Anyone who’s read a book is familiar with bad adaptations. The movie completely fails to capture what made the novel great, or changes it so much that the story is unrecognizable. This happens the other way too, with film novelizations often missing the mark by a country mile. But why does this happen? Why is adapting a story so hard, and what even qualifies as an adaptation. Do theme park rides count?
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Music]
Oren: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Mythcreants podcast, I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And Wes is going to be out for a few months. He’s off doing his own thing, wandering the fields. But for today, we are going to be adapting this podcast into a movie.
Chris: Oh no.
Oren: It’s going to be a movie of the podcast. Now, obviously we can’t change anything about the original podcast, but we’re also going to have to add a bunch of things because it’s a movie now. So, what we’ll end up with is a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really fit in a movie because it’s from the original podcast, plus a bunch of vestigial movie things that don’t fit with the original content. And I think that’ll be great.
Chris: Let’s face it, if they made a podcast into a movie, it would be about how we learn life lessons and how we’re like underdogs that are struggling to make a successful podcast- and then we like, you know, have our down point where everything is terrible. And then we learn like an up- life lesson, and suddenly the podcast is great.
Oren: Unless it’s a Ghibli adaptation, in which case, like the message will be that podcasting is bad and you shouldn’t do it. And there will be like-
Chris: Laughs
Oren: -one or two characters will yell that at some point, and people will be like, ‘What?, Isn’t this a movie about podcasting?’. Throwing some Ghibli shade right there.
Chris: And to see how we’re- we now feel complete, so we don’t need to podcast.
Oren: Yeah, that would be the end. We just decided to not podcast anymore. That would be a lot easier on my schedule, actually. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
Chris: Oh no! The wrong lesson. The wrong- That’s a bad adaptation. Bad.
Oren: Bad-aptation. That’s good. That’s a good word. We can just make that one word. Bad-aptation.
Chris: I have one question for you. Does a Disney world ride to movie adaptation count?
Oren: I would say no, personally. I mean, granted, I don’t think I ever actually been on any of the rides that have been turned into movies.
Chris: I have been on the Pirates of The Caribbean ride. It’s really more of a setting. But, sometimes I think that filmmakers like basing their stories off of something with no story at all, because that gives them complete freedom in making up a story.
Oren: Let me put it this way. We could argue if it is technically an adaptation and if it’s technically a sandwich, but functionally speaking, it’s the same as just saying, ‘make a pirate movie’.
Crhis: Pretty much.
Oren: Like, I would say that Jungle Cruise is more of an adaptation than Pirates of The Caribbean, because at least with Jungle Cruise, they have a very specific premise of a boat going up a river.
Crhis: Wait, have you been on the Jungle Cruise ride?
Oren: No, I haven’t.
Chris: It’s not really any more based on the ride than Pirates of The Caribbean.
Oren: I’m not saying it is! I’m just saying that there’s like a- there’s at least sort of a premise, whereas like, Pirates is just a concept, right? It’s like, there’s not really anything specifically from the ride. I’m sure there are Easter eggs, right? If you’re like super into Disney rides, so you can probably see some Easter eggs in the Pirates movies.
Chris: The tricky thing is, I took the ride after I saw the movie. So I don’t know how much they changed the ride, like the ride- the movie is an adaptation of the ride, and then the ride becomes an adaptation of the movie. It’s like, Tortuga is in the ride, but was it originally Tortuga? I don’t know.
Oren: I have no idea. One thing that I find kind of interesting is that when we talk about adaptations, we’re almost always talking about turning something into a movie or occasionally into a television show. But, adaptations go the other way too, we just don’t think about them.
Chris: We call them novelizations.
Oren: A novelization is definitely an adaptation, of a movie, usually, into a novel, sometimes a video game or whatever. Uh, you can also do, like making things into a video game could be considered an adaptation or into comic books. Adapting novels into comic books is a fairly popular thing that people do.
Chris: I have to say, when judging how good an adaptation is, I think thathow much it changes, the original should factor into it. Granted, that can be kind of subjective, and again, storytellers might want to change a lot of things so they can make a better story, but at least in my mind, a great adaptation changes as little as possible while making a better story.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, if I had to pick, I would definitely go with better story over changing less, because I want to watch a good story. Most of all, but like, if you aren’t trying to keep things from the original, at some point you do have to ask the question of ‘Why are you marketing this as an adaptation?’.
Chris: But like, we were just talking about with Ghibli, our crack at Ghibli films, just adding a new message there that was not in the original, just because the filmmaker likes that message- that’s not, to me, a sign of a good adaptation.
Oren: Right, Howl’s Moving Castle is the movie we’re talking about. This happens in a few other Ghibli films, but this is the really noticeable one of the earliest, the one that most people have seen. And, there’s a decent chance they’ve also read the book. Because the movie wants to be about being like an anti-war message, using magic as an analogy for like, you know, weapons of mass destruction or what have you. And that’s a perfectly legitimate story to tell, but that’s definitely not what the book is about.
Oren: And so, as a result, what you end up with is this weird thing in the movie where it starts off basically identical to the book, with the witch of the waist, casting a curse on Sophie and her turning old and the witch of the waste being a big bad. But then like, at about the halfway point, that story basically disappears and the witch of the waist turns into a weird blob creature for no reason. Cause’ we’re kind of done with her now. She’s not part of the movie and Sophie is still old, but like, the reason she’s still old is kind of a question mark. It’s like, what purpose does that serve in the story anymore? No one really knows.
Chris: Now it’s about how war is bad. It’s like a completely different story.
Oren: And admítedly, that’s not necessarily worse than the original book. Cause’ at about that point in the original book, they go into Wales in the real world. Like Wales, the country.
Chris: It’s like, wow, that’s a theming break. What is Wales doing here?
Oren: It’s like, now it’s the real world, and we find out How; is sad because he’s from the real world and he doesn’t like it. And it’s just like, what is-OK-what is happening here?
Chris: (Laughs)
Oren: So it’s not like the original book doesn’t have a problem there too, right?
Chris: I do like how the movie tightens some things up, like, in the movie we have this, I think it’s a broom that turns out to be this prince of another country, and it’s very random and cursory. It’s like, okay, that was kind of random. But in the original book, they actually find two people who have been, like, mixed together. And it just makes way more sense to just find a single person, than it does to find like two people- (Laughs) pieces of two people that have been mixed into one being. It’s just, you know, it tightens the story up, right, and it takes off- and there’s more emphasis on Sophie’s sisters in the book that- it feels a little more scattered and the movie kind of consolidated the story more, which that part was-
Oren: Yeah, and I mean, the castle itself is beautiful.
Chris: I still love that movie despite its failings, including the castle.
Oren: The castle is great, and Calcifer is great, and his relationship with Howl is very interesting. And I like all of that. I just find the random like, ‘oh yeah. Also this is an anti-war movie.’, It’s like kind of got to bake that in from the beginning, man. Can’t just introduce that halfway through and try to pivot to it. Well, I mean, you can, I guess if you’re Studio Ghibli, you can do what you want, but I wouldn’t recommend you do that.
Chris: (Laughs)
Oren: There are a few interesting reasons I’ve found that adaptations tend to be bad. I’m not prepared to say that adaptations are bad more often than they’re good. I think we tend to remember the bad ones more, and the good ones either get cast as exceptions or just forgotten about.
Chris: I think adaptations are one of those things where, when it’s done well, people notice it less. It’s just like, ‘oh, I’m watching this novel on screen.’, and- because somebody did their job really well and it looks very seamless. Not always, I mean, definitely the more adaptations fail, the more people appreciate it when they don’t fail. But, yeah, I would say the bad ones, definitely just call more attention to themselves.
Oren: But there are a few notable reasons, right? And like, we just talked about one, the adaptation clashes with the original, and this is the case of- that they wanted to do something with the adaptation that isn’t in the original, and they weren’t willing to completely change the concept, probably because they thought people would be mad or maybe it was a contractual thing, who knows. So, instead they do this like weird halfway-house. And like, now the story is being pulled in two different directions. If you’re lucky, sometimes it’s three directions.
Oren: Uh, another common one is that the medium does not serve the original story well. And, this is- you can overcome this if you’re willing to make enough changes. But, again, a lot of the times, they either aren’t able to, or they aren’t willing to, like the Hobbit movies and the Mortal Combat movie both fall into this.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the Hobbit movie, that’s a hard one. I almost wonder if it should have been a TV show, because it’s a lot more episodic, The Hobbit.
Oren: Well, so, I don’t envy the job of either Peter Jackson or Deltoro as they were trying to adapt The Hobbit. Because, apparently, there was, you know, from what we understand with behind the scenes, there was a lot of studio meddling. Like, apparently there being three films was a mandate from the studio. It wasn’t a creative decision in the first place. Um, and of course they’re also like clearly desperately trying to make it like Lord of The Rings, but they also want it to be kind of like The Hobbit. I guess you could say that that’s clashing with the original, but like, by the same token, it’s just- The Hobbit is a very short book, right, there just isn’t that much material in there.
Oren: So, trying to turn it into three movies was always going to be weird. Although, you know, now that I say that, The Hobbit is 90,000 words, it’s not actually that short, it’s shorter than Lord of The Rings.
Chris: The issue is that it’s actually light, right? It’s a travel story where there’s, they’re going to a location to get a thing that they want, but there’s no real tension behind the journey, so it’s really the individual episodes and incidents they have along the way that provide tension, right. Whereas, when we watch a movie, especially since it’s only two hours long, we expect it to have that strong through-line, like most, but not all novels have. And, that’s why it makes more sense as a series of half-an-hour cartoon episodes than it does as an exciting live-action film.
Chris: I think they could, uh, they could expand on the material, right. Even if there’s not a lot there, they could make the plot more robust if they wanted. But I just think it would have lended itself much better to a TV show so that they could have each incident along the journey be an episode. And, you know, instead of trying to make it into 3 movies.
Oren: Yeah, at the same time, I do think one of the things that would always have been difficult, and this is a medium issue, as in like, you know, the medium of film or book, is that in the book, there are 13 dwarves and 12 of them basically act as a single character. And then there’s Thorin who is, sort of has his own character in the book. And, I don’t think that was ever going to work in film. Like in a book, it’s like, whatever, Tolkien can kind of slight-of-hand you to not worry about what the 12 other dwarves are doing.
Oren: But in the movie, it’s just weird that there are 13 dwarves around and they do nothing most of the time. That’s an absurdly large cast. If you tried to make each dwarf its own character, that would just be too many. It’s too many characters.
Chris: Visual stories can get away with more characters because it’s easier to remember what a character looks like than it is to remember all of their names. At the same time, I think that comes with an expectation that they will feel like unique individuals instead of just like blurring together as a mass. If you’re in a traveling party, right. It’s a little different if you’ve got like a crowd or something.
Oren: It’s not quite enough of them to be a crowd, but there are too many to be a group of individuals.
Chris: So, my example of a story where the media was not a good fit and there were not enough changes is the TV show, The Rook, which is based on an urban fantasy novel. And there were some cool changes. I mean, they actually changed quite a bit. One of the coolest things about the show is, there is a character named Gestalt, which was actually originally a villain in the book, but they decided to make it into the love interest.
Chris: Which is an interesting change, but this is- I think I’ve talked about this in podcasts before. Basically it’s the same person in four different bodies. You know, siblings, three dudes, one woman, but they’re all the same. They’re actually a non-binary individual that just occupies four bodies and is basically multitasking. It’s a really good like, queer analogy because they have to pretend to be unique individuals to put other people at ease, like they’re masking. So that was a unique and really cool thing that the adaptation did, but I think the big problem with it is there’s some mystery solving and the main character spends her time in the book, you know, looking up files, right.
Chris: And a lot of things that are very internal, where she’s not mystery solving by talking to people or doing action. It’s just- and so like, we have these shots of her just like, you know, going to a place and then staring at some like melted sand. These are not exciting sequences. You know, they made sense in the book because she was digging things up and doing this research, but we really needed to change that so that she could do mystery solving in the show kind of more externally.
Oren: She needed a buddy is what she needed. She needed someone to talk to.
Chris: Yeah, that probably would have helped.
Oren: This is the reason why movies often have two main characters is because movies don’t have narrators, usually. Uh, and so, they need dialogue to get information across, and that’s why they have two characters. That’s why Momo exists in Avatar: The Last Airbender, because sometimes a character needs to go off on their own and then Momo can go with them, so they have someone to talk to.
Chris: So they just talk to Momo.
Oren: So just talk to- what I’m saying is that The Rook should’ve had Momo in it.
Chris: (Laughs) Another one, and perhaps you can tell me if you’d put this one in the category is The Green Night, the movie. And it’s not like the original “Green Knight” is brilliant, but it’s also like, a 14th century story, OK. It’s not- expectations are not necessarily high, but what gets me about this adaptation is- there’s a lot of things wrong with it, but that it took what was a very clear message in The Green Knight and then made it really head-scratching and confusing, right? Like “The Green Knight”, as many older stories do, just had a very clear lesson. And when you watch the movie now, it’s like, is it trying to say something, I’m not even sure. Which is all the rage, today.
Oren: Well, I mean, the movie has a number of problems. I don’t think a lot of them are particularly adaptation-focused. I mean, with something as old and as weird as the “Green Knight” poem, which is mostly just an exercise in chivalric language and not really a story to begin with, you have a lot of freedom in adapting it. So, I’m not sure how much of this is because of an adaptation problem, I think it’s just because the movie has its head up its ass about what it’s supposed to be, and doesn’t like, actually, no, but it’s trying to sound much smarter than it is.
Oren: But there are some parts that are like, clearly caused by clashes between the vision they had for the film, but stuff that they wanted to keep from the poem. So like the most obvious one is that the movie seems to take place in a fairly gritty setting where the main character is not a knight, he’s some errant son of the king’s sister, I think., and he just spends his days gambling and paying sex workers, which is great. I have no problem with that, but the idea is that it’s supposed to be that he’s more real, right. And when he meets some bandits, he doesn’t fight them, he just lets them rob him and that’s real.
Oren: And then he gets to this weird house and the guy inside is like, “I will trade you my hunt, my kill for anything you find in my house.” And it’s like, why is he- is that a thing people do in this setting? This doesn’t seem like the kind of world where that happens, but that’s from the poem, that’s a thing in the poem that happens. So, they’re like ‘We should probably put that in the movie, I guess.’ And that’s like, one of the ways that it’s struggling as an adaptation.
Chris: Mhm, I mean, it definitely feels like a case of ‘we’re going to take this old poem and just do with all of the fad in Hollywood stories today’, right? We’re going to make it all gritty and we’re going to make Gawain so flawed and kind of unlikeable, you know, it almost feels like somebody wants to stick it to this 14th century poem. (Laughs). It’s like, you know, the person who wrote this poem has been dead for hundreds of years. You don’t really need to stick it to them. I don’t think that subverting something that old that we’ve kind of moved on from is really that clever anymore. Taking something light and making it dark and gritty has been done so many times, it’s starting to feel trite-
Oren: But you can also see how, in some ways, this movie seems like it’s trying to go against the Hollywood grain, which makes sense. It comes from a studio that’s known for doing that. Which is fine, again, the Hollywood grain is often not very good, so I wouldn’t be against going against that, but it’s just the way it does it is in ways that don’t particularly accomplish anything. And it’s like, oh man, this lady is playing two different characters. She plays Gawain’s girlfriend and the weird seductress, except like they make her- they kind of darken her skin a little bit to play the seductress, which is kind of racist, and you probably shouldn’t do that. But beyond that, what does that mean? What is the purpose of having the same woman play the two different characters and then another woman plays this ghost that he talks to, and also, the girl that he marries in this weird future vision that maybe he has, or maybe we just see and he doesn’t see, it’s unclear.
Chris: Right. But I mean, I also think that correlates to the fact that they took a message that was very clear and obscured it, right. Because the sort of literary strain, I almost want to say, because it’s kind of the same culture but in film, of filmmaking, kind of uphoors a clear message and wants everything to be super ambiguous to the point where you’re just not even sure if they’re supposed to be a message. Just like, okay, we saw the same actress twice. What about it?
Chris: You know, and so the original story again is just, it’s a temptation story. And at the end, you know, Gawain comes through mostly having resisted temptation, but there’s one place where he didn’t quite get there, and then he is given a little nick and a decides to wear green- He’s the ultimate humble bragger. So he wears, you know, a green shash for his shame at this one tiny thing he did wrong. Right. But it’s, it’s very clear, like what the lesson is going to be, and the movie just does the absolute opposite.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, it definitely feels like parts of it are like taking shots at this supposed Hollywood obsession with things like “Save The Cat” and stuff like that, where it’s like, ‘oh, I’m gonna make my protagonist, have no redeeming features and be a huge dick, that’s what’s going on here. And it’s like, all right. I guess, I hope that made you happy.
Oren: Another kind of very weird thing that has trouble being adapted is Alice in Wonderland because much like The Green Knight–
Chris: It has no plot. It has no plot whatsoever.
Oren: Yeah, there’s no plot to Alice in Wonderland. It’s just a bunch of random things happen.
Chris: Also, she wakes up at the end. Like you could say that the plot is her, like, going to the strange land and getting home, but she doesn’t actually get home. She just wakes up and it was all a dream in the original story.
Oren: Nor is there any particular reason to think that she’s not going to get home, right? There’s no conflict in any of these scenes that they just, things just happen. Some of the best Alice adaptations are like not even really stories. They’re like weird, surreal, stop motion film. Yeah, that’s a weird, surreal, stop motion film, all right. That definitely feels like what’s going on in Alice in Wonderland. But when movies try to adapt that into something with a plot, they continually run into issues. And like the Disney adaptation, the Disney cartoon adaptation is legitimately probably the best film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. I mean, it’s a cartoon, but, so- watch it on a movie screen.
Chris: Alice in Wonderland probably should be a cartoon.
Oren: You’re right. Well, I mean, first of all, there’s that, but like also it’s a cartoon. It’s really light. It’s just about like, oh look, the funny thing is happening. And like, Alice is in like a little bit of danger, but not much. And that works okay. But when you try to make it more serious and you try to give it grim and gritty stakes, the weirdness of Wonderland just gets very grating. And of course, nowhere’s its more obvious than the 2010 adaptation. Which is just, it’s like, ‘Hey, what if we tried to do Lord of The Rings in Wonderland?’ and it’s like, well, it wouldn’t work. (Laughs) I can tell you that’s what would happen because, oh my gosh, that movie is so tonally and thematically confused.
Oren: And it’s, it’s like trying to have these epic Lord of The Rings soundtrack battles. And then the characters are like, doing weird obnoxious dances cause it’s Wonderland and that’s what you do in Wonderland. And the, you know, none of the characters are going to help, cause’ they’re just weird and wacky Wonderlanders.
Chris: Right, I think the problem there is when you make the story more tense, but then the characters are still acting wacky, it gets frustrating, right? It’s like, OK, so why aren’t they solving the problem? There’s now actually a tense problem for them to solve. Whereas in the original there’s no problems for them to solve so they can have just whatever weight that they want to. And if you have a lighter animated story, then there’s just more room for people to be wacky without getting frustrated that they’re not immediately attending to the important issues of the day, shall we say.
Oren: There was actually a fairly interesting sci-fi mini series adaptation of Alice in 2009. I think it was just called Wonderland. And it’s certainly not perfect. It has its own problems, but I like it because rather than wacky it’s approached to Wonderland was more uncanny. Like, so everything in Wonderland, it has an internal logic that it works on as opposed to original Wonderland, which is just so random, but everything’s just kind of weird and there’s a lot of drug metaphors and like- so it feels more like wandering around a world while stoned out of your mind, than in being in like a purely chaos planet.
Oren: It allows the world to be a little darker without getting frustrating, and it’s not to say that’s a perfect adaptation. It has some serious problems. It has this whole thing about the main character being a martial arts instructor, and yet like, she’s apparently helpless in fights. And I was like, “Why did you make her a martial arts instructor?”. You made that choice, no one forced you to make that choice. It’s not like Alice has a well-known history of teaching Kung Fu
Chris: (Laughs) But it sounds like at least thematically they decided to choose kind of a new theme for all of the weirdness that actually- it could implement consistently and fit kind of new tone.
Oren: Yeah, and I mean, it was much less weird than, or much less wacky than the 2010 adaptation. The world was much more mundane, for lack of a better term, but things were still kind of weird cause’ again, they were going for uncanny rather than just like completely off the walls, whatever we could think of.
Chris: Whereas uncanny is weird in a more subtle way.
Oren: Right, uncanny it’s like everything’s just a little off as opposed to everything is the most bizarre we could think of.
Chris: An adaptation choice that just baffles me is Locke and Key. It’s based on graphic novel series, and the thing that I find extremely weird about this is the graphic novels are definitely for adults and it’s- they’re dark, they’re quite dark. People die, and it’s just very creepy, and the very beginning, the family, the dad of the family gets murdered. It’s just, it’s a dark work. And, but it’s clear that the Netflix series is not for- it’s, you know, I don’t know exactly what their target age range is. If I would say maybe like 12 year olds or something, or you know, maybe younger teenagers or older kids, if I were to guess.
Chris: And I feel like some marketing executive looked at this and was like ‘Well, the story is starring three young people, so clearly that’s the target audience. So, we need to make an adaptation thats for them,’. But like, what’s the point of buying an IP and spending the money to adapt that IP if you’re going to make it for a different group of people that aren’t it’s fans? I mean, the whole point of the licensing an IP is so that you can get an existing fan base, as like a built-in audience.
Oren: Yeah, it’s weird, cause usually when you change who a story is marketed to you go older with the idea being that you are now marketing to the people who read or watched or whatever, this as kids, and now they want the same thing, but they want it more mature. Usually that’s how you do it, it’s a little weird to go backwards and be like, ‘Well, this was clearly a comic for adults, but now we’re going to try to aim it at a younger audience’. And they definitely spend a lot of time in high school, which suggests to me that this was supposed to be aimed at kids. Cause’ there’s lots of like ‘the problems of being in high school’ and those can be compelling stakes for any age, but it’s definitely harder for them to be compelling when you also have a story about finding magical keys that go into people’s heads, right?
Chris: And maybe they just thought it would be good wish fulfillment. Cause’ it’s like, ‘Hey, you go into a mysterious house and you find magical keys’, when it’s really like kind of cosmic horror-y and that the magic turns out to have kind of a bad source. Not that there aren’t scary stories for kids. There absolutely are, but that’s not generally what you think of when you think of wish fulfillment. And there are scenes, I guess, around the school at least in the graphic novel series, but it almost feels like, you know, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a scene with these teenagers having lunch out on the school lawn, right, and they happen to be in the proximity of school’. Whereas in the Locke and Key adaptation, it’s like, ‘Here’s some, you know, teen drama. We’re gonna show up those cool kids.’
Oren: ‘Yeah, can’t let those cool kids get ahead of us’.
Chris: I would also say that maybe part of the thing here is it doesn’t feel like the Locke and Key adoptation had enough budget. And I know as you pointed out, when we saw, there were some kind of, interesting, probably smart choices when it came to special effects. Like, for instance, in the original graphic novel series, there’s a head key that is actually quite creepy because you can stick it in somebody’s skull and it opens up the top of their head, like on a hinge, and then you can see like a graphic representation of their psyche. And even, you know, take stuff out of there to change their changed their what’s in their head. Um, or like, one of the characters basically takes the representation of fear out of her head and she doesn’t feel fear anymore.
Oren: It’s the key that makes the Inception movie unnecessary.
Chris: (Laughs) And she does in fact do that in the show too. But instead of having a head open up, they have like, a chest. When you use the key, there’s a chest that represents your psyche, that appears that you can open up and get in inside.
Oren: Yeah, which made sense. I mean, they, weren’t going to be able to actually open up their heads, that special effect was not within their budget.
Chris: But I do wonder how much it might be harder to create a dark feel as opposed to a campy feel with less budget.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that seems reasonable. When I watched it, it was hard for me to pin down like a single problem with it. It was just kind of- it just feels like we’re spending a lot of time at the high school and maybe that was cheaper. Maybe it was cheaper to film high school scenes than to film magic key scenes, I don’t know.
Chris: I mean, I do think that they were kind of struggling to add more plot and adding high school plots was a way to do that. But like the high school plots were very, just kind of silly teen drama, right. Whereas the original graphic novels were very mature.
Oren: I didn’t really have much to do with the keys, it was just like, ‘Hey, on the one hand we have a house full of magic keys. And on the other hand, the kid’s getting bullied in school’, and like, are those plots related? Eh, maybe eventually.
Oren: All right, so, I think that we are basically past our time. We have gone over several bad adaptations and that last one, I think, turned out to be the key to figuring out the problem.
Chris: No
Oren: The problem is write better.
Chris: (Laughs) Don’t we need a new paradigm to explain? Come on, with a fancy philosophy about the true nature of adaptations.
Oren: Write an article about how Locke and Key changed the way I look at storytelling Anyway, all right, so now we’re making bitter references to the way people cover, TV shows and journalism. So, I think we’re going to go ahead and end this podcast. Those of you at home, if anything we said picked your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening-closing theme,”The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
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One recent adaption that really annoyed me was Artemis Fowl. The whole thing about the novel series is that he’s a criminal mastermind who starts out as a pre-teen and slowly, over the course of several books, turns into an outright hero who sacrifices himself at the end of the last book. When you’ve followed the whole series, that scene in the last book hits really hard, because that would never, ever have happened with the Artemis from book one.
In the movie adaption, they’ve changed so many things it wasn’t really Artemis Fowl any longer. He’s a nice guy, he’s sporty (original Artemis is actually pretty awkward physically and relies on Butler for all physical tasks), his mother is dead (in the books, she’s often the one who keeps him a little in check and healing her depression at the end of the first book is an important step in Artemis’ development), and his father has known about fairies for ages. In the actual series, his parents only learn about fairies after he’s died.
Not to mention the connotations of making Butler, Artemis’ servant/bodyguard, black – a member of a family that has served the Fowls for centuries and has a decidedly Slavic first name and is mentioned to have played Artemis’ uncle before (and is masquerading as his father in one later book).
On the other hand, Holly Short, the elf Artemis kidnaps, is described with nut-brown skin in the books and is played by a white woman in the movie. Then there’s the total negation of Holly’s arc in the first book, being the first female officer in Recon – with Judy Dench playing a gender-switched Commander Root, this is obviously no longer true.
I could ramble on much longer, but it was horrid, especially as so many fans have waited for a movie adaption and many of the more outlandish things described in the books would be possible to do with CGI quite well by now.
Disney did not and perhaps could not risk its brand image in order to properly adopt Artemis Fowl. The idea of tween criminal mastermind being the protagonist of a 21st century Disney movie would not do when their entire image to the public is of a purveyor of family friendly stories. A villainous kid being the bad guy and getting a way with it goes against their very carefully cultivated public image.
Then they should never have bought the movie rights. That’s the simple solution to this. It’s not as if Disney’s forbidden from developing their own IPs. Honestly, exchange the names and you very much have a story that has nothing to do with ‘Artemis Fowl’ and might even work better on its own, because it wouldn’t be compared to the original text.
They wanted the name recognition, but didn’t realize that the fans would be put off by this? That is ignorance if I’ve ever seen it, especially after the fallout of the Percy Jackson adaptions.
Artemis is not necessarily 100% the bad guy, not even in the first book. Things don’t always go as planned and in the end, he gives up half the ransom to have his mother healed. Throughout the story, we learn that he is weary of some actions he adopts, so he’s not evil, he has been raised in a family of criminals – it’s what he does. Taking that away has turned him into ‘generic child fantasy protagonist No. 26524’. They could have had that cheaper by simply making their own stuff up. They wanted the name, so they should have committed to the story.
Existing IPs make it easier to get people in seats or stream the movie. New IPs are a bigger risk. Most major movie studios seem really risk reluctant in the past several years. Sometimes media companies mess up with existing IPs like with Artemis Fowl and they piss everybody off but the no original IP strategy works a lot more than it fails.
Using an IP you know you will completely change after the reactions even minor changes can bring online these days is not exactly a great idea. As I said, the story is so far removed from the books it was apparently based on (the first two of the series) that they could just have changed the names and would have had an IP of their own which would have been better received.
Really, after the trailer, all fans knew this was going to be a dumpster fire.
The Hobbit is a pretty short book, but it’s dense – there is, so to speak, lots of things happening in fairly little text. So I think two movies would have been reasonable, actually, but three is noticeably stretching it. Then there’s the problem of trying to make an originally much lighter and more whimsical story consistent in tone with LotR… and the episodic nature of the thing.
I think the tonal thing wouldn’t have been AS MUCH of a problem on it’s own, if it had been made as a TV show instead, with each episode of the TV show covering one or one half of a book episode, and then have the show be as long as it needs to be but not longer.
I respect your ability to avoid falling into the deep rabbithole that is The Last Airbender adaptation, even while referencing Avatar.
That’s an example of bad adaptation by trying to stay TOO faithful to the events of the original. Not faithful to anything else, mind you– characters, tone, magic system– no, just the bullet points that make up the story outline.
As for The Hobbit– now that you’ve mentioned how the other dwarves really are just a vague blob of dwarviness for most of the book, I’d like to see a visual adaptation where all the dwarves are all essentially the exact same. Just 13 identical dwarves, all milling about in the background as one or two pipe up when necessary.
Bilbo will misname one, and one will say “That’s Bofur, not Bombur! Bombur is huge, how can anyone mistake him?” Bilbo examines the dwarves carefully, quite sure they’re all the same size. It’s going to be a long trip.
I didn’t see the Percy Jackson movies, but I heard they didn’t do so well.
They’re fine in a vacum, but inferior to the original books. They aged up the cast from 12 to 17 for no reason outside of marketing.
I wonder what the deal was with that? I thought that since the books were for kids and Disney made the movies, it would be for kids, too?
One reason might be that movie producers don’t like working with teenagers and characters of 16 or 17 can be played by young adults around 20. You can’t do the same with a 14-year-old.
Besides what Cary said, kids will watch movies starring teenagers or twenty somethings but with a few exceptions most people sixteen and over won’t watch a movie staring elementary and middle school aged actors. So aging the characters up allows you to potentially increase the market share and add some romantic tension without being skeevy. Hollywood history shows that they are firm believers that nearly every movie needs some romance no matter what the topic and this goes back to the Silent Era.
What i expect(ed*) in an adaptation is for they to expand upon the original work. that means keep what people love of the original and add something unique to the medium. Obviously there are things to be changed to translate from one to another medium, but that are the things they usually don’t change.
And there always be “revivals” for the new generations, that try to introduce, say, TMNT to the younger. That pissed of countless 30s and 40s that think that the product that once was for them is still theirs. I find it ironic that while studios milk on the nostalgia to bring “back” TMNT, He-man or any other famous cartoon of yore, on the other hand they change the target audience for what? It’s not only a messy choice for Locke and Key, but for a lot of badaptations.
I could rant long and wide about Agents of SHIELD “adaptation” but i’m trying to close that stage of my life.
*I grew old and learned better than to have hopes for adaptations, Cowboy Bebop was the last nail on the coffin for it.
I agree with Locke and Key, but TMNT target audience was older teens for the comics (and quickly became for younger teens)
And all the other versions were always for kids. I liked most of them. And the 2018 one was one of my favorites.
I feel like the only way to make a bad TMNT adaptation is to make it so gritty and pander to adults the characters become unrecognizable or to simply rely on brand recognition and put minimal effort, like next mutation and the musical.
Rise of TMNT has been beaten from all the fronts. Probably for being too “silly” for the now adult audience that hope to take four 6 foot tall pizza -eating turtles seriouslly.
The Hobbits’ problem is that they wanted to take a children’s book and turn it into a movie for adults by adding stuff from Tolkien’s notebooks. This is mainly because they believed they would get more money for something that matched the style of the Lord of the Rings movies rather than something that had a more family friendly/kid movie vibe to it. Maybe they thought that the change in vibe would be too jarring for the audience.
Avatar’s problem beyond the rather questionable casting choices because a movie filled with East Asian actors is apparently unthinkable in Hollywood unless it is a foreign movie up for an Oscar nomination was that they tried to stuff too much in one movie. They should have went for the technique of the anime industry where the movie version of a TV show is a stand alone filler story with a bigger budget and better animation than the average TV episode.
I’m unique on this blog in that I like the Green Knight as an adaptation. It gets the feel of the original story correct while adding things for a modern audience. The problem with adopting from myth, religion, and folktales to the screen is that they aren’t really that long and you need stuffing. Like Noah’s ark could probably be told in thirty minutes if you just stick strictly to what is in the Bible. The Green Knight is similar. A more faithful adaptation of the Green Knight would not be that long. So you need to add stuff. Plus, the chivalry and being able to resist the temptations of the ladies would just seem odd to an audience that wants more open sex in their fiction.
Hail, fellow Green-Knight-lover! I’ve defended it before against Mythcreants’ criticism.
Although I admit that some of that criticism was valid, and that some of my love depends on the fact that I’m a sucker for novelty, more so the older I get.
Speaking of adaptations. Tolkien made it no secret that while he did borrow a lot from Norse mythology in the depicting of the dwarves in his works, his real inspiration was my people, the Jews. He didn’t mean this as an insult or at least not in his mind. Dwarves were supposed to be a disaporic culture that didn’t have a homeland of their own anymore but proudly maintained their language, religion, customs, and cultures while being scattered among the nations of Middle Earth. He also made it clear that dwarves identity as great craftspeople was more important than their warriorhood.
While many subsequent fantasy novels borrow a lot from Tolkien but basically ignore the Jewish elements of Tolkien’s dwarves by giving them homelands and vaguely Celtic aspects and focusing more on the warrior aspect over the craftsman aspect. This is because a group of badass short warriors is probably more popular with people than a group of diasporic craftspeople.
I imagine that if subsequent fantasy novels and movies used more of Tolkien’s dwarves as Middle Earth’s Jews we would get something very different in fantasy. Imagine if the dwarves spoke with a vaguely Yiddish accent and were seen as more humorous than dour and the warrior identity was not that present. Really different.
Surprised you didn’t mention Starship Troopers, a movie that couldn’t decide if it wanted to affirm or subvert the original book