Scott Meyer
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How to Express Dissatisfaction
🕑 Added 2023-10-16 07:00:01 +0000 UTCThose of you who have watched the TV show, Foundation, but not read the books may be surprised to hear that in said books the emperor is barely ever shown in person.
Those who read the books but haven’t watched the show will be equally surprised to hear that the emperor probably gets more screen time than any other single character, including Hari Seldon. They will also be surprised at how much screen time Hari Seldon gets.
After the first episode (which may have been the pilot) the tv show is, pretty much, a totally different story, with a few familiar names and similar concepts thrown in. My suspicion is that they used the book's sales figures and reputation to get their foot in the door, then started making the story they wanted to once they had a green light.
I haven’t watched the entire second season. I gave up when they introduced an important villain from the later books, and he was not just changed, but seemed to be the exact opposite of how he was described in the book. I only held on as long as I did because the new story they made up has some really interesting concepts and is exceptionally well acted. I was excited for an adaptation of Foundation. And I’m all for original science fiction stories. It’s just doing one and calling it the other that bugs me.
There are plenty of other examples of this. The recent TV adaptations of Sir Terry Pratchett’s The Watch, and Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency both spring to mind.
Speaking of Douglas Adams (And I am, on a daily basis, speaking of Douglas Adams. Just ask Missy.) Shortly after the Producer/Director Ivan Reitman passed away stories began to surface out about the time he and Adams worked on a film of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Adams wrote a rough script and sent it to Reitman for notes. Reportedly, among those notes were the following:
He didn’t find it believable that beings who could make a planet would be working for mice.
He didn’t think it was plausible that dolphins were smarter than humans.
He compared jokes about Slartibartfast’s name to bad Mel Brooks material.
And, last but not least ...
He felt that having the answer to the ultimate question be 42 was unacceptable, as it would leave the audience “feeling jerked off.”
So, you know, minor changes that wouldn’t change the story much.
This is not an isolated story. The documentary Jodorowski’s Dune is supposedly about a man who tried to make a film of the book Dune, but when I watched it, what I saw was a man cataloging all the ways he planned to change the story.
You might think I’m being oversensitive. Judge for yourself.
I can’t find the link to the specific article I read, but there's a story that at one point Steven Spielberg was looking at making a movie based on The Curse of Monkey Island, a videogame about a young pirate named Guybrush Threepwood. Early on, he asked for a rewrite so it was about the villain, an undead Pirate named LeChuck.
They wrote the new script, went to meet with Spielberg, who said he’d had a new idea. It’s called ‘Monkey Island.’ The movie should be about monkeys.
Comments
Damian
If Reitman got into a ship with an Infinite Probability Drive, it would take him until the heat death of the universe to stumble across an understanding of Adams' humor.
Bernie Margolis
I just remembered a book series that was adapted so horribly that it actually inspired me to read the original books. Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels were adapted into a two-part mess of a TV show on the Sci-FI channel called Earthsea. When I finished watching it, I thought to myself, "This is the worst fantasy movie I've ever seen, but hasn't this author won a bunch of awards?" So I bought the Earthsea books and was shocked at how badly they had botched the TV series. That's when I did some internet searching and found out that Ursula K. Le Guin was in agreement. She had written an article (https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv-earthsea.html) that accurately stated, "When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence."
