Last week, Lost in Translation looked at the problems faced when adapting toys. With the issues in mind, let’s see how Michael Bay’s live-action Transformers stacks up.
The Transformers toy line first appeared in the US in 1985. The core concept of the toys were robots that changed shape into other forms, mostly but not limited to vehicles, becoming small puzzles to solve by the children playing with them. Hasbro licensed lines from first Takara then Bandai, bringing them together as the Autobots and the Decepticons. After the success of the G.I. Joe relaunch as action figures, especially after the related cartoon and comics, Hasbro worked with Marvel to bring out Transformers, integrating the toy and the animated series. The first generation of Transformers were a hit. The success of the line and cartoon led to an animated feature film, which introduced a new line of Transformers toys. Later animated series would either form their own continuity or have a tenuous link to the Generation 1 series.
With Generation 1, several details were set. The heroic Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, voice by Peter Cullen in the cartoon, defended Earth from the evil Decepticons, led by Megatron, voiced by Frank Welker. The Autobots were mainly, but not exclusively, ground vehicles, from Prime’s tractor-trailer rig to Bumblebee’s Volkswagen Beetle. The Decepticons had a mix of aircraft, including Starscream and his squadron, and non-vehicular machines, including Soundwave, a non-working radio and cassettes, and Megatron, a Walther P-38 with similar attachments as seen in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.* The next wave during the original run of the cartoon included non-vehicle Autobots, including Blaster, Perceptor, and the Dinobots, and cars for the Decepticons, including the Constructicons, the first combining set for the line. Each side had a symbol to signify which side the toy was one, Autobot or Decepticon.
Both the Autobots and Decepticons come from a distant world, Cybertron, where the main lifeforms are sentient machines. The two sides had been engaged in a long civil war, started when Megatron tried to take over as ruler of Cybertron. The war depleted energy reserves on the planet, forcing both sides to go looking for more energon. The Autobots left on a spaceship, but the Decepticons managed to get on board. The ensuing fight damages the ship, placing all the robots on board into stasis. The ship crashes on an unknown planet and lays dorment for millennia.
The Decepticons are the first to awaken. The ship’s computer, Teletraan-1, also reactivated, scans for the dominant forms, providing them to the Decepticons. The Autobots also get new forms when they awaken. However, the new forms aren’t the dominant species of the planet, revealed as Earth. Instead, they are vehicles used by the dominant species, humans. Megatron plots to drain the energy from Earth while Optimus Prime meets with several humans, including “Sparkplug” Witwicky and his son, Spike. Optimus staved off Megatron’s attempts to plunder the Earth with help from the Autobots and, indirectly, from Starscream (voiced by Chris Latta), Megatron’s scheming second-in-command who would as often as not wreck the Decpticon leader’s plot.
As to be expected in a series based on a large toy line, both sides had a large cast. However, each side also had core characters. On the Autobots, there was Optimus Prime, Bumblebee (voiced by Dan Gilvezan), Ironhide (Cullen), Ratchet (Don Messick), and Jazz (Scatman Crothers). The primary Deceptions were Megatron, Starscream, Soundwave (Welker), and his cassettes Laserbeak, Rumble, Ravage, and Frenzy (all Welker**). Even as new toys were introduced, the core cast remained.
While the Autobot-Decepticon war was the main plot device, as the animated series continued, two other general stories emerged. The first type dealt with how the Autobots adjusted to life on Earth, with the people of Earth learning how to adjust to their new neighbours. The fight against the Decepticons would appear in some of the these episodes, but the thrust was on how the Autobots were learning about life on the planet. The other type of story was essentially “Transformers in Space”, with both the Autobots and Decepticons encountering strange new life and civilizations. These episodes tended to clash with the rest of the series.
Notable later series includes Beast Wars/Beasties***, a Mainframe Entertainment produced series using CG animation, and Transformers: Animated, which followed the success of the live-action film. Each series released had its own set of toys; or, each new set of toys had its own series. The cartoons had mixed success; Beast Wars/Beasties lasted several seasons before becoming Beast Machines, which itself wasn’t as successful.
The live action Transformers was announced in 2005. Fan reaction was mixed. Early designs leaked out, causing some stir. However, the announcement of Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus went some distance to assuage fears. The Autobots, despite the film’s approach in designing them as alien, still looked like their classic appearances, including colours. The film also is its own continuity, its own cinematic universe. Given that prior to the film’s release, there had been multiple continuities in the animated series, it wasn’t a problem. The creation of the Transformers cinematic universe also helps with the adaptation.
Transformers has three separate but related stories running through it. The first features an American special forces team in the Middle East, survivors of a night attack by an unknown hostile force. The second follows a small group of hackers pressed into service to crack an alien code after an attack on Air Force One. The third is boy meets girl, boy tries to impress girl with the help of his alien robot car. The three stories come together in the form of giant alien robots looking for an ancient artifact, the All-Spark.
Scorponok’s attack on the American military base was to search computer records related to the All-Spark. The soldiers on the base manage to cut off the data, leading to Scorponok destroying the base. Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) leads his team away from the destruction. Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), though, managed to get an image of Scorponok in robot form, causing the Decepticon to give chase. The team finds an oasis with cover, civilians, and cell phone coverage. Lennox calls in an airstrike. The first wave barely staggers the Decepticon, but a second wave using heavier weapons and sabot ammunition, drives Scorponok away, leaving his stinger behind.
The Pentagon, aware of the attack on the base and of a hacking attempt from inside Air Force One, start their own investigation. Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor), one of the analysts working on the project, secrets a copy of the date to take to Glen Whitmann (Anthony Anderson), a hacker of her acquaintence. However, the FBI is aware of the data theft and take both into custody, where they are turned over to Sector 7 through Agent Simmons (John Tuturro) and pressed into service.
Elsewhere, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBoeuf) managed to earn an A in his classes. His father, Ron (Kevin Dunn), follows through on a promise to pay for half the cost of Sam’s first car. At the car lot, Sam finds an old yellow Camero. While the price is initially too high, the dealer (Bernie Mac) agrees to Ron’s offer after the Camero sends out a pulse that damages the rest of the stock. While Sam believes the car is his, and tries to impress classmate Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), the Camero has a mind of its own.
Interweaving the three plotlines is Frenzy (Reno Wilson), a Decepticon spy and the source of the hacking attempt on Air Force One, and his search for the All-Spark and Megatron through the only link he has, the eyeglasses of Captain Archibald Witwicky, Sam’s great-great-grandfather, who found Megatron. Despite the attempts by the Pentagon to block the hack, Frenzy found enough to link the glasses through to Sam, and passes the information on to Barricade (Jess Harnell). Barricade, in his form as a police cruiser tracks down Sam. He generates a hologram to arrest Sam, but the teenager gets help from an unexpected quarter, his new car, Bumblebee (Mark Ryan). Bumblebee and Barricade drop their façades and transform to their robot forms to fight; Bumblebee doing what he can to protect Sam and Mikaela.
Sector 7 also tracks down Sam, thanks to Barricade arresting him. Sam had reported that his car was stalking him, before Bumblebee revealed himself, alerting Sector 7. However, Bumblebee managed to get a message sent prior, summoning several of his Autobot allies. Optimus Prime, Jazz (Darius McCrary), Ironhide (Jess Harnell), and Ratchet (Robert Foxworthy). The Autobots try to extricate Sam and Mikaela, but in the confusion, Sector 7 takes Bumblebee, Sam, and Mikaela prisoner, leaving the glasses in Prime’s possession. Sam, Mikaela, and Bumblebee are taken to Hoover Dam, which turns out to be a secret installation housing both the All-Spark and what Sector 7 calls Non-Biological Entity One, or NBE One. Sam, thanks to conversations with the Autobots, recognize NBE One as Megatron (Hugo Weaving).
Lennox’s special forces team, now safely back in the US, are ordered by the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) to go to Hoover Dam. Lennox’s team is the only one with first hand knowledge on how to defeat the alien robots. Unfortunately, Frenzy has tagged along, disguised as Sam’s cell phone. Frenzy locates Megatron and shuts down the cryonic stasis Sector 7 had been keeping him in. Megatron revives. and summons his Decepticon soldiers, Starscream (Charlie Adler), Barricade, Devastator, Bonecrusher (Jim Wood), and Blackout. As Megatron escapes, Lennox and his team force a stand-off with Sector 7 agents. The tension is broken by the Secretary of Defense who orders Simmons and Sector 7 to release Bumblebee and Lennox to accompany the Autobot, Sam, and Mikaela as the trio takes the All-Spark to the nearby city.
The remaining Autobots catch up and join the convoy. In the city, Lennox and Epps make contact with a F-22 Raptor. Ironhide recognizes the jet as Starscream, confirmed by Epps because of the low altitude the jet flew at. The Autobots barely have time to prepare for Starscream’s attack and Bumblebee loses his legs. The other Decepticons arrive, leading to the climactic fight with the Autobots trying to defend Sam and the All-Spark from Megatron’s forces. The Autobots lose Jazz who is ripped in two by Megatron. One the Decepticon side, Starscream is the only one to escape, with Megatron defeated by Sam and the All-Spark.
The key to the movie is that it is based on the Transformers line of action figures, not the Generation 1 cartoon, even though the original toy line was tied closes to the series. Helping here, as mentioned above, is that the movie is the start of the Transformers cinematic universe and its own continuity, something that prior animated series had also pulled off. That said, there are efforts to remain accurate to the toys. Both Optimus Prime and Bumblebee keep their colour schemes, Ratchet is still an ambulance, Starscream is a modern jet fighter. Just as critical, perhaps moreso, is the return of Peter Cullen as Optimus, still capable of giving the same inspirational speeches as in the Generation 1 cartoon.
In the cases changes were made, there were some shout outs to the original. Due to licensing restrictions, the movie could not use a Volkswagen Beetle for Bumblebee. However, the car that Camero Bumblebee sat beside in the dealer’s lot was a yellow vintage Beetle. With Optimus, the progress of time meant replacing his original cab-over form with a long nose truck, with a similar change happening with Starscream’s vehicle form. Starscream, though, still disappointed Megatron with his failure to acquire the All-Spark. Megatron has his distinctive helmet design and an arm cannon, and both he and Optimus had melee weapons as seen in the Generation 1 theatrical animated movie, Prime with a red-orange sword and Megs with a ball-and-chain. And, like the Generation 1 cartoon, the movie had its own toy lineup.
As a film, Transformers has some issues. Technical issues prevented the title characters from appearing for most of the film; the rendering of robots in disguise was pushing the envelope in computer animation. Michael Bay is best known for action sequences, and the ones seen in Transformers are breathtaking. However, some of the purely human scenes have issues. As an adaptation, though, even with the limitations in the ambitious rendering, the movie captures the essence of the Transformers.
* Megatron’s change to Galvitron, with an artillery piece alternate form, eased some concerns about the sales of a toy gun.
** Frank Welker, voice of the Decepticons.
*** Some countries had restrictions on using the work “War” in a title of a children’s series, thus the alternate name.
In analyzing the history of movie adaptations, I tracked the sources of works. While the Aughts resembled the Fifties in having adaptations be the overwhelming source of popular movies, the type of work adapted changed. Toys, games, and comics became viable original works for adapting, eating away the piece of the pie that literary works had. Games have had a varied success rate; Clue managed to stay with the core concept and, while not a blockbuster hit, works thanks to the strength of its cast and writing. On the other hand, Battleship had problems, from wasted plots to the checklist approach the script appeared to take.
With toys, all the problems with adapting games return, with a new one introduced. With games, the mechanics shape the nature of the play. With toys, there’s not even mechanics. There is no wrong way to play with a toy, whether it is a doll, an action figure, or a set of building blocks. The manufacturer can give a broad base for play, but, ultimately, it is the owner that determines the story, if there is one. The LEGO Movie provides a demonstration of the problem in-story. The movie felt like someone was playing with LEGO, because that was the source of the plot and one of the film’s themes.
The LEGO Movie is probably the best toy adaptation made. It caught the feel of playing with LEGO. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was based on how series creator Lauren Faust played with her ponies as a girl. Both works pull from the idea of playing with the toys themselves. On the other side, there are works like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Jem and the Holograms. Both are based on toy lines from Hasbro and both films had problems. GI Joe‘s script tended to forget what happened earlier and worked better as a collection of set pieces. Jem, though, may have been better off as a TV movie in an alternate timeline where there wasn’t a popular cartoon in the Eighties.
The presence of prior animated series just adds to the problems facing works adapting toys. Without the series, adaptations face the same challenge as studios adapting tabletop role-playing games. There’s no one way to approach the toy. The toy is just an object; the person playing with it adds his or her interpretation, which could align with the manufacturer’s intent, if any, or go in a direction that couldn’t be foreseen, such as using a set of Matchbox fire and rescue vehicles as a space response team fighting pirates disguised as Furbies. Taking that same fire and rescue set, creating an adaptation featuring it may very well just be an action movie featuring firefighters, at which point, the presence of the toy may become a hindrance.
With an existing series, the problem future adaptations have is the lasting memories of the prior work. Jem is illustrative here. The recent movie, while pulled after two weeks, suffered because it just wasn’t the cartoon. The studio didn’t handle audience expectations well. If the cartoon hadn’t existed and if the movie was aired on TV instead of released to theatres, it would be seen in a better light and could have been spun off into its own live-action series. GI Joe, among its other problems, also had a definitive version in its past, the Larry Hama-helmed G.I. Joe comic published by Marvel, which built upon the animated series from the Eighties.
Not all toys with prior adaptations have this problem. Michael Bay’s Transformers succceeded, at least financially, by borrowing elements from the different cartoons and creating its own continuity. The Transformers franchise doesn’t have just one definitive work, so creating a cinematic universe isn’t necessarily destroying memories.* Mattel’s Barbie movies have the doll and her friends as animated actresses, taking on the roles required by the features without locking them into any one personality.** My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is turning into the definitive MLP work, but the series covers enough ground to include slice of life and magical girls and has a large supporting cast that future works can fit in without a problem.
The key issue when adapting toys is to stay true to the play. The closer the adaptation stays to how a toy is played with, the more the audience will identify with the work. The LEGO Movie is the ultimate example of an adaptation getting to the heart of how a toy is played with and can serve as a lesson for future adaptations. The further away from the toy’s core play, the harder it will be to get an audience to turn out.
* Lost in Translation will go into further details next week. Short version, the Transformers live-action movie made all the right moves in casting to offset fan concerns.
** Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse breaks this approach, but is its own continuity. The result is functionally the same as having the dolls as actresses.
Lost in Translation has focused mainly on adaptations of English language works, primarily because a foreign language work would not be understood as well. Translating a work doesn’t involves just the words but the culture behind the work. Little details that are taken for granted in one language can throw a reader or viewer with a different native tongue. Even when a language is shared, such as between England and the United States, there’s still a cultural barrier. In England, a hundred miles is a long distance while in the US, a hundred years is a long time.
The above makes this week’s analysis a bit of a challenge. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was written by Swedish author, Stieg Larsson. Larsson was, prior to his death in 2004, the editor-in-chief of Expo, a Swedish magazine, and had written and delivered the manuscripts for what is now known as the Millenium trilogy before his fatal heart attack. The cultural differences begin with the titles. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was titled Män som hatar kvinnor, or “Men who hate women”. The second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, had its title properly translated from Flickan som lekte med elden. The third and final book Larsson wrote was Luftslottet som sprängdes, “The air castle that was blown up”, but titled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in English, following the title scheme established with the previous books. The choices reflect an editor working out what would draw attention and sales. “Men who hate women” is a little too on the nose for the book in an English market.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows Mikael Blomkvist, the owner, publisher, and a contributor to Millenium, a financial magazine that often tasked other outlets for their poor coverage of financial news. After Blomkvist is found guilty of libel against a market speculator, he receives a request from Henrik Vanger, retired CEO of Vanger Industries, to do two things; first, write Vanger’s biography and, second, solve a forty year old cold case, the death of Henrik’s neice, Harriet. With the libel verdict hanging over his head, Blomkvist agrees and starts digging. At first, the investigation hits the same dead ends that the police and even Vanger found, but Blomkvist gets his first break on close examination of a photograph of Harriet the day of her death. The deeper he digs, though, the more sordid the details of the Vanger family get.
Elsewhere, Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title, has done her own investigations on Vanger’s behalf, though through an intermediary, the company lawyer. The first investigation was on Blomkvist, to get an idea of how to approach him. Later, though, when he reads the report on himself. Blomkvist realizes that Salander is a hacker, and asks for her help. Together, they discover what did happen to Harriet and clear Blomkvist’s name. Salander, for all the billing she has in the book’s title, has a supporting role in the book, an artifact of the title change. Blomkvist is the primary character, thiough Salander tends to take over scenes that she’s in. It’s a minor quibble at this point.
In 2011, a film adaptation of The Girl of the Dragon Tattoo* was released. Directed by David Fincher, the movie starred Daniel Craig as Blomkvist, Rooney Mara as Salander, and Christopher Plummer as Henrik Vanger. The film doesn’t change the setting, leaving most of the action in Sweden. In fact, the movie hits all the major beats of the book. Parts that were removed, such as Blomkvist’s jail time, were more to maintain the flow of the investigation and keep the pace of the movie going. What works in one medium doesn’t necessarily translate to another. The Vanger family tree that was listed in the book as a chart becomes too much info to be able to track in a film where flipping back becomes problematic to the narrative flow. The movie needed to be tight to fit in its running time, which is a shade over two-and-a-half hours as it is. Key clues get highlighted, allowing the audience to follow, though the biggest sleight of hand of the novel is still in the adaptation. The ending and the reveal of what happened to Harriet Vanger takes the most liberties with the source, but still remains in the spirit of the novel, if not the actual events. Again, narrative flow for a movie already over 2.5 hours long necessitated some changes here.
To say that there was an effort to keep to the events in the novel is an understatement. Filming took place primarily in Sweden, having Stockholm play itself and a manor in Hofsta portray the Vanger home in Hedeby. While the main cast – Craig, Mara, and Plummer** – aren’t Swedish, the supporting cast mostly is. Salander has a more prominent role, though given that she is the girl of the title, that makes sense. The result is a film that, while Hollywood produced, feels authentic. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as perfect an adaptation as seen here at Lost in Translation.
* To show how the title changes by language, the Quebecois French release was called Millénium: les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes, or, “Millenium: men who didn’t love women” following the original Swedish title of the book and the name of the trilogy.
** Daniel Craig is from England, Rooney Mara is American, and Christopher Plummer is a veteran Canadian actor.
Last year, over the Hallowe’en weekend, I went to CanCon, a local literary science fiction and fantasy convention. Among the guests was Robert J. Sawyer, who, among other achievements, has had the most serialized stories in Analog. During his panel on serial writing, he mentioned that the act of serialization led to adaptations, thanks to how he sets up the chapters. This week, instead of reviewing an adaptation, Lost in Translation looks at how to be adapted.
While not every creator wants to see his or her work adapted into a new form, others see it as a new source of income for little additional effort. The easiest way to get adapted is to be popular. Hollywood, in particular, wants as close to an instant hit as possible and adapting something already popular should bring in an audience. Warner Bros. would not have paid JK Rowling anything if Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hadn’t been a juggernaut in the publishing world. The phenomenal sales of each book in the Harry Potter series was something that no studio could ignore. Harry Potter wasn’t the first written work to be adapted so soon after publication. All Quiet on the Western Front, published via serials before released as a novel in 1929 was turned into an Oscar-winning movie in 1930.
The catch here, though, is that popularity is hard to predict. Audiences are fickle, demanding originality but going out in droves for by-a-Save the Cat-numbers film. Publishers and studios alike can release works that are similar to what has been popular before, but the new offering could very well languish. What works in one medium might fizzle in another. Also possible, a work that is all but ignored can become a smash hit as an adaptation. Popularity of the original isn’t a guarantee that an adaptation will also succeed.
The next best thing to being popular is to catch the eye of a potential adapter. Scott Pilgrim vs the World is a good example. The graphic novels were known but not a household name, but Edgar Wright had read them. The result, a movie that used the graphic novels as a storyboard, using the actual locations portrayed in the books. The benefit of catching the attention in this manner is that there will be a greater effort to be as accurate as possible to the original work. The adaptor is making his or her version because of what was seen in the original and will try to bring it out in the new work. The drawback is that audiences may not have an idea of what to expect. Worse, marketing departments may have no idea, as happened with Scott Pilgrim.
The third way to get adapted is to be adaptation-ready. Sawyer’s approach to serialization helped him here. He has had nineteen novels adapted or optioned for adaptation. When he serializes his stories for /Analog/, he includes a short summary of what happened in the previous chapter, to remind readers what has happened already. He continues with the summary for the last chapter, leaving him with a proposal that hits the major plot points in a one-to-two page summary, ideal to pass along to studios looking for a new series or movie. When the person making the decision on what to accept has limited time, a summary that explains the premise and shows each beat has an advantage. This method also means removing the uncertainty of getting Harry Potter levels of popularity or being read by the right person at the right time; in this case, rejection by one studio still allows the property to be shopped around. This doesn’t mean that a story should be serialized; Sawyer uses serialization as part of his business plan to get readers, but not all stories are easily turned into a serial. The summaries, though, are the key part, at least for getting a work ready for adaptation.
None of the above is any guarantee that a work will be adapted. There are other considerations, including the ease of adapting. However, the effort taken to be adaptation-friendly can remove barriers.
Lost in Translation is taking the weekend off and will return next week. Enjoy the festivities!
Normally, a franchise tie-in novel isn’t considered here at Lost in Translation. The only exception so far has been a Nikki Heat novel by Richard Castle, mainly because of the metafictional aspects the book provides. However, a recent discovery brings up the nature of tie-in novels. How much time since the end of the original work is needed before a tie-in novel becomes an adaptation in its own right?
Murder, She Wrote was the television equivalent of a cozy mystery series, a number of novels featuring the same core cast of characters where later entries focused more on the lives of the cast than on the mystery. “The Cat Who” mysteries by Lillian Jackson Braun and the Mrs. Murphy books by Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown are good examples of cozy mysteries series. With Murder, She Wrote, Jessica “JB” Fletcher, a widow and retired English teacher turned mystery writer played by Angela Lansbury, solved murders on a weekly basis for CBS from 1984-1996, followed by four made-for-TV movies. While Jessica did tour the US, either to visit friends and family or to promote her latest book, she also spent time in her hometown of Cabot Cove*, a fictional town in Maine, letting the TV series build a cast of regular recurring characters.
A typical episode of Murder, She Wrote had the murder victim and prime suspect, who had some connection to Jessica, introduced to the audience; the murder itself; the police arresting the prime suspect; and then followed Jessica’s investigations through to the reveal of the real killer. The show allowed viewers to make their own observations, letting them try to figure out who the murderer was before Jessica. There were no sudden reveals; all the clues were shown. The reaction of the police varied. Most tried to keep Jessica from getting involved in official business, but some accepted her help, including Sheriff Amos Tupper, played by Tom Bosley, and Sheriff Mort Metzger, played by Ron Masak, both of the Cabot Cover Sheriff’s Department**, both of whom relectantly accepted Jessica’s help because of her track record.
The first Murder, She Wrote tie-in novel, Gin and Daggers, was released in 1989. The novel was written by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain, and had a few inconsistencies, including having Jessica driving where in the series, she didn’t even have a license. A second edition that corrected the problems was released in 2000. Five tie-in novels were released before the series ended in 1996. Afterwards, an average of two Murder, She Wrote novels were released each year since.
Killer in the Kitchen, published in 2015, begins in Cabot Cove. The first part of the novel introduces the murder victim and the obvious suspect along with the supporting cast. Brad and Marcie Fowler, the son and daughter-in-law of Jessica’s friend Isabel, have been working towards opening a seafood restuarant in Cabot Cove, extending themselves financially. Brad has a short temper and a shaky sense of the restaurant business. He and his wife need their endeavor, the Fin and Claw, to succeed. However, noted chef Gérard Leboeuf has decided to open a new restaurant in his chain right across from the Fin and Claw. Gérard knows the business, once letting Jessica look behind the scenes of his New York City as part of research into one of her mysteries, but has the manners of a boor. During the Fin and Claw`s grand opening, Gérard goads Brad on, leading to threats of violence from the latter.
It is no surprise when one of the chefs turns up dead with a kitchen knife in his chest. Dr. Seth Hazlitt, who was played by William Windom in the series, fills in for the Medical Examiner, and gives Sheriff Metzger the details on the cause and time of death. The Sheriff suspects the rival chef because of obvious reasons, but Jessica believes that someone else murdered the dead man. Clues are laid out for the reader to follow, but not always explicitly made mention by Jessica. Other characters become suspects, if not to Jessica, then to the reader, especially once the victim’s home life and possible Mob connections are revealed.
The goal of a tie-in novel, beyond the “make money” aspect, is to present the characters as fans of the original work see them. The problem there is that each member of the audience could have a valid but differing interpretation of the character***. The success, or lack thereof, depends the author setting not only the right tone for the novel but having a good ear for how characters speak and a good eye on how they act. As mentioned above, Gin and Daggers had issues with details that were corrected with a second edition. Murder, She Wrote was a light mystery, a cozy, with a well-meaning busybody snooping around when she felt the police had arrested the wrong person. Writing in the style of Dashiell Hammet or even Richard Castle would miss the proper mood. Jessica was well define in the run of the TV series; she needs to behave in the novel as she did on TV.
Killer in the Kitchen is written in the first person from Jessica’s point of view. Getting her right is critical, and Bain does a good job getting Jessica’s voice correct. Likewise, the recurring characters who do show up also have the correct voice. One can easily picture Angela Lansbury, Ron Masek, and William Windom back in their roles. The result is a story that would very much fit in the run of the TV series, twenty years after the show left the air.
* Cabot Cove, Maine, fictional America’s murder capital, beating out the current one, Detroit.
** Sheriff Tupper retired in his last appearance on the show in 1988, possibly in preparation for Bosley to star in Father Dowling Mysteries. Sheriff Metzger was a New York City police officer who thought that Cabot Cove would be more peaceful.
*** Then there’s the out of left field interpretations, such as Jessica Fletcher being the most successful serial killer on television and responsible for all the murders during the run of Murder, She Wrote.
Like the previous two gaming adaptations looked at, Star Wars and Star Trek, today’s is also based on a franchise. Unlike the previous outings, though, Victory Games’ James Bond 007 Role Playing Game, released in 1983, is set in modern times.
007 is an older franchise than either Star Wars or Star Trek, beginning with the release of Casino Royale in 1954, followed by thirteen more books, including two collections of short stories.. After Fleming’s death, other authors continued writing about Bond, including Kingsley Amis, penning Colonel Sun as Robert Markham, and John Gardner. Naturally, Bond’s adventures became popular enough to become adaptation fodder. Casino Royale was the first adapted; the first adaptation of the book was an CBS TV movie featuring “Jimmy Bond” in 1954, followed later by the 1967 parody with Woody Allen, and then in 2006 starring Daniel Craig. The latter was a reboot of the film franchise started by Cubby Broccoli in 1962 with Dr. No. All told, the franchise has seen six actors portraying James Bond, each bringing a different interpretation of the character. 007 has had many imitators, from Matt Helm to Danger!! Death Ray, and has also been the basis of many parodies, including the 1967 Casino Royale, the Austin Powers movies, and the Reboot episode, “Firewall“. Bond is an influence.
Sometimes, the dice go meta.
A role-playing game based on a franchise featuring a sole main character may seem odd, but Bond is just one agent of several with a License to Kill. The franchise also has recurring characters, including CIA agent Felix Leiter and fellow MI6 agent, Mary Goodnight. The novel Moonraker mentions agents 008 and 0011, and the film franchise shows agents through to 009. Goodnight represents the lower ranked agents in MI6, allowing for players who want to work towards becoming a 00 agent.
Character creation in James Bond 007 is point-based, as opposed to random dice rolls as seen in Dungeons & Dragons*, allowing for players to create an agent to their taste. The points, the number of which depend on the experience of the character, can be used to buy attributes, skills, and appearance details. The attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Perception, and Intelligence – are more or less standard across the majority of tabletop RPGs, and are the base for skills. The twenty-four skills are those seen in the 007 books and movies, from Boating to Gambling to Seduction. Need to outrun a number of SUVs filled with mooks working for the head of a Columbian drug cartel? Driving. Need to shoot at those same mooks? Fire Combat. Need to convince the cartel head that you wanted to get his attention to become one of his lieutenants? Charisma. If a skill doesn’t quite cover what a player wants to do, there’s also the optional Fields of Experience, which provide some flavour on what an agent knows, from being able to ski to understanding a toxicological report on a rare poison. The Primary Chance of a skill is based on one or two attributes plus the number of levels bought for the character.
With the appearance details, the game introduces an interesting concept that works in the context of an espionage RPG – the more average a character is, in height, weight, and looks, the more it costs to buy the appearance. An average looking character is harder to identify, which is handled in the game with Fame points. Fame is further increased depending on the initial experience level; Rookies, like Goodnight, aren’t known while a 00-level agent, like 007, has had missions that have become known. Agent-level, the middle tier covering people like Felix Leiter, may or may not be recognized, but word of their exploits have gotten out. Bond, who is known through out the espionage world, has a high number of Fame points that even dying, as seen in the film adaptation of You Only Live Twice, still doesn’t help avoid recognition. Also affecting Fame is gender; female agents get a reduction because women aren’t as represented as agents as men are; Holly Goodhead, the CIA agent from the Moonraker movie, isn’t recognized by Bond because of this factor.
The core mechanic of the 007 RPG is based on the roll of a percentile die, or d100. However, it’s not a simple pass/fail system. Instead, the game uses Ease Factors ranging from 10, the easiest, to 1/2, the hardest. The Ease Factor is multiplied by a skill’s Primary Chance to determine the Success Chance. When the percentile dice are rolled, the result is checked against the success table, not only to see if the character succeeded, but how well, through the determination of the Quality Rating. The QR ranges from 1, best, to 4, worst but still a success. If the roll was to see if a character hit using Fire Combat, for guns, or Hand-to-Hand Combat, for melee, the Quality determines how much damage is done.
Dice, though, can be fickle. Bond seldom fails when he knows he must succeed. The 007 RPG has one more mechanic that helps, the Hero Point. Today, most games have a hero point or drama point mechanism to help players when needed. Prior to the 007 game’s release, the only hero point mechanism seen was in TSR’s Top Secret, with optional Fame and Fortune points. With 007, the hero point mechanic was part of the core. Players had to declare the use of a Hero Point, though not how many, before rolling. Hero Points improved the Quality Rating by one per point spent. A QR of 1, though, was the best possible, with no further improvements possible**. However, that Hero Point isn’t lost; getting a QR1 gets the player a Hero Point, turning the expenditure into a wash. That does mean that more experienced agents, like 007, will be getting more Hero Points on average than a Rookie, but a 00 will also be facing more challenging opponents. A Rookie shouldn’t be going up against Scaramanga on his or her first mission.
All of the above may seem complex, and the game does front-load the complexity at character creation, but once an agent has been made, the mechanics are easy to use. The provided character sheet includes all the skills and and how to calculate their base chance and even has a multiplication table for Ease Factors. All rolls are based on Ease Factors, giving players an idea of their chance of success. The game includes examples of play that show how the mechanics work using scenes from the movies and books. While the core rulebook doesn’t have room to detail all of 007’s gadgets, the supplement, Q-Manual covers everything that has appeared in the books and movies.
With weapons, vehicles, and gadgets, the core philosophy of the designers was that the character still had to be the focus. Almost every item detailed in either the core rules or the Q Manual provides a Performance Modifier, a bonus or penalty to the the task’s Ease Factor. The only exception is the automatic safecracker from the movie version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a suitcase-sized device that did the work while Bond read a magazine. The Performance Modifiers give the GM room to throw added challenges to players. A chase sequence that’d be too easy with the Q Branch provided Lotus becomes a tense scene when said Lotus explodes and the player needs to borrow a non-player character’s aged Peugeot, as seen in For Your Eyes Only.
All the above discussion about character creation and game mechanics, though, doesn’t answer the main thrust of Lost in Translation – is the game a good adaptation of the source works? The answer – yes. The game’s mechanics were pulled from the books and films. Reading the novels or watching the movies with an eye to seeing the mechanics in action reveals that the rules cover everything that happens. It is possible to see when Bond gets a QR1 result and when he spends a Hero Point. The robustness of the mechanic means that players and GMs can apply them to the 007 films released after the game went out of print. The game’s designers ensured that the rules reflected 007’s exploits.
The only lack that the game has is the hole caused by litigation over Thunderball. EON Productions, the licensors of James Bond, didn’t have the rights for SPECTRE, thus could not grant Victory Games permission to use the organization. Victory Games created a new villainous group to fill in the gap, TAROT, using the organization to fill in SPECTRE-sized hole, particularly in adventure modules based on the older movies. Characters with ties to SPECTRE were transferred to TAROT.
While the James Bond 007 RPG is out of print, and the Avalon Hill Game Company has folded the Victory Games imprint, the game itself is again available. A retro-clone, Classified published by Expeditious Retreat Press, was released in 2013. The game doesn’t have the /007/ license, but the core mechanics will allow for Bond and his contemporaries and successors.
* Point-buy in D&D has been around as an option since second edition AD&D, but was explicitly made so in the third edition.
** Except when using the Gambling skill, depending on the game of chance being played, allowing a player to beat an opponent’s 8 with a 9 in Chemin de Fer or Baccarat or an opponent’s straight flush with a royal flush in Poker.
With announcement after announcement of adaptations being optioned, there`s a fatigue building. Even sequels are starting to suffer. As seen in the History of Adaptations, this decade is shaping up to look like the Fifties, where adaptations reigned supreme. In the Fifties, there were three popular original movies and two were Cinerama demos. In this decade, of the four original movies identified on the Filmsite.org list, three are sequels and just one, Inside Out, is original. The analysis of this decade will have to be redone once it’s over, to take into account films like Deadpool and the Marvel Cinematic Universe offerings. Suffice to say, adaptations are dominating this decade.
Not helping with the fatigue is the source of the adaptations. Unlike decades past, adaptations this decade are coming from what could be considered “low-brow” entertainment – comics, Young Adult novels, and movies of the Eighties and Nineties. As seen in the History wrap up, the sources of adaptations in the Fifties came from literary works, with the only Children’s Lit work adapted becoming a Disney movie, Lady and the Tramp. Today, what is considered works solely for children and adolescents – comics, Young Adult Lit, and Harry Potter – are making up the bulk of the popular movies; but all the sources are popular across age barriers.
Some of the fatigue may stem from perceived snobbery; studios aren’t making “grown-up” films, not like the past. That’s not the only source of fatigue, though. Like the Fifties, this decade is seeing remakes of movies from twenty to forty years ago. Ghostbusters, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and even Jem and the Holograms all reach back to a nostalgia for the Seventies*, Eighties, and Nineties. The Eighties were the first decade in movie history where popular original works outnumbered popular adaptations. Indeed, the Eighties saw experimentation in all forms of entertainment – movies, music, television, novels – because no one could predict what would be a hit. Follow-the-Leader maneuverings by studios weren’t guaranteed to be successful, while a low budget movie based on a nightmare, The Terminator, grabbed audiences’ attention. Unlike the Fifties, where the remakes added elements like colour and sound that weren’t possible in the Twenties, the difference between film technology today and in the Eighties is primarily effect based, specifically, CGI. To give a remake its own identity, changes are made elsewhere, such as the flipping of genders in the Ghostbusters remake.
Changes, though, strike at the heart of both the feel of a movie and at nostalgia. With social media allowing voices to echo across the Internet faster today than any previous decade, a film doesn’t have to even be released before critics denounce it. Yet, shot-for-shot remakes lead audiences to wonder why they just didn’t watch the original, something that is easy to do thanks to home video, DVD, and online streaming. Gus van Sant’s remake of Psycho may have had some subtle techniques, but the general audience saw a shot-for-shot remake.
The big problem is the risk aversion seen in Hollywood today, at least on the silver screen. Today’s budgets mean that movies need to pull in as many people as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to adapt what’s popular in other media. Worse, movies like the Harry Potter series, which made an effort to be accurate to the original books, have upped the expectations of audiences. Adaptations that pay lip service to a popular work aren’t going to survive long in theatres, much like Jem. But the adaptations that do pay attention to the source get butts into theatre seats. The record for highest grossing movie keeps getting reset year after year by adaptations this decade; this can’t happen without people going to see the movies. People may be clamouring for original works, but they keep going to adaptations.
If the big screen is becoming dominated with adaptations, where can an original work be found? Television. While there are several adaptations on the air today, including Supergirl, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., A Game of Thrones, and The Shannara Chronicles, the nature of today’s thousand-channel universe means that adaptations can’t fill every time slot. Reality TV, once a dominating genre, doesn’t allow for reruns; once someone wins the season, there’s no point to watching the previous episodes, which means no sales of boxed sets for holiday seasons. Meanwhile, popular series, from those airing on broadcast channels to cable-only offerings, have a secondary market. The competition between stations, even taking into account time-shifting, means that TV shows have to stand out from the crowd. For now, television is where originality will shine.
With movies, though, until there’s a series of massive flops, adaptations are going to be the order of the day. Studios, though, aren`t going to allow a big budget blockbuster to bomb if they can help it, and have checks and balances and Save the Cat to prevent huge losses. A flop these days only comes about when a studio misjudges the audience response to a project, as what happened with both R.I.P.D. and The Lone Ranger. In the former, it was a comic book movie based on a comic that wasn’t known to the general audience. With the latter, the nature of Westerns had changed greatly as audiences’ understanding of history has changed since the last Lone Ranger movie to the point that Johnny Depp wasn’t the instant draw the studio expected.
The only way to get studios to consider original works is for one to become an unexpected hit. Nothing gets Hollywood’s attention more than the surprise hit. Sure, there will be a number of follow-the-leader movies as studios try to figure out why the film was a hit, but that should spur a few original works, avoiding all-adaptation all the time.
* It could be argued that The Rocky Horror Picture Show became the cult hit it is during the Eighties thanks to repertory theatres.
Two adaptations announced this week are raising eyebrows and possibly blood pressures among potential audiences.
First, the BBC announced that it has teamed up with Netflix to produce a four-part Watership Down mini-series. The goal is to introduce the story to a new audience while toning back the “brutal images”. While the movie did have some shots that featured blood, most of the violence was done with discretion shots. However, the mini-series will be using CGI to make the rabbits more life-like, which may make any violence shown more hard-hitting. The animation of the 1978 movie allowed for a separation of reality and fiction, something the new computer animation may blur. With the four one-hour parts, the new mini-series may be able to delve further into the original novel than the ninety minute adaptation did.
The second adaptation is a sequel to Disney’s Mary Poppins. The 1964 movie, which was itself based on a story by PL Travers, was one of the most popular films of its year. While Travers did write eight books featuring Mary Poppins, she wasn’t enamoured with Walt Disney’s adaptation, as seen in the fictionalized account, Saving Mr. Banks. Disney’s sequel, titled Mary Poppins Returns, will follow up with the Banks children as grown ups,
There is a difference between the Watership Down remake and the Mary Poppins sequel. The BBC is expanding the run time available, allowing them to take in more of the original novel. The Watership Down mini-series is also using modern techniques to add realism, while the 1978 movie was done in a rush by an inexperienced writer, director, and producer*. The Mary Poppins sequel feels more like an attempt to cash in on a known name. Granted, the working relationship between Disney and Travers was poor, which may prevent the studio from using an of her other books, but Mary Poppins won five Academy Awards and is still popular. Disney is also working to ensure the movie is a success, including casting Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton. Time will tell if the sequel is accepted by audiences.
* To be fair to Martin Rosen, he learned quickly and was able to produce a quality work limited by its length.
Adaptations of games are an iffy prospect. There have been major failures along the way, from Super Mario Bros through Dungeons & Dragons to Battleship. Yet, studios keep trying, because the recognition factor of the names involved should pull in an audience, as seen with the announcement of the Tetris movie. With D&D, Battleship, and Tetris, there isn’t a proper setting as would be used in fiction. Maybe movies aren’t the best vehicle for game adaptations. World building takes effort, and movies don’t provide enough time to get the details down. Also a good idea is to pick a game that has a setting. D&D has several, but using them would mean making the movie using the setting’s name*, not the game’s. Yet, the animated D&D series was able to create a setting and a conflict that came from the game’s mechanics. An animated series also has the advantage of needing to be short and to the point without having to worry about the effects budget. Time to look at a game that has a developed setting and see how it was adapted. For this, let’s look at BattleTech, a game of mecha combat in the far future.
BattleTech started as BattleDroids, produced by FASA in 1984. The change in the name came after some legal pressure from Lucasfilm over the term, “droid”. Becoming BattleTech didn’t change the core idea of the wargame – two sides fielding walking mecha called BattleMechs to claim dominence of the battlefield. FASA licensed mecha designs from several anime, including Macross**, giving them their own attributes for the game. As the game grew, different factions were developed, and a history came about explaining why these interstellar empires were at war. The five nations of the Inner Sphere*** eventually received a supplement each, detailing their culture, economy, and interstellar relations – the Lyran Commonwealth headed by House Steiner, with German influences; the Draconis Combine headed by House Kurira, with Japanese influences; the Federated Suns headed by House Davion, with French and English influences; the Capellan Confederation headed by House Liao, with Chinese influences; and the Free Worlds League headed by House Marik, with Greek and Balkan influence.
As the setting expanded, the years progressed from 3025, detailing the Succession Wars to see who would form the new Star League. The Houses could barely keep their technology base, with many technicians performing rituals that were learned by rote instead of proper study. In 3049, a new threat appeared from beyond known space. The Clans, the return of the descendants of Star League forces that fled the Inner Sphere after the the revolt from one of the Periphery states resulted in the death of the First Lord of the Star League in 2766. The goal of the invaders was to restore the Star League and retake Earth. The Clan invasion forced the major Houses to research technology and upgrade to survive. Ultimately, the Clan invasion was stopped in 3052 after a coalition of forces fought a proxy battle for control of Earth. The major Houses then formed a new Star League in 3060 to pre-empt a second Clan invasion, but internal fighting inside the Federated Commonwealth, made of Houses Davion and Steiner, erupted as a civil war. In the aftermath, Houses Steiner, Davion, and Liao pulled out of the Star League, ending it. BattleTech grew from the basic box set to encompass published missions, a related role-playing game (MechWarrior), tie-in novels, video games, and even an animated adaptation.
BattleTech: The Animated Series aired in 1994. Produced by Saban, the fourteen episode series melded traditional animation with CGI and detailed the exploits of the 1st Somerset Strikers, an ad hoc team created by Major Adam Steiner, and instructor at the famed Nagelring Military Academy of the Federated Commonwealth Armed Forces (FCAF). Adam’s goal was to find out who attacked his homeworld of Somerset; at first, he believed the Draconis Combine was involved, but learns that a new invader was responsible. With the tacet permission of Archon Melissa Steiner-Davion, he commandeers a Draconis JumpShip to take investigate further. With him are Lieutenant Rachel Specter, Adam’s best friend and tactical officer; Lieutenant Ciro Ramierez, Adam’s assistant instructor at the Nagelring; Cadet Katiara Kylie, aerospace pilot and fellow Somerset native; Captain “Hawk” Hawkins of the FCAF; “Captain” Valten Ryder, mercenary picked up on Dustball; Franklin Sakamoto, Draconis smuggler and illegitimate son of the Combine’s ruler; Doctor Deirdre Nakamura, shipmate of Franklin’s; and “Patch” McGuire, mechanic.
The 1st Somerset Strikers soon learn that the new foe they face is Clan Jade Falcon, one of the invading Clans returning to take back Earth. The Jade Falcons forces in the area of operations are led by Star Colonel Nicholai Malthus and Star Colonel Kristen Redmond. Both have a technology introduced for the cartoon, an Enhanced Imaging implant that allows them to get a broader picture of the battlefield through virtual reality. At first, the ragtag Strikers spend almost as much time infighting as they do battling Malthus’s forces, but as Adam gains intelligence, the Jade Falcon commanders become rivals as Nicholai tries to defeat Steiner. It’s not easy for the Strikers; they lose Ciro to the Jade Falcons, where he is turned into a bondsman and becomes a ‘Mech pilot with an EI implant. In the final episode, the Strikers battle Nicholai and his forces over the fate of Somerset.
The EI implant allowed the studio to switch to CGI, showing ‘Mech battles via virtual reality. The characters are given ties to the setting, through relations, like Adam and Franklin, and through position, like Nicholai and Kristen. Ciro first appeared in Michael A. Stackpole’s BattleTech novel, Lethal Heritage. Franklin’s storyline began in Robert Charette’s novel, Heir to the Dragon. Distinctive BattleMechs were used, from Adam’s Axeman and Kristen’s Vulture to Valten’s Bushwacker, making its first appearance in the setting. Jordan K. Weisman, one of the series’ creators, also was a developer on the game. The production team took pains to bring in as many elements of the setting that they could fit, from having characters of both the Federated Commonwealth and the Draconis Combine working together to the choice of the Jade Falcons as the antagonists. Keeping the focus on the 1st Somerset Strikers helped the writers create their own stories while still using the decade of work already produced for the game as background.
There were some issues. As a cartoon, the animated series was aimed at the lower age of BattleTech players. The series couldn’t get into a lot of detail; a 22 minute episode doesn’t provide enough time to get into the depth of the setting while still providing an ongoing story arc and ‘Mech versus ‘Mech action. To get some of the ‘Mechs, the Technical Readouts were ignored. Hawk’s Mauler was originally a Draconis Combine-only design, yet the Fed-Com pilot has one. For the casual viewer, one interested in the series with little or no knowledge of the existing canon, this isn’t a problem.
Unlike the D&D movie, the problem with adapting BattleTech is the sheer amount of world building that has been done since 1984. Even in 1994, just ten years after the game’s first release, the Inner Sphere saw two Successor Wars, one that resulted in two of the nations becoming one through marriage and conquest, and the return of the descendants of the Star League. The political maneuverings between the wars were hinted at in the animated series, but could use more time to expand. A Game of Thrones does show it is possible, but a 22 minute episode requires a focus on the core characters without getting into too much detail of events beyond..
FASA did release a sourcebook based on the series, 1st Somerset Strikers, which served three purposes. The first was to act as an intro for new players brought in through the cartoon, explaining the different factions shown in the series. The second was to let existing players replay events in the series to see if things could go differently. The third was to bring the characters into the BattleTech canon. Star Commander Pytor, one of Malthus’ ‘Mech pilots, appeared in the Robert Thurston novel, I Am Jade Falcon while Adam became the Archon of the post-civil war Lyran Alliance, to name but two characters. However, the animated series is now considered an in-universe series detailing a fictionalized account of events that happened.
BattleTech: The Animated Series was an ambitious undertaking by FASA. The designer notes in 1st Somerset Strikers shows the efforts being taken to ensure that new viewers wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the setting while still getting key elements in, a challenging task, especially when different products and novels could show any given House as both savior and destroyer of mankind. The chosen format required liberties taken through necessity. Overall, the series makes an effort to adapt the game, even if it’s not perfect.
* For example, Dragonlance, though that adaptation had issues related to time needed.
** These ‘Mechs would later become “the Unseen” after a legal proceedings by Harmony Gold led FASA to remove their images. The conflict came about because of how each company had licensed the images; Harmony Gold had the Macross license, leading to Robotech, while FASA had approached the design studio instead of the animation studio.
*** There are minor nations outside the Inner Sphere, collectively known as the Periphery. They, too, have BattleMechs, but their capacity for warfare is limited compared to the major Houses. Some of the Periphery states still do have a role to play in interstellar politics.
