Tie-ins are a hard fit for Lost in Translation. While tie-ins have appeared in the past, notably My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the Richard Castle Nikki Heat novels, they are usually set aside for various reasons. However, The LEGO Movie created a dilemma. The film fell neatly into the gap between tie-in and adaptation. After seeing the movie, I really wanted to get some LEGO bricks to play with, but still felt like I had watched an awesome film that took into account the nature of the toy. Thus, the need to work out the nature of a tie-in work.
One of the views of tie-in works comes from advertising. A work is created to sell a product. Prior to the 1980s, works of this nature were seen as strictly advertising and were heavily restricted in what could and could not be shown. The regulations were loosened in during the Reagan administration in the US, paving the way for TV shows such as Transformers, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Jem and the Holograms, and MLP:FIM. While they could be aired, the product they were based on could not be advertised during their time slots. In the 80s, with Transformers and G.I. Joe, there was also Lazer Tag Academy and Pac-Man; quality was uneven. The memorable series treated the work as more than just advertising, elevating them above the pack.
The other main view of tie-works is the expanded universe. Star Trek and Star Wars are the exemplars here. Both have had novels, comics, and spin-off animated series. With Star Wars, the universe expanded by the extra material is considered canon, to one degree or another.* Paramount, however, does not consider the Star Trek expanded universe as canon, with a few exceptions. That difference aside, the main thrust with the tie-in works was to fill a demand by fans for more, particularly during the years where no more official work was expected. The Nikki Heat books fall into this category, being a tie-in to the TV series Castle, though in an unexpected manner.
The core element in both of the above is that the original creators, be they toy company or studio, are providing the impetus for the new works to be created in support of the original. Captain Power was meant to be part of an interactive toy, yet the stories delved into the nature of humanity and ended on a powerful note involving the death of one of the main characters.** With adaptations, the original work is moved to a different medium, typically book to movie like the Harry Potter series. Remakes and reboots can be done by the original studio, as what happened with Star Trek: The Next Generation, but are meant to stand on their own, not support the original.
This isn’t to say that tie-ins are inferior works. Captain Power, as mentioned above, became a cult hit as viewers realized the depth of the work. MLP:FIM became an Internet sensation because Lauren Faust wanted to make sure that the family show would be appreciated by the entire family. The Richard Castle novels, while based on the characters in Castle, are filtered through the titular character’s writing, allowing a fictional novelist to publish real books. In each of these cases, and in many more, the tie-in work goes beyond just supporting the original and becomes a work of its own merit. People don’t need the interactive starfighter to enjoy Captain Power, nor a pony for MLP:FIM, nor even watch Castle to enjoy a Nikki Heat book.
Will Lost in Translation look at tie-in works in the future? The answer is a definite “maybe”. The tie-in will have to transcend its nature and demonstrate that it can stand on its own.
Next week, Veronica Mars.
* West End Games’ Star Wars Sourcebook, published in 1987 and updated for the role-playing game’s second edition in 1994, has been used by the creative team of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. West End Games went bankrupt in 1998.
** Captain Power is being remade as Phoenix Rising, an hour-long science fiction drama, thanks to the original becoming a cult hit outside the target demographic.
Tie-ins are a difficult area to judge. At what point does a work stop being merchandising and start being a work of its own? I have reviewed some tie-in works, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because of its impact on the Internet and the Richard Castle Nikki Heat novels because of the meta nature of the books. While I have reviewed movies based on toys – G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra and Battleship – I haven’t touched any of the animated works. The cartoons came about after the easing of US Federal Communications Commission regulations restricting toy- and game-based series in the 80s. While several cartoons from the era were memorable, including Transformers and Jem and the Holograms, most were just there for merchandising.
Last month, The LEGO Movie opened. A CGI animated action movie, The LEGO Movie was based on LEGO, the construction bricks created in 1949 and refined in 1958. Given that the company wasn’t directly behind the creation of the movie, I felt that The LEGO Movie was an adaptation.
Since the film is still in theatres, I’ll try to keep the summary as spoiler-free as possible. The plot has Emmett, a Minifig, find the Piece of Resistance that makes him the Special that can stop Lord Business from using his secret weapon to destroy all of the different worlds. Unfortunately, Emmett isn’t all that special, but WyldStyle, who was looking for the Piece of Resistance, is there to help him in the fight against Lord Business. Along the way, Emmett and Wyldstyle get help from Batman to get to Cloud Cuckooland to find the Master Builders in hiding.
The movie uses many a bad pun.
The characters are well aware that they are in a LEGO multiverse and most can build items out of the scenery. The CGI makes it hard to tell whether the settings were built physically out of LEGO bricks or if the animators were just that good. The ground, where it isn’t paved by flat-topped bricks, has the classic LEGO brick struts, including the company’s logo. With adaptations, the little details can make or break the work. The eye for detail in The LEGO Movie is amazing. Emmett’s hair has a molding seam. The 80s Spaceman’s helmet has a crack where the piece always got a crack. The Minifigs, for the most part, come from existing sets past and present. The construction scene as the big musical number starts has a Minifig calling for a 1×2 macaroni piece and getting it, just as people playing with LEGO bricks have since, well, 1958.
The LEGO Movie felt like the writers were playing with LEGO while working on the script. Building of items, like a motorcycle from parts in an alley, referenced the LEGO videogames, where players could do just that. The buildings, the vehicles, the animals, the sets, all could be built given enough bricks. Given that LEGO is a toy meant for creating your own designs, the movie showed possibilities and encouraged imagination.
As an adaptation, The LEGO Movie worked. Emmett lived in a LEGO world and acted knowing he was a LEGO minifig. All the bits came together and screamed “LEGO!” as the movie progressed while still allowing the story to unfold. The story itself could not be told without the LEGO bricks.
Next week, the nature of tie-in media and adaptations.
Apologies for the unannounced break. I ran into an odd situation with the planned review of The Mechanic, mainly losing my copy of the remake in my apartment.
In lieu of a proper review, I’ll throw open the floor for questions and comments. Is there something anyone would like reviewed? Is there a question about approach? Why is the sky blue? Feel free to ask below.
Again, my apologies.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the issues surrounding adapting a work to the silver screen. This week, I look at the smaller screen – television.
With movie adaptations, the big sacrifice is depth for time. Few people will sit in a theatre for longer than three hours, meaning that a lot of detail from novels especially gets lost. There just isn’t the time to do worldbuilding. Television allows for the build up of a storyline over a longer period of time, allowing characters to grow, allowing plots to wind around and find fertile ground.
What television lacks compares to movies is budget. A typical movie adaptations will have a large enough budget to cover salaries and special effects*. In a TV series, even the series has an overall cost similar to a blockbuster, that budget needs to be divided over the run of the season. A big effect at the start of the series may drain the FX budget for several weeks or even the rest of the season. There are ways to get around the cost, mainly through creative accounting**, but there is a limit on what can be done. Stock footage helps, to a degree. In the Stargate series, the whoosh of the stargate could be reused through out the franchise, allowing the crew to create different views to give the illusion of new effects. However, in the original Battlestar Galactica, starfighter combat boiled down to mixing up the same stock footage into different orders; there was always a scene where a Colonial Viper fired at the middle Cylon of a three-fighter formation, causing the other two Cylon fighters to break away from each other. With CGI, though, the effects team can create the needed elements once and then animate as needed at a lower cost. When the new budget comes around, the elements can be upgraded, which did happen with the Stargate whoosh.
Television is also very much ratings driven. A seven year arc is rare; studios need to know that the audience will not only be around for season one, but also for season seven, and that later seasons can draw in more people. Depending on the network or cable channel, the series may have two months to establish itself, or just one airing. The days where a show like M*A*S*H could linger near the bottom of the ratings until discovered by audiences is long gone. Shows now need to be instant hits from the beginning or so cheap that even a bottom rating still means the series makes money. The latter is typically filled by reality TV. A series could be cancelled before the planned arc is finished, because of low ratings, a change in the executive suite, or a network retool. A long arc will be left dangling.
One problem longer works may face is the slow switch from episodic to series arcs that’s happening. Most historical TV series were written so that each episode could stand alone, allowing networks to rerun episodes without disturbing continuity. Soap operas, both daytime and prime time, were the exception to the rule, but the idea of a non-soap that had a longer storyline was unheard of until relatively recently. Some network executives still aren’t fully aware of the idea; Firefly suffered when the series was aired out of order, destroying several storylines.
With the increased time available for a TV series***, it’s very possible that the show will outstrip the original work. Anime is well known for this phenonenom; it would be easier to list the number of series that didn’t outstrip the original manga. The possibility also exists in the North American market. A Song of Ice and Fire could run into this issue. George R.R. Martin can only write so fast and has released five books so far. The HBO adaptation A Game of Thrones has three seasons completed and has been renewed for a fourth, just one book back unless season four covers a smaller portion to give season five breather space. Completed book series won’t have this problem, but a TV series based on those books using the same approach as A Game of Thrones, that is, a book per season, then filler may be needed.
Actor availability is a rare issue, but can crop up. Usually, an actor is signed for the duration of a TV series. However, it is not unknown for an actor to want out of his contract. The reasons vary; conflicts with production staff or even the cast, a break of a lifetime comes up, injury, even pregnancy can require an actor to leave. If the actor is in a critical role, recasting becomes difficult. Movie series have also run into the same problem; in the Harry Potter movies, the death of Richard Harris required Warner Bros. to recast Dumbledore with Michael Gambon. And while most original TV series can write out a character and introduce a new one, adaptations aren’t as flexible if the goal is to remain accurate.
Television brings its own unique problems to adapting a work. With the smaller budget and push for ratings, a movie adaptation looks far better.
Next week, The Mechanic.
* Depending on the effect. Progress in technology allows for cost reductions over time, but early adopters pay more.
** In the first season of The Muppet Show, a prop that was meant to be used just once was used instead in three separate episodes, allowing its cost to also be split split over the episodes.
*** At about 45 minutes per episode and a 13 to 22 episode season, that’s about nine to seventeen hours available for storytelling in a broadcast year.
The Empire Strikes Back getting the Shakespeare treatment.
William Shakespeare’s Star Wars did well enough to get the next movie adapted the same way. An educator’s guide is also available.
Neil Gaiman updates on American Gods TV series.
HBO is out. Freemantle Media is in. No network has been announced. From the same journal post, Anansi Boys will be made into a TV miniseries for the BBC.
Help put clues together with Sherlock LEGO.
LEGO is still reviewing the idea, but a set of Sherlock minifigs are making their way through the review process. Other sets being considered are the Macross VF-1 Valkyrie and a Back to the Future DeLorean.
Barbarella TV series sets up at Amazon Studios.
A pilot script has been written and is now waiting for a showrunner. Amazon Studios is run by the online bookseller. Gaumont International Television, the producing company, is also involved with NBC’s Hannibal and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove.
Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman in three films.
Besides appearing in Batman Vs Superman, Wonder Woman will appear in two other movies, so far unnamed. Ideally, one of the other two movies will be a Wonder Woman movie, but this is Warner, who can shoot their own foot at a hundred paces.
Transporter: The Series to air in US in fall.
This slipped right by me. Season two of the series, based on the Transporter movies, begins filming in February.
The Astronaut Wives Club gets ten episode summer run.
Based on the book of the same name by Lily Koppel, ABC will be airing the drama over the summer. Both the book and the series follows the lives of the women who were suddenly elevated after their astronaut husbands on Project Mercury made history as the first Americans in space.
Redshirts to become a limited TV series.
John Scalzi’s Redshirts is being adapted by FX as a limited series. Casting has not started yet. It’ll be interesting to see how the novel is adapted.
Black Widow solo movie in the works.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe keeps going. The Black Widow will be played, again, by Scarlett Johansson. The movie will delve into the background of the character.
Speaking of Marvel… Which studio can use which Marvel character? An infographic.
The surprising one was Namor over at Universal. He started as a Fantastic Four villain, has fought the Avengers, has been an Avenger, and has had his own series. The overlap is Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, who are tied heavily to both Avengers and X-Men continuity. Fox could easily commit to a Cable & Deadpool movie, while Power Pack falls under Marvel Studios.
Raving Rabbids to invade silver screen.
Ubisoft has been busy, getting deals to have Assassin’s Creed and Ghost Recon adapted to film. The latest of the efforts is Raving Rabbids, who already have a TV series.
And an update! A month ago, I reviewed the Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight animated movie and the problems it had at adapting the original novel. Over at io9 this past week, Lauren Davis posted an argument on why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy franchise to be filmed. She has strong arguments. The only thing that could hold back a new adaptation is the failure of the animated movie. However, if ninety minutes was only enough for a shallow adaptation, two hours isn’t going to be enough time, either. Will people go for a six-movie fantasy series based on three books? Going back, I argued that TV may be better for some works than movies; Dragonlance is definitely one of those works. The television format allows for the development of longer arcs, such as Laurana’s growth from elf lass to military leader.
The year 1977 was a banner year for Hollywood. Several iconic films were released that year, including Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Saturday Night Fever. Star Wars alone dominated, giving way to an appetite for science fiction. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Fever tapped into the disco fever of the 70s. Not to be left out, car chase fans got their iconic film, Smokey and the Bandit.
The plot of Smokey and the Bandit is simple. Bandit, played by Burt Reynolds, and the Snowman, played by Jerry Reed, need to get a truckload of Coors beer from Texas to Georgia. At the time, Coors beer wasn’t available east of Texas due to an arrangement between Coors and Anhauser-Busch. Hauling a cargo of the beer was essentially bootlegging and, well, illegal. To distract the police during the cargo run, Bandit takes an advance on the payment to get a Trans Am to use to flush out roadblocks, giving the Snowman and his dog, Fred, open highway.
Along the way, an unexpected complication jumps into Bandit’s car. Carrie, played by Sally Field, left her fiancé at the altar and wants out of the county. Adding to the complexity, Carrie’s ex is the son of the Smokey, one Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by Jackie Gleason. Sheriff Justice didn’t take the jilting of his son well, and starts his chase, completely unaware that there is a truck full of illegal beer involved. Most of the police are unaware of the beer in Snowman’s truck; Bandit becomes enough of a distraction that Snowman can keep the hammer down and speed with impunity.
Car chase movies exist solely for the automotive stunts. Plots don’t have to be elaborate, and Smokey and the Bandit‘s is more than enough for the vehicular carnage that ensues. The pull for these movies is in the chase; everything else is secondary. To be fair, all the main characters in Smokey and the Bandit have a motive for what they’re doing. Bandit and the Snowman want to win the $80 000 bet; Carrie is running away from a wedding she knows is wrong for her; and Sheriff Justice wants to stop and arrest the man who kidnapped his son’s bride.
Two more theatrical sequels followed, the first following the fallout of Bandit and Carrie breaking up, the second with Sheriff Justice trying and failing to adjust to a life of retirement. Smokey and the Bandit 2 held together well enough, going back to the core of the car chase. Smokey and the Bandit 3, however, went far overboard in the writing. Jackie Gleason pulled off the role, but the rest fell short.
Fast-forwarding, we reach the year 1994. The 500-channel universe hasn’t yet arrived, but both Bruce Springsteen and “Weird Al” Yankovic had commented on the number of hours to be filled; the former with “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” in 1992, the latter with “I Can’t Watch This” in 1993 with the line, “I hooked up 80 channels, and each one stunk”. While The Real World had started on MTV in 1992, the reality show explosion would go off in 2000 with the debut of Survivor on CBS. The airwaves and cable channels had to find programming somewhere, and syndication was hitting its stride. Universal Television responded to the need with its Action Pack, a number of movies meant for syndication. The Action Pack included Hercules: The Legendary Journeys*, TekWar, based on the novels by William Shatner, the Midnight Run films, based on the movie starring Robert DeNiro, and the Bandit movies, based on Smokey and the Bandit.
Four Bandit movies were made, with Hal Needham, creator and director of Smokey and the Bandit, as the executive producer and director. With Burt Reynolds working on the final season of Evening Shade, a new actor was needed. Brian Bloom, who would go on to play Pike in the adaptation of The A-Team, got the role. A few changes were made with the supporting cast. The Snowman and Carrie weren’t around; instead, Lynn Denton, son of the governor, was introduced as the Bandit’s best friend, and each movie had its own romantic interest. While the movies did have chase sequences, the focus turned to Bandit and his endeavors and complications. Bandit: Bandit Goes Country has him returning to his hometown to clear up long-standing feuds and meet up with an old girlfriend. Bandit: Bandit Bandit has him tracking down an imposter of himself who had stolen a prototype alternate fuel car. Bandit: Beauty and the Bandit has him helping a woman, played by Kathy Ireland**, on the run from both mobsters, federal agents, and a bounty hunter. Bandit: Bandit’s Silver Angel sees him stepping forward to help a circus owned by his late uncle.
The Bandit movies wound up in an odd position. For low budget TV movies, they were watchable and fun. However, by carrying the Bandit name, comparisons to the original would happen, and a theatrical release where cars could be abused and junked has the edge over a series of TV movies where repairs eat into the budget. At the same time, without the link to Smokey and the Bandit, the movies might get ignored or, worse, be thought of as a rip-off of the original work. Television adaptations also have a different flow thanks to the need for commercial breaks. A theatrical release can keep building to a big ending, adding ebbs to let the audience catch a breather. On TV, the requirement for advertisements means that, every ten to fifteen minutes, the movie needs to have a mini-cliffhanger to ensure viewers return after the ad. Viewing a TV show or a made-for-TV movie on DVD, with no commercial, can become choppy as a result.
Overall, the Bandit movies are fun for what they are, low-budget TV movies. Brian Bloom’s Bandit is clearly the same as Burt Reynold’s, a man who gets by on charm and can wind up over his head as a result. With Hal Needham on board as producer and director, the TV movies could keep to the core of the originals and move away from the car chase without losing the identity.
Next week, the February adaptational news round up.
* And, later, the Hercules spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess.
** Kathy’s southern accent is far more easy to listen to than her squeaky voice in Alien from LA.
The silver screen has been the pinnacle of Hollywood since the early days of Hollywood. Movies occupy the top rung of the creative hierarchy, towering over television. Actors work hard to get their big break, looking to move from TV to the big screen. For adaptations, movies are both a blessing and a curse. A film adaptation means that an author has reached enough of an audience that a studio has noticed. On the downside, few books survive the process of being adapted.
Over the past fifty to sixty years, the average length of a book has grown over the past 50 years, with doorstoppers common today. There are exceptions, naturally; each book of The Lord of the Rings was far longer than the other fantasy novels of the time. At the same time, The Lord of the Rings became the template for modern fantasy works, leading to series such as The Wheel of Time and A Game of Thrones. With the increased length comes more detail, more plot points, more action, all of which makes it difficult to put into a feature film.
Typically, a theatrically released movie is from ninety minutes to two hours long, with a few going under to eighty-five or over to three hours. Any shorter, and the audience starts wondering about the cost of seeing something so short. Longer, and audience fatigue sets in unless the film is kept tight so that the viewers don’t notice the passage of time. The time limit means that something from the original work has to give. Usually, the decision is to remove scenes that will confuse the audience or that don’t add to the plot. Such partial adaptations can work; Blade Runner, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and Jurassic Park all kept to the core story while still excising elements that detracted from the plot. However, if the wrong elements are removed, or the story is so intertwined that removing elements causes the story to fall flat, movies can fail. The Dragonlance animated film is a good example; with a ninety minute running time, the movie felt shallow, missing concepts that made the original work breathe.
The problem grows if the original work is part of a series that isn’t yet complete. While Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was successful both as a movie and as an adaptation, some parts of the story that became important in later book were removed for the sake of fitting the movie into a decent running time. With Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the studio decided to split the book into two movies to avoid rushing the story in just one. Likewise, The Hobbit became three movies in part to give the plot the time it needed to unfold.
With short stories and novellas, the problem doesn’t quite go away. A short story may not have enough plot to last even ninety minutes, requiring padding. A good example is the Ian Fleming story, “The Living Daylights”. The story has 007 protecting a Soviet defector from a sniper. In the movie, The Living Daylights, the original story takes up about twenty minutes of screen time, leaving over one hundred minutes to be filled.
The answer, though, isn’t to stop adapting books. Given the risk aversion in Hollywood, not adapting anything is off the table. One solution is to take into account book length. Going back to James Bond, the movie versions of both Dr. No and Casino Royale stayed close to the original works, with little to no scenes added or removed. Longer books could be broken into parts, though if the first movie fails at the box office, the rest of the story won’t be filmed.
Another solution is to take a hard look at adapting the work for television. Whether the work becomes a regular series or a mini-series, the adaptation isn’t as dependant on the vagueries of the international market. With mini-series, the full novel will be shown in a short span, long enough to get the immediate ratings, but not long enough for the network or cable channel to end the adaptation early. In a regular series, the adaptation will have the time it needs to build the world and establish characters, but poor ratings could kill the show before the work has been fully aired. However, cable channels aren’t as beholden to the Neilsens as the broadcast networks are. Dexter, True Blood, and A Game of Thrones all thrived as series, with each book becoming a season in the series.
Reducing the size of novels is a non-starter. As mentioned earlier, The Lord of the Rings became not only a classic but also a template for writers inspired by it. It is rare to find a stand-alone fantasy novel that isn’t a tie-in to a property such as Dungeons & Dragons. Science fiction does have them, but given the time and effort needed for worldbuilding, recycling the work becomes tempting when looking at building a new universe from scratch. There’s also the readers’ reaction; the price of books has crossed a point where buyers are expecting not just a good story, but a long one to match the cover price. A short book just doesn’t have the physical weight that readers want.
In short, the glamour of the movies needs to be balanced with the idea that two hours just isn’t enough time to do justice to today’s works.
Next week, Smokey and the Bandit.
Dinosaurs have long been a source of fascination. For many people, their first foray into science was as a young child pouring over anything about dinosaurs, leading some into careers in paleontology. Only fossils remain from the reign of the dinosaurs, but that keeps scientists and the curious intrigued enough to try to discover much about Earth’s prehistoric past.
In late 1990, Michael Crichton released his science fiction novel, Jurassic Park. At the heart of the story was the idea, “What if someone recreated dinosaurs?” He worked out the details, who could afford the cloning equipment, why would dinosaurs be cloned and brought back, the legal issues in opening a theme park featuring wild animals.
In the novel, the CEO of the fictional InGen, John Hammond, created the titular park on the fictional Isla Nublar as a theme park where people could visit and see the returned dinosaurs in a somewhat natural habitat. The park’s investors, through their lawyer, needed assurances by academics that the park was accurate and safe. Hammond brings on board Doctor Alan Grant, a paleontologist, while the investors’ lawyer brings in Doctor Ian Malcolm, a chaos therorist. Dr. Grant brings along grad student Ellie Sattler, a paleobotantist, along.
During the tour of the main facilities, Hammond shows how the dinosaurs were recreated, replacing damaged genetic code with DNA from reptiles, birds, and amphibians. The new DNA was then modified so that only females were viable and that the creatures required regular doses of lysine to survive. However, among the more benign species like Triceratops were carnivores like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex.
For the tour of Jurassic Park, Hammond sends along his grandchildren, Lex and Tim. Tim, like many boys his age, is dino-crazy and is looking forward to the tour. During the tour, Velociraptor eggs are found, something that shouldn’t occur in an all female population. Dr. Malcolm also points out that a flock of Procompsognathi have a normal distribution of heights instead of the expected uniform height he’d expected from cloned creatures.
Elsewhere, a tropical storm forms and moves in on Isla Nublar. Dennis Nedry, a subcontractor with financial problems, takes advantage of the storm to steal genetic samples for InGen’s competitor, and sabotages the park’s computer systems to help in his escape. The sabotage disrupts all security, including the electric fences keeping the dinosaurs apart from not just each other but from the tours. For the herbivores, this isn’t a problem. For T. rex, it now has a larger range to hunt, and the tour group, in two electric trucks that are also out of power, had stopped near the dinosaur’s paddock.
Things get worse. Grant and the children get separated as the T. rex and its child attack. Malcolm is critically injured. The park’s power returns, but is soon again lost as only the auxiliary power was restored. With the loss of auxiliary power, the Velociraptors, quarentined due to intelligence and visciousness, escape. The ship that had left Isla Nublar for the mainland has Velociraptor stowaways, not the formerly quarentined ones, but wild ones.
The movie adaptation of Jurassic Park follows the plot for the most part. Given the length of the novel, some scenes in it had to go to keep the movie’s running time under ten hours, let alone the two hours, seven minutes it did have There were changes made, though. In the novel, Lex’s role is to be The Load, screaming anytime a dinosaur appeared. Her brother, Tim, not only was well-read on dinosaurs but also was a hacker. The hacking ability was transfered over to Lex for the movie. The fate of Hammond is different as well; he gets to escape the island in the adaptation. Helping to ease the transition from book to movie was having Michael Crichton on board as a scriptwriter. He was able to remove elements from the novel that let the movie still hold together without dragging out the film. Some elements removed, such as the Pteranodon aviary, returned in Jurassic Park III. Other elements, such as what happened to Malcolm, were added. The novel never went into details on whether he survived his injuries or died from them. The movie, Malcolm is seen in the helicopter, awake and alert, allowing him to return for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
The core of the novel, the warning about hubris, the dangers of reintroducing an extinct species, the folly of trying to control nature, remains intact. The movie did not back away from showing the consequences of trying to play God. Even with precautions in place – the lysine requirement, the electric fences, the all-female population – dinosaurs ran amok and multiplied. People died from one man’s folly.
Some time back, I mentioned that there would be times when I would run into the adaptation before the original. This in one of those cases; I saw the movie when it first came out, but only read the book recently. The differences were startling, not only in the scenes that weren’t filmed or were used for Jurassic Park III, but the roles. As mentioned, Lex’s role expanded in the movie, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In the book, Lex was very much the damsel in distress, needing Dr. Grant’s assistance. In the movie, she took on dimensions, and the interplay with her brother felt more natural. Once she adjusted to the events, she took charge of her brother, particularly in the park’s kitchen.
Overall, the movie is faithful to the original work. Not all of Jurassic Park was adapted, but what was came through. The core of the story remained in one piece, keeping the thriller aspect of the novel front and centre without losing the message.
Next week, the problem with movies.
The new year brings new news.
Death Note: The Musical, coming to South Korea in 2015.
The anime /Death Note/ is being turned into a musical with music by Frank Wildhorn (Broadway play Jekyll and Hyde, Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”) and Jack Murphy. This isn’t the first musical about a serial killer. Sweeney Todd was at one point a ballet.
Warner Bros, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in negotiations for Sandman.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt may star and co-produce the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Gordon-Levitt may even direct the feature. David S. Goyer will also be on board as co-producer.
Sweetpea Entertainment moves for partial dismissal of D&D rights case.
Hasbro has been trying to regain the movie rights to Dungeons & Dragons from Sweetpea Entertainment. Sweetpea was responsible for the 2000 movie plus the far better direct-to-DVD sequel and was working on a script based on Chainmail, D&D‘s progenitor game. At issue is who currently holds the movie rights. The original contract required Sweetpea to release a sequel within five years of the original movie, but Hasbro does not count the direct-to-DVD works while Sweetpea does.
Ghost writing and spin-offs; what happens after an author has died.
It’s not a new phenomenon. Now, though, with best sellers and adaptation rights bringing in money to publishers, the desire to continue an author’s series is growing.
Star Wars comic license being given to Marvel
Not that unexpected, considering that Disney owns both Marvel and Lucasfilm. Dark Horse had a great twenty-year run, though, and set a standard that will be difficult to match.
With the changeover, comes the fun of working out continuity.
Lucasfilm’s Leland Chee (@HolocronKeeper on Twitter) heads the group tasked with getting the canon straight. The story group will have to work out how the movies, TV series, comics, books, role-playing games, video games, and toys all work together. Interestingly, West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game is still an influence on Star Wars despite WEG’s bankruptcy in 1998.
Magic: The Gathering being adapted as a movie.
This isn’t as dire as it sounds. As a collectable card game, Magic: The Gathering has a setting that has been developed since 1993, and storylines in each expansion set. As long as Fox, the studio making the movie, can keep the familiar elements and introduce them to people who haven’t played while still keeping fans of the game not-annoyed, the adaptation stands a chance.
Amazon scrapped.
The Wonder Woman prequel TV series has been cancelled by the CW. The network left the possibility of a future Wonder Woman series open. It looks more that the CW doesn’t want to botch the series and is being cautious.
Batman finally to be released on DVD.
The Adam West TV series will, at long last, see a DVD release. Warner and Fox have worked out the legal differences over rights. No specific date has been set.
Batman/Superman movie delayed until 2016.
Warner delayed the release of the movie, still untitled, until May 2016. Start of production won’t start until second quarter of this year.
Carleton University’s radio station, CKCU, will have a half-hour dedicated to discussing fanfiction tomorrow, Thursday, January 16, starting at 6:30pm Eastern Time. Kate Hunt, the host of Literary Landscape, will interview Mary Pletsch and me during the half hour. CKCU has a live stream if you prefer to listen over the Internet.
