Superman has been around for a long time. Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the release of Action Comics number 1, Superman’s first appearance. Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster created the characters for a thirteen page story in the comic, originally an anthology. The story showed the now-classic origin story of a baby sent from a dying planet to be adopted and raised in the American Mid-West to become a champion of the oppressed. An entire genre – superhero comics – built up after publishers noted the success of Superman. Generations have grown up with the adventures of the Man of Steel; Superman has appeared on radio, in serials, in movies, on television (live action and animated), video games, novelizations, and even a Broadway musical. Superman is an iconic character, one of the most recognizable.

In short, people know who Superman is.

This level of familiarity, though, can make it hard to adapt the character. As with other works, like the Incredible Hulk and the Addams Family, what the general public knows about a character doesn’t necessarily reflect the original or any development that has occurred, with the knowledge coming from a popular adaptation. Superman, as iconic as he is, has had iconic adaptations done; the main one in the collective subconscious being Superman: The Movie with Christopher Reeve. The 1978 movie introduced distinctive theme music that is now forever associated with the name “Superman”. All incarnations of Superman since then, including Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and Smallville have had nods back to the Christopher Reeve movie. To be fair, Superman: The Movie was well done, captured the feel of the Silver Age Superman, and Reeve did show how a pair of glasses could protect Superman’s secret identity*.

Man of Steel opened last month after a turbulent five year development that saw numerous writers directors approached. Eventually, Zack Snyder was signed on to reboot the movie series instead of continuing from the 2006 Superman Returns. Man of Steel takes the audience back to the last days of Krypton, as the planet died through an ecological disaster, and follows, through flashbacks, Clark’s arrival on Earth and how he adapted to his powers, Clark’s search for who he is, and his choice to protect his new home when the old war finds him. The movie is one part an orphan’s story, one part a refugee’s story, and one part an immigrant’s story.

Given the nature of the story, with an alien refugee hiding from terrestrial authorities, having Lex Luthor as a villain would defeat the purpose of the general theme. First, there is a gross power unbalance between Superman and Luthor; Luthor has far more power available to him just through wealth that he could defeat the Man of Steel before the latter knows something is up, while, in a fight, Superman would have to hold back to avoid looking like a dangerous invader. The choice of General Zod, though, sets up Superman as the saviour of Earth and forces Clark to decide whether he is a Kryptonian or a Human. Having Zod also allows the film to show the destructive potential a battle between Kryptonians and, hopefully, sets up a “World of Cardboard” speech in the next movie or in a potential Justice League film.

As an adaptation, the movie mostly succeeds. The problem, as noted above, is that the general public is more aware of an adaptation than the current comic. As a result, the tone feels slightly off, darker than what the audience may be used to in previous incarnations. At the same time, Man of Steel is a Superman movie, with Henry Cavill’s portrayal of Clark on the mark. It’s just that the story isn’t what people are used to out of the Superman franchise.

Next week, Alien from LA.

* Watch Reeve’s body language as Clark Kent. There’s one scene where he’s about to reveal himself to Lois, taking off the glasses, with a noticeable change in his posture. When he changes his mind and puts the glasses back on, he deflates, slouches, and his voice loses confidence.

Adapting popular books isn’t new in Hollywood. Some of the best known movies are based on written works, be they books, short stories, or plays. Historically, the accuracy of adaptation has fluctuated, though some works included a change of name to reflect the differences. It is possible that, right now, we are in the middle of a Golden Age of adaptations, where authors have just enough clout to ensure that their works are adapted faithfully instead of being mined for ideas and left an empty corpse in Hollywood Hills.

Outside Hollywood, studios and directors tend to be more aware of the original work and its audience when it comes to adapting. The approach is to keep the original work in tact where possible, and can be seen in The Guns of Navarone. The original novel, released in 1957 by Alistair MacLean, featured a hand-picked team of specialists being sent to destroy the anti-ship artillery guns on the titular Greek island after previous attempts, including a bombing run, failed to destroy them. At stake, the lives 1200 British soldiers and the British ships being sent to retrieve them before the German offensive starts. Without the guns destroyed, the flotilla would be under a heavy barrage from the guns, out of range of the ships’ own weapons.

The movie follows the plot of the book reasonably closely. Events from the book do show up in the movie. The changes between the two occur in the characters. Captain Keith Mallory, Corporal Dusty Miller, and Andrea, a former Greek colonel all appear and serve in the same roles in both movie and book, with some minor alterations. Supporting characters, though, did see changes, some minor, some massive. Mallory, a New Zealander in the novel, picked up Gregory Peck’s American accent in the movie. Andrea, played by Anthony Quinn, originally was Mallory’s confidante, and didn’t harbour the grudge he had in the movie. Miller was cynical in the book, but David Niven gave him a touch of resigned whimsy. The Greek resistance members Louki and Panayis became Maria and Anna, played by Irene Papas and Gia Scala, respectively. The gender flip allowed the producer to add a romance that didn’t exist in the original novel.

As I mentioned above, the plot remained unchanged. The change from novel to movie meant that different means of keeping up tension had to be used. The destruction of the guns occurred “off-screen” in the novel, leaving the tension to the reaction of the characters as they waited for their explosives to detonate. The movie, though, turned the focus of the tension to the search for the planted explosives and the raising and lowering of the cargo lift, where if the lift dropped down far enough, the circuit needed to detonate the charges would be complete. Camera angles, the tempo of the music, the cuts from the cargo lift to the flotilla to the main characters waiting heightened the tension.

Is the movie version of The Guns of Navarone a perfect adaptation? No; many changes, some for the sake of expanding the demographic to have something for everyone, were made. However, the plot remained unchanged, as did the general feel of the novel. The core ideas – the guns being a danger, the stakes, the race against time – remained. Helping was the quality of the cast*; the odd actor out was James Darren, whose movie works prior to being cast as Spyros Pappadimos included two Gidget movies. However, Darren turned out to be up for the challenge and held his own among the rest of the cast.

The Guns of Navarone has been adapted in other ways, beyond just the movie. A radio play was produced in 1997 for the BBC.  The original Battlestar Galactica had an episode, “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero”, that combined The Guns of Navarone with another of MacLeans’s novels, Ice Station Zebra.  The core story – the race against time by a small team to protect thousands – reaches out and grabs the audience, no matter the format.

Next week, The Man of Steel.

* Today’s cast equivalent would be Daniel Craig, Johnny Depp, and Patrick Stewart, in terms of talent and draw. James Darren would essentially be Rihanna in Battleship except with a better role to work with.

Charles “Chas” Addams had a macabre sense of humour. His one-panel cartoons were mainly around the theme of the mundane meeting the bizarre. From this mind came the Addams Family, first depicted in 1938. The Addamses were a typical American family, just one that enjoyed the darker things in life. Today, the mere mention of the name can trigger the TV show’s theme song as an earworm.

The first adaptation came in 1964, when The Addams Family appeared on ABC as a sitcom, lasting for two seasons and sixty-five episodes. The TV show required Chas Addams to give his characters names for the first time. The series continued to show the family as being macabre, but not dysfunctional. Sure, they were bizarre and creepy, but Gomez and Morticia loved each other, in their own way. The portrayal of the family mirrored Chas Addams’ cartoons, with minor changes: Grandmama was originally Morticia’s mother, not Gomez’s; and Pugsley was more like Bart Simpson in the original one-panel cartoons.

Fast forward to 1991. By this point, most people were more familiar with the television series than the original cartoon, thanks to the magic of TV syndication. The TV series reached the magic number of sixty-five, which would allow a station to re-broadcast the series five days a week for thirteen weeks. However, adapting an adaptation can be troublesome; each iteration introduces interpretation gaps, where the portrayal of a character or even of the tone of the new work is slightly off. Part of the issue is that getting two people to agree perfectly on an interpretation is rare; everyone involved has different experiences filtering and colouring what is being seen. Yet, the original work was available.

Fortunately, the movie makers had read some of the one-panel cartoons. The cast included Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and a young Christina Ricci in her third movie role ever. Julia took John Astin’s manic portrayal of Gomez Addams and replaced the mania with intensity while still being Gomez. Ricci portrayed an older Wednesday, one that’s more devious and darker than her television counterpart. Meanwhile, Pugsley, originally played by Ken Weatherwax and portrayed by Jimmy Workman in the movie, lost his intelligence and deviousness and becamse the younger sibling. However, the sibling relationship between Wednesday and Pugsley remained intact – Wednesday would try injure Pugsley who would somehow survive and possibly enjoy what was happening.

The plot of the movie followed a scam to take advantage of Gomez and his search for his long lost brother, Fester. Hoping to cash in with a look-alike to pay off a loan shark, Gomez’s lawyer uses the loan shark’s son to pose as Fester. Through machinations, the Addamses are forced to leave their home and deal with the real world. The major problem with the movie was having the Addamses try to adjust to the mundane world, when, in the TV series and the cartoons, it was the mundane that had to make the adjustment. However, when Morticia is taken prisoner and is tortured to give up the AddamsFamily fortune, the classic macabre returns with Morticia complimenting techniques, again, coming from elements in both TV series and cartoon. The end scene, with Morticia knitting a misshapen baby’s outfit comes directly from one Chas Addams’ own cartoons. The name of the new child, Pubert, is reused from the TV series, where it was discarded because it sounded to close to “puberty” and “pubic”, words that were considered unfit for broadcast.

As an adaptation, the movie stumbled a bit by forcing the Addamses to adjust to the rest of the world, a problem corrected in the sequel Addams Family Values, where the cheerful could not stand in the way of the sardonic. However, The Addams Family movie managed to blend the style of the original cartoons with the TV series and kept the feel of both.

The movie and its sequel weren’t the only adaptations. There have been two animated series, a direct-to-video pilot, a rebooted TV series. video games, and even a stage musical. The core has always been a family who, despite their macabre ways, love each other.

Next week, heading back for a classic adaptation, The Guns of Navarone.

Back before I started the Adapting Games, I chatted with Steve on unofficial adaptations; works that don’t share the name and may not even have permission to build on an original. This opened up a wide vista and possibly a can of worms. A good number of such adaptations come from adapting a work that’s long out of copyright protection; the various adaptations and reworks of Shakespeare’s plays are the obvious examples. However, the idea struck me after watching Alien from L.A.*, an adapation of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which may be reviewed in later installments.

In a manner similar to slightly changing the name of an adaptation**, the use of a completely different title allows some distance between the original and the adaptation. The change allows viewers to know that the new work won’t be faithful in some manner to the original. If the adaptation is unofficial, it also gives some legal maneuvering room. If the original work is famous or infamous, the new name will prevent potential viewers from leaving, either because of preconceived ideas about the original work or because of real issues with the original. The change of title from Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story allowed the movie makers to change the Shakespearean play set in Renaissance Italy to blue-collar 1950s New York City; the change also could bring in people who, thanks to English classes, felt Shakespeare was too high brow for them to understand. Similarly, if Plan 9 from Outer Space were to be remade, it would need a new name; Plan 9 is infamous for being bad, a quality that gets people to watch it. A good or even a “not bad” version of the movie would lose the charm Plan 9 and Ed Wood fans see in the film.

Sometimes the name change comes from translation. Changing the setting of the original work can force a twist. The Western The Magnificent Seven was based on the Japanese movie, The Seven Samurai. The core of feudal honour of the samurai became personal honour for the gunmen; katana were exhanged for revolvers. Yet, The Magnificent Seven still tells the same story as The Seven Samurai. The switch in language, in era, in tone still allows the original story to reach a new audience. This is where many localizations fail. The cast gets “Americanized”, but the background is left as is, creating a jarring dissonance. The live action Akira may be a victim of this, even during pre-production. It is not enough to move the action to New York City; Tokyo is as much a character in Akira as the titular character. If the makers still want to move the story to New York, they’d be better off re-titling the movie after the main character and adjusting the story to reflect the character of New York.

For older works long out of copyright protection, changing the name creates a distance that helps separate the new work from the old. As mentioned, West Side Story places Romeo and Juliet into an at-the-time modern New York***. Romeo Must Die turns the play into an action movie. The animated film Romie-0 and Julie-8 turns the cast into robots; Gnomeo and Juliet turns them into garden gnomes. Each title lets the audience know what the twist is in advance. Shakespeare’s plays tend to receive a disproportial number of adaptations by other names. Disney’s The Lion King is based on Hamlet. The musical Kiss Me, Kate is based on The Taming of the Shrew. Part of the reason for the updating is that the plays are presented as written works in English classes, not as performed works; Shakespeare’s entire library then gets seen as a very high brow form of entertainment for a limited number of people. The adaptations are then seen as being simplified for a larger audience.

In future installments, I’ll take a look at a few adaptions in other names and see how well they stack up to direct adaptations.

Next week, the Addams Family.

* Well, the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on it.
** For example, Real Steel.
*** West Side Story started on Broadway in 1957 before being adapted as a film in 1961.

Welcome to Lost in Translation‘s quick – wait, not so quick – series of adapting games to television and film. The series grew, but now it’s time to wrap up.

Part I – Video Games
Part II – Boardgames
Part III – Tabletop Role-Playing Games
Part IV – Adapting Games to Games
Part V – Adapting Games to Games: Tabletop RPGs

Wrapping Up

The core through the series kept going back to the key to adapting anything: respect for the original. In the case of games, there just happened to be a few elements that don’t exist in other media. Game mechanics do create a feel for a game; a game of Battleship should be different from a game of Parcheesi while a game of Clue should be different from a session of Vampire: The Requiem*. Video game adaptations also have to factor in that many viewpoint characters are there to represent the player and have no pre-determined personality. Tabletop RPGs allow the players to create their own characters. Boardgames may not even have a being beyond a marker.

Game adaptations have ranged from successful (Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), failures (Dungeons & Dragons, The Legend of Chun Li), and the in between (Battleship**, Street Fighter). When an adaptation works, the new work captures the feel of the original. The failures, though, seem to miss the point completely or have no respect for the fans of the original. Warner Bros. is developing a new movie based on D&D, with the project originally working on adapting the RPG’s predecessor Chainmail. With luck, the scriptwriter has played the game and can bring the feel through to appease fans while still not alienating the audience that doesn’t play.

This series barely scratched the surface. I focused on television and movies, but skipped past books. Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October began with the Games Designer Workshop wargame Harpoon. Red October would go on to be adapted as a movie, which then got adapted as a wargame by TSR. The Wild Cards series of books got its beginnings in a Superworld campaign with George R.R. Martin as the GM; in 2007, Green Ronin picked up the license for an RPG based on the setting. Works get adapted, then the adaptations are adapted. Pull one thread and the next thing you know, you have half of a different medium following like cats chasing a laser dot.*** With the proliferation of gaming, whether board, role-playing, card, or video, more and more creators are going to find inspiration in what they play. Amazon’s foray into publishing fanfiction (see Steve’s thoughts, parts one and two for more), we could be seeing more game adaptations in a few years.

Next week, an adaptation by any other name.

* Less blood drinking in Clue, ideally.
** Battleship wasn’t a bad movie in and of itself. It didn’t live up to expectations or to the budget it had.
*** There was a metaphor here, but it got lost.