Seems to be used for bashing, suggest nuking examples.: In Name Only

Did anyone really think this page wouldn't turn into "who can insult the adaption the most"?

The problem is that there are genuine examples, where it is either extremely obvious or confirmed by Word of God that the work literally was not an adaptation, and it got shoehorned into one at the last minute. The I Robot and Constantine films are great examples, and still perfectly good movies on their own. You just have to quietly ignore their supposed connection to previous works, which is what I always thought this page was about.

Are there any good examples buried in there? Because if we can make this objective, only for works where it is literally In Name Only, it would help a lot.

I'll check when I'm done with my current task.

'k, back. Let me get a read of this page.

Okay, can you give a me a quick definition of a "good" example?

edited 2nd Jun '11 7:56:40 PM by Deboss

I Robot. It originally started life as a bit of a subversion of the Robot War trope (only one robot went crazy, who can control the other modern ones, while the older robots defend humanity), but it was noted to be a bit too close for comfort to Asimov's works. So it was renamed I Robot, the protagonist robot was renamed Sunny, and the Three Laws were more directly referenced throughout the movie. Wonderful movie, has only tangential relation to Asimov's short story.

Eh? Most of the examples seem correct and neutral.

Hm, the area I ran into was the one for Starship Troopers, as I'm sorting the wiks to the proper media page.

Ah, I know what the problem was, all the times I'm seeing the word "fans" on the page. That's why it struck me as bitching.

edited 2nd Jun '11 8:58:04 PM by Deboss

I tweaked the lead paragraph to take out the implication of "Isn't it horrible when this happens!"

Do you think that's enough or should go down and do a cleaning?

It definitely needs further cleaning. In fact the whole description needs to be gone over, as well; I just did a quick-and-dirty on the opening paragraph and the one that said "These are very very rarely good."

I wonder if there should be a split between "adaptations that are almost unrecognizable" - which tends to draw most of the complaining - and "retroactive adaptations" like I Robot. Might only make things worse, though.

Wouldn't Dolled-Up Installment cover the latter?

Not necessarily - to my understanding, that involves adding an unrelated work into an existing series. I'm pretty certain it's also a translation/localization trope more than anything else.

Dolled Up Adaptation?

The only real problem is the degree to which the new product resembles the original is up to interpretation, only the worst of In Name Only has absolutely zero resemblence to the source material (Dragonball Evolution keeps the same basic premise and characters, just altering the narrative to fit a movie format). The page picture probably doesn't help much, as it applies to that miniscule extreme decay. But otherwise I see most examples being accurate.

And as it has already been said, many very fine movies have come out of In Name Only. I would put The Bourne Series of films being among the best.

I've been going through this page - some of these entries are instances where a handful of elements are changed, but the characters and general plot stay the same. Looks like this could use some pruning - I'll try to get to it in the near future.

Did some further tweaks on the description to make it less rant-y.

Bump. So are we good now?

I'd like to ditch this bit:

It seems like shoehorning stuff belonging to other tropes, and opening the doors to petty complaints.

Removed it. Thread can be closed now.

Have the examples been scrubbed?