter and Shredder a personal edge. The show even did a good, touching episode where Splinter briefly regained his human form.
- The second animated adaptation of Herge's Tintin comic book series often streamlines the original narrative to make the story of each comic book fit into two half-hour episodes by cutting out subplots that don't affect the main plot overall, but otherwise faithfully follows Herge's original plotlines.
- Frank Maggiore commented on a change made to a Winx Club episode; in the dub, Sky went from being killed (it's never explicitly said as such, but Flora mentions his lack of pulse at one point) to being put into a deep sleep (by having the Trix, who "killed" Sky, explicitly mention this a few times). It seemed to him that it made a lot more sense when Bloom revived Sky; this changed a never-before-seen magical Back From The Dead ability to a Sleeping Beauty-style awakening that seemed more 'probable', especially since that these new powers were played as "healing powers" in either version. The kicker? Not only did a normally eyeroll-worthy Never Say Die edit give some cred to the story, it was made by 4Kids Entertainment. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
- That said, they still left in Flora mentioning Sky's lack of pulse, thus confusing the viewers a bit. Also, Bloom's resurrective powers would become a plot point later on.
- The first half of Superman: Doomsday runs The Death Of Superman fairly straight save for the absence of the Justice League, but the second half, based on The Reign of the Supermen, gives us a single replacement Superman, who's a clone like Superboy, but with elements of both the Eradicator (crimefighter with extreme zero-tolerance policy) and the Cyborg (secretly working for a villain), and drops the complex Mongul plot entirely in favour of a straightforward battle of the Superman.
- The Cyborg (Hank Henshaw) wasn't working for a villian secretly, but rather was a villain working with yet another villain secretly.
- Green Lantern: First Flight literally breezes over Hal Jordan's classic origin story in about 5 minutes to focus on the intergalactic dealings of the Green Lantern Corps. This was partially because of plans for a Live Action Adaptation of Green Lantern that would likely go into that origin, but also because of examining much of the same story in Justice League The New Frontier and they didn't want to rehash his origin with every new DTV.
- The cartoon movie adapted from The King And I was absolutely ridiculous about this.
Theater
- Wicked the novel was about anarchy, cruel dictatorship, persecution, and watching a woman's descent into insanity. The Broadway musical changed around the story into being about friendship, shoes, and drama over stolen boyfriends.
- And extremely romantic female friendships. In the book, it's less noticeable on Elphaba's side, but arguably more noticeable on Glinda's side.
- Another change, albeit a minor one, is that Elphaba's sister Nessa doesn't have arms in the book. Obviously difficult to portray onstage, so they just stick her in a wheelchair instead.
- And of course the biggest- Elphaba and Fiyero live.
Well Nigh Unclassifiable
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Starting as a radio show, it has been adapted with various degrees of pragmatism and decay into the (more well-known and certainly well-loved) novel series, the (well-loved) computer game (Douglas Adams said it bears as much resemblance to the original story as Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead does to Hamlet), the (pretty-well loved) BBC Series, and the (Love It Or Hate It) movie... not to mention various and sundry Comic Books, Stage Productions, Sound Recordings and Towels. Of course, since each new adaptation added and removed ideas from the central story, it is almost nigh-well impossible to say what exactly is meant to be an adaptation of what, or how well its been done. This is probably how Douglas Adams would have wanted it.
- Considering he was directly responsible for most of the differences...
- Okay, the radio series came first. The play was based on the radio series with stuff added in. The books were based on the play, and rearranged some plot events. The TV show was based on the radio series. Pretty much everything from there onwards was based on the books, with the exception of the computer game which sort of cobbled everything together.
|
|
