(1) WHAT’S A FEW MILLION BETWEEN GEEKS? Wizard World will be scaling back conventions after posting a $4.25M loss in 2015.
The comic convention franchise Wizard World is scaling back the number of conventions after filing a $4.25 million loss in 2015, according to ICv2. The company, which takes its name from the defunct magazine Wizard, held 25 events in 2015 for a combined revenue of $22.9m, which was less than 2014’s convention revenue of $23.1m despite only hosting 17 shows that year. Looking closer, Wizard World’s 2015 conventions earned on average $916,000 per show, as opposed to $1.36m in the year prior.
Additionally, Wizard World has sold all but 10% ownership of the fledging ConTV to Cinedigm. That venture was a $1.3m loss for WizardWorld in 2015.
WizardWorld has 19 conventions planned in 2016, with one being the new ‘con cruise’ venture.
(2) WISTFUL WATNEY. From The Martian Extended Edition, now on Digital HD, DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD.
Mark Watney marvels at Earth and contemplates on the reasons for his rescue from Hermes.
(3) LOVE WILL KEEP US TOGETHER. Mark Gunnells wrote “A Love Letter to Joe R. Lansdale”.
Some of you may be saying, Who’s that? And if you are, that makes me sad. The man’s talents are so immense that he really should be a household name in my opinion. His books never fail to impress and thrill me, and I’ll give a few reasons why I am such a fan.
One, simplicity. The man’s language can be so lean and yet convey so much. He doesn’t have to do a lot of literary acrobatics to get his point across, but can say so much with such economy of words. It is something I aspire to.
Two, dialogue. I’m a sticker for good dialogue, and Lansdale knows how to do it. His characters talk in a way that is witty and fun but also believable and authentic.
Three, darkness of character. But not just of the villains. He isn’t afraid to infuse his protagonists with darkness too. They aren’t all saintly and virtuous, but a mixture of good and bad, just like real people.
Four, diversity. The man does westerns, mystery, horror, and a great deal of fiction that defies category. I think that hurts him in some ways, since the industry (and many readers) like writers who are predictable, where they know what they’re getting going in. That isn’t Lansdale, and I love him for it. He is also equally adept at short stories, as well as novels and novellas.
(4) ROAD WARRIOR. “Letter From Terry Brooks: The Importance of Touring” at Suvudu.
…Chained to my computer and locked away for 8 to 10 months while writing, you tend to forget what it is you are writing for. You tend to forget how wonderful it feels to hear that your books mean so much to the readers. You forget that it gives you energy and inspiration for your work. But the book events remind you of all this, and they give you an unmistakable desire to go back and do more and to never, ever disappoint your readers by doing something that is less than your best work.
Love the families that come out. Sometimes four or five, all reading the books at once. Love the stories of how people came to read the books in the first place – frequently through another member of the family recommending them. Love the way the stories and characters have impacted people at times in their lives when things seemed a bit bleak. I am reminded of how we all escape into books to flee our own lives now and then, and when we do we inevitably return better able to get on with things. Love all the strange, wild tales of where people were and what they were doing when they read a particular book…..
(5) TWEETAGE OF THE LAMBS. Here’s a little-known fact about Amazon rankings.
This is exactly how it works. Says so right there in the manual. Of course, when you drop below me I eat your liver. https://t.co/MrCzFwrkot
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 9, 2016
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 9, 2006 — The animated feature film Cars, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, roars into theaters across the United States.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY DUCK
- Born June 9, 1934 — Donald Duck made his first screen appearance in “The Wise Little Hen.”
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS AND GIRLS
A time traveler, a pirate and a princess…
- Born June 9, 1961 — Michael J. Fox
- Born June 9, 1963 — Johnny Depp
- Born June 9, 1981 — Natalie Portman
(9) WHITE HOUSE LOOT CRATE IN HEADLINES. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports “Obama gave Trudeau a signed copy of Star Wars script”.
According to ethics disclosures, Justin Trudeau was given a copy of “The Force Awakens” script – the seventh Star Wars movie, released last year – signed by writer/director J.J. Abrams. U.S. President Barack Obama gave Mr. Trudeau (a big fan of the sci-fi franchise) the gift, along with a sculpture, a photograph and toys for the children, during the state visit to Washington in March.
Mr. Trudeau and his family gave the Obamas a sculpture and indigenous clothing.
The personal touch of this particular gift is no doubt a sign of how close the two world leaders are. Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Obama will see each other again at the end of the month, when the President comes to town for the North American Leaders’ Summit in Ottawa on June 29. Mr. Obama is expected to address parliamentarians while he’s in town.
(10) BROOKS FANZINES. The University of Georgia (as reported last month) is displaying Ned Brooks’ fanzines in the Rotunda of the Russell Special Collections Libraries through July. Now there is also a companion online exhibit anchored by George Beahm’s tribute, “To Infinity and Beyond! The Fanzine Collection of Ned Brooks”.
(11) WILLIAMS SCORES AFI AWARD. Tonight John Williams picks up the 44th American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. The ceremony will air on TNT on June 15.
John Williams’ storied career as the composer behind many of the greatest American films and television series of all time boasts over 150 credits across seven decades. Perhaps best known for his enduring collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, his scores are among the most iconic and recognizable in film history, from the edge-of-your-seat JAWS (1975) motif to the emotional swell of E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and the haunting elegies of SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993). Always epic in scale, his music has helped define over half a century of the motion picture medium. Three of Williams’ scores landed on AFI’s 100 Years of Film Scores — a list of the 25 greatest American film scores of all time — including the unforgettable STAR WARS (1977) soundtrack, at number one. With five Academy Award® wins and 49 nominations in total, Williams holds the record for the most Oscar® nominations of any living person.
(12) VAPORTECTURE. “Is a Comic-Con museum headed to Balboa Park?” asks the San Diego Union-Tribune. The answer is: not necessarily.
So far it’s undecided whether such an attraction would simply share space with the Hall of Champions or occupy nearly all of the 68,000-square-foot, memorabilia-filled venue next to the Starlight Bowl.
“I heard they might be interested in doing something, so I made contact and began a conversation, and it’s been going on for awhile,” said Hall of Champions board member Dan Shea. “We have a space that could be considered under-utilized for what we have. Comic-Con is an iconic community group, and we would love to see them stay here, so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a museum for them in our hometown. And that’s what we talk about when we get together now and then.”
But no deal has been reached, and it could be some time before a museum even materializes, Shea acknowledged.
“There’s no hurry to move it along,” he said.
Comic-Con International spokesman David Glanzer was equally vague about the prospects for a Balboa Park museum devoted to the popular arts icon, a San Diego presence since 1970. The four-day convention, which now draws more than 130,000 attendees, is contracted to stay in San Diego through 2018.
Asked about what the museum might showcase and how much space it might occupy, Glanzer responded, “We’re still in discussions. I’m sorry but we haven’t gotten that far yet.”
Shea said an announcement about the possibility of a museum was made, in part, to put to rest “silly things we were hearing about what people thought they knew about this.”
(13) SEVENEVES MOVIE MAYBE. “Skydance Reunites ‘Apollo 13’ Team For Neal Stephenson Sci-Fi Novel ‘Seveneves’” – Deadline has the story.
EXCLUSIVE: Skydance has set the Apollo 13 team of writer Bill Broyles, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer for an adaptation of bestselling author Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Seveneves. Grazer and Howard’s Imagine Entertainment is producing the ambitious adaptation.
(14) KRAKEN, NOT STIRRED. Nerdist “Meet the GAME OF THRONES Brittle Star: Ophiohamus Georgemartini”.
The trend of naming new species after pop culture icons is on the rise, and we’re giving the latest addition to the list of nerdy namesakes our stamp of approval. A brittle star, found deep in the South Pacific, has been officially dubbed Ophiohamus georgemartini because of its likeness to the thorny crown found on the cover of book two in the Game of Thrones series, A Clash of Kings….
The George R.R. Martin-friendly specimen was found off the coast of New Caledonia, at a depth of 275 meters (902 ft), but you can find brittle stars in shallow waters as well, and even in rocky tide pools. “Brittle stars live everywhere,” explains the Echinoblog’s Dr. Christopher Mah. “Under rocks, in the mud, on corals, under corals … even on jellyfish. Many of them are tiny, tiny little critters that fit easily into cracks, crevices and nooks in rocks.”
[Thanks to Stephen Burridge, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce Baugh.]
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@Sunhawk: “I managed to almost collide with Mercedes McNab (from Buffy) when we were both coming/going from the ladie’s washroom, I am pretty sure that’s not normal”
I think I can say with high confidence that encountering Mercedes McNab at the bathroom is not “normal.” 😉
@Chip Hitchcock: “visual media producers are frequently not working with their own money.”
“NEVER PUT YOUR OWN MONEY IN THE SHOW!” – M. Bialystock, producer
@Rev Bob – that seems to be the only way I meet famous people: randomly and with no chance at a conversation lol Like one time I saw Stan Lee whiz by me in a wheelchair while I was setting up my AA table but by the time I registered who he was, he was already twenty feet away and all I could see was the back of his head lol
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Pixel as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Clarion Under the Direction of the Marquis de Scroll
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there.
🙂
“Scrolls to the left of me, pixels to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you”
(first time evah had a title come to my head)
They could change them all to guys and rename it “Smadadams.”
I just wonder if they’ll get Neil deGrasse Tyson to play Neil deGrasse Tyson.
THE MARTIAN : extended edition. Recipes for potatoes included?
Reviewers on Amazon are sneering at this edition, because it is only ten additional minutes. And they’ve already shelled out change for the initial Blu Ray release.
Maybe they’ll rename it “Sevenfives.”
I thought the TV adaptation of Going Postal (and Hogfather) was okay, but The Color of Magic was literally unwatchable. As in, I thought it was so disgustingly bad I couldn’t stand to suffer through it. Pratchett perhaps more than average is poorly suitable for TV/movie adaptions because a large percentage of the heart of the work is in the description, exposition, and inner monologues, not in the dialogue. Take that away and you are left with something much more like generic comedy. So little of what makes it meaningful makes it through the translation in medium that IMHO it isn’t worth making that translation.
@ Bonnie McDaniel
Nah, they don’t need to get that extreme. After all, the seven Eves are just the McGuffin. I’m sure they can find some other male characters to take up 95% of the screen time.
Darren G: I’m going to quietly disagree.
Based on (3) checked out Joe R. Lansdale’s site.
Read this week’s free short: Boys Will Be Boys.
First Impressions: rhythm, pace, metaphor all well done. Content though… too dark. I think a steady diet of it would be soul killing from a million tiny wounds.
I’m not really sure why. I can read, for instance, James Ellroy works containing equally horrific material and it just flows around me. Why the Lansdale, by contrast, would be a gut punch??? I’ll have to ponder on that awhile.
Since the scroll item mentions he works in other genre’s I may check out his non-horror, non-crime work.
Anyone following on to read this particular story: trigger warnings for language, murder, sexual abuse, misogyny, cat killing… in fact, just trigger warnings period.
My favorite Lansdale story is probably My Dead Dog Bobby. Which is yet more evidence that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with me.
@Heather Rose Jones:
Wouldn’t that be an accomplishment(of the thoroughly negative kind)? A version of Seveneves that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test…
@Darren ‘Smadadams’? Isn’t that a beer in Boston?
@IanP:
I’m no expert on Indian cuisine, but is that what’s known as a gullfrezi?
(It certainly appears to be done to a tern).
🙂
ETA: Beer and curry in consecutive posts – must be Friday!
I liked House of Shattered Wings, though it took me two goes to get into it. The setting is great, and as said above, the motivations of the characters do come out over the course of the book, which I think is a strength as I didn’t feel like there were stereotypical hero/villan cardboard cut outs in there.
Having said that, it is grimmy grim mcgrim most of the way through. Looking forward to the sequel and I did put it on my Hugo novel list.
Apollo 13 is probably my favorite film ever (maybe I am sekrit puppy?) which drives my wife nuts as I will watch it whenever its on (she says “you do know they get back, right?”). At least it’s not possible to spoil Seveneves and chainsawing it down to film size, excising the last third, might be kinda fun in a depressing “watching everyone die via CGI, either quickly or slowly” kinda thing. Bonus points if Ron Howard can get Neil degrasse Tyson in the cast, and Jeff Bezos, and all the other thinly veiled characters Stephenson stuffed in in lieu of, you know, actual character development or anything like that.
Seveneves is way the hell below No Award for me. That’s probably not a shock to anyone 😉
(3) I’ve been a fan of Lansdale since 1983/84 and, looking back, it is clear that he was/is my biggest creative influence.
William Goldman may have made me think being a writer would be a cool thing to do. The emotional whammy of John Carpenter’s Halloween (way back in 1979) and the strong, immediate desire I felt to WRITE something that would effect somebody the way that movie effected me is what made me realize I needed to be a writer. But reading Joe R. Lansdale showed the kind of writer I truly wanted/aspired/needed to be.
Some of my favorite Lansdale:
Hell Through a Windshield (which became The Drive-In)
Dead in the West
Cold in July
Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back
Across the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks
The Night They Missed the Horror Show
The Thicket
(anything that features Hap and Leonard)
Captured by the Engines (a Batman novel)
The Nightrunners
High Cotton (anthology)
Bumper Crop (anthology)
An Incident On and Off a Mountain Road*
*The padded to fill an hour running time Masters of Horror episode that adapted the story does not do it any justice, or favors.
“Apollo 13” is what I thought of when i read about this… all-American technical problem-solving in space. “The Martian” was a success as well. I don’t see how they could possibly do the far future stuff in the same film.
Some interesting comments on “House of Shattered Wings”, making it more likely that I will give it a try.
Okay, let’s look at a concrete (and brick, and cobblestone) example.
Book:
Sam Vines is walking along a street thinking about how he can identify what street he is on through the thin cardboard soles of his boots. He is also thinking about how a rich man can afford to pay much more for his boots, but that those expensive boots last far longer than the cheap boots that regular people can afford, so that–in the long term–rich people pay less for boots than poor people.
TV show:
Sam Vines is seen walking along a street.
You could try to paste over this gigantic gap in content by having him (very unrealistically) talking aloud to himself as is done so often in TV. Or you could have him (uncharacteristically) saying it aloud to a second character. But what is most likely to happen is that the idea will be ignored completely.
A movie/TV adaptation of a well-written novel is like staring into a room through a cracked peephole while wearing dusty, smudged welder’s goggles as opposed to actually being in the room.
@Darren Garrison
I guess you weren’t one of those squeeing over the Altered Carbon adaptation then? I know I was.
Or the Expanse, GoT…
I can’t speak to the specific work in question, but in general I find TV/movie adaptations to be less satisfying when compared with the original work. The exceptions are pretty rare. Blade Runner comes immediately to mind as an example.
Regards,
Dann
Bonnie McDaniel said:
Hey, if the movie of The Children of Men could change the setting from a world where seemingly all men have become infertile to one where seemingly all women have become infertile, anything’s possible!
@Darren:
I believe that there are some stories which simply are not well suited to some media. Stephen King’s It, for example – the most powerful part of that novel for me is the structure. The way “then” and “now” interact, first in big chunks and then shrinking to fragments as the stories converge in the sewers… that’s heady stuff, and the tale flows back and forth in print in a way that no visual medium can possibly achieve. It’s impossible to mistake Bill-at-eleven for Bill-at-thirty-eight on the screen, but it’s easy on paper.
And yet, the miniseries is worth watching and works as its own thing. My heart aches at how much texture got lost in the translation – the Black Spot, the logging camp, the house on Neibolt Street, and So Much More – but that’s the price one pays for an adaptation. The old rule of thumb is that a page is a minute, and by that standard It comes out to almost nineteen hours. Shedding sixteen of them will always be painful.
If all that a book has is texture, then perhaps it is indeed not suited to a TV or film adaptation. But if there’s more there… it can work. And if there’s one thing I know about Pratchett, it’s that there’s definitely more there.
EDIT: Plus, images and sounds add their own texture. A few seconds of a demented cackle can send chills up your spine in a way no written words can possibly evoke.
Chris S said:
I prefer to imagine a world where Neil DeGrasse Tyson never has to find out that a major author decided to publish slashfic about him.
@Petrea
I’d guess you’d have to leave the part about his date getting pregnant, then abandoning her to die with your unborn child, and not giving her/them another thought, to get NDGT on board…
@Chris S
V gubhtug gurl uneirfgrq gur rzoelb fb gung ur pbhyq gnxr vg bagb gur fcnpr fgngvba nybat jvgu nyy gur bgure rzoelbf.
http://www.rot13.com/ for those not in the know.
Regards,
Dann
@StephenfromOttowa: I asked Weir about that in our interview and, yes, several scenes from the book were borrowed/inspired by the movie Apollo 13.
I think in some (very) small way, the movie The Martian did for a lot of people what the actual Apollo 13 mission did for those of us who experienced it: it was dramatic, it was heart-wrenching and it was the ultimate American Feel-Good moment when they regained contact with three live astronauts after LOS.
What Apollo 13 said to me was: we’ve got a handle on this stuff. Even when things go totally wrong, pluck, hard work and thinking outside the box (which are supposed to be hallmarks of the American psyche) can see us through.
Man (my thoughts continued) after this, we’ll be on the Moon permanently in no time….
I “met” Neil Gaiman on an elevator at DragonCon way back in the day. My buddy and I were loaded to the gills on a rather potent mix of intoxicants so we didn’t register who it was until later. He seemed both amused and bemused.
And she gave away the pixels of her past
And said, “I’ve lost the scroll again”
A movie version that was better than the book in every way was WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?. They pretty much kept some character names and Roger himself and made a much more entertaining story of it. (The animation apa I was in at the time was fairly critical, but in a loving way. Someone said it was “The worst movie you will want to watch ten times.”) Anyway, they disposed of rotting mounds of creaky conceits and made it into a sort of classic. A stunt but a classic one.
Perhaps they are thinking of turning SeveneveS into a movie franchise. Then they don’t have to fit everything into a single movie.
(9) Mmm, Trudeau. He should be allowed to be PM/President of all countries. Hot! Family man! Loves Star Wars!
(13) Maybe “Seveneves The Movie” will be better — it’ll have to ditch the infodumps for time. Perhaps it will be a trilogy or more, taking just the good chunks.
@Ita: I was “meh” on “House of Shattered Wings” too. It’s been over a year and I only have a vague memory of it, and that memory is “meh”. I think I didn’t care for the ending? I’ve loved all AdB’s other work, but this is truly meh. Setting is great, but the 8 Deadly Words applied about 80% The grim didn’t bother me, which I guess is a compliment? Probably won’t bother with the sequel.
If any Blu-Ray non-extended versions of “The Martian” need a good home, they can come here to two geeks, two cats, 55″ screen, and surround sound.
Movies better than books: not SF, but “The Godfather”.
Re Seveneves, I enjoyed the early depressing part of the story and I expect that this is where the movie is going to go. It could be quite a thriller to see if any of humanity survives. I would expect it to end on a somber note, such as White Sky, but hopeful, as some of humanity will survive. I will be quite surprised if they include any of the entirely-in-space section in the movie, and will fall out of my chair to see any part of the third section, with the exception of a possible epilogue. Of course, I’m going to see it just out of curiosity of how they turned it into a movie. I really loved the first part. The second part had people behaving in ways that I found unbelievable. The third part was terrible. I have never read a book that so failed its promise and so I was extremely disappointed. I actually think it would have been better if it was three large volumes like his Baroque Cycle. I think the second and third sections were so terrible because they felt rushed. He kept skipping forward in time. YYMV
Re House of Shattered Wings, I found it mostly dull but with great world building. This was also my impression of her novella (?) Citadel of Weeping Pearls. I expect de Bodard is just not the author for me.
And I would argue that the “more” in Pratchett’s books–the depth and the wit and the humor and the humanity–comes very largely from the inner monologues of the characters and the non-dialogue exposition. Strip away everything but the action and the dialogue and what you have left is rather generic Monty Python style humor. Watch any of the TV specials made from Discworld novels and (somehow) look at them as if you had never read the novels and they are very forgettable trifles.
Let’s put it this way–you would probably be willing to hand Discworld books to someone looking for something deep that could effect they way they think about their life. Would you do the same with a Discworld TV adaptation?
Jim Henley: And think of the branding potential for the sequels — Eighteves, Nineeves…
And then they could follow the example of another franchise and make some dreadful prequels – Fiveeves, Secondfiveeves…
@Lurkertype — As it happens, my extended Martian just arrived and my theatrical version has never been touched by human lasers, so I’d be happy to send it somewhere where it would be loved …
hoopmanjh at Hotmail dot com if you’re interested.
And then they could follow the example of another franchise and make some dreadful prequels – Fiveeves, Secondfiveeves…
Not to mention the AVP type crossovers with other films:
Twelve Monkeves
@Kip Re:Roger Rabbit the movie. I’m 180* out from you on the relative worth of the movie and the film. The book was an allegory about the effects of prejudice, the movie was “OOOH, live action and animation on the same screen!”
I hate, loath and despise that light-weight movie, not because it was terrible, but because it meant they would never make a movie that actually captured the book.
I
I gave up on HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS when I reached the torture scene half way in. It’s extremely well done because all it says is that he felt a bone pop and he was in pain, which got a lot worse. Sadly, my mind filled in the gaps and that was enough for me. That’s why I didn’t get very far in to CODE NAME VERITY. I could imagine all the torture going on around the heroine.
Scrolled Away…By an Unusual Pixel in the File 770 of June
C.A. Collins
I could see what the book was trying to do, but it was unwieldy and full of inane details that the author had to stop everything for so he could explain them at amateurish length. Click to edit: Oh yeah, and the “Maltese Falcon” pot. Or plot, whatever.
Not-quite-random “book in progress” report:
I finished The Complete Independence Day Omnibus last night and went straight into Crucible, which is the sequel to that and the prequel to the new movie, which hits theaters in two weeks. I’m now about a third of the way through that book, and my recurring complaint is that I’m sick of the “prequel/sequel” nonsense. Crucible is #4, the new movie is #5, and the omnibus is #1-3. It just so happens that #2 and #5 were movies.
First up, I’m happy to report that Crucible is telling the story I wanted to read. There’s a brief chapter set in 1947 that ties into an element I’ve already seen in marketing for the new movie, and then it jumps ahead to the time of the original movie. The remainder of the book bridges that twenty-year gap by telling a few stories in parallel, dipping in at various points to show what’s going on with the old gang while establishing new characters whom I expect will play significant roles in the new movie. I’ve already had several “ah, so that’s who that was in that teaser clip” moments.
One nice touch is that the three earlier books appear to be as canon as possible, with only mild exceptions. (For instance, Okun is referred to as dead at one point in the original novelization, but they brought him back for the new movie. Likewise, the novelization kept the “biplane ending” that the first movie sensibly ditched. These things happen.) The most significant part of this is the worldbuilding related to the aliens and their tech. #3 went into a fair amount of detail on that, well beyond what was discussed on-screen in #2, and #4 actively uses some of the expanded info.
I’m also going to give a special thumbs-up to the way Crucible handles the legacy of Russell Casse – aka “the drunken crop-duster.” He’s publicly known as one of the big heroes, a significant facility is named after him, and his story inspires one of the new characters (a boy orphaned in the first movie’s attacks) to strive for greatness.
While it is possible that Crucible could pull a Seveneves and seriously mess things up near the end, I’m currently prepared to recommend Crucible to anyone wanting to get caught up before seeing the new movie.
@Mike Gluer:
You can tell which of us lives closer to Hollywood!
Okay, you didn’t like the book, I did.
I thought it worked both as allegory and parody, with a plot that was cribbed from several famous hard boiled works. I still think that the movie was still a light-weight bit of fluff about nothing except special effects, not a movie I wanted to see twice, much less ten times.
As God is my witness, for months I thought the title was “sevenEYES.”
(Yes, even when people pointed out that it was a palindrome.)
C.A. Collins
Fair enough! (It also triggered my sensor for attempts at hard-boiled writing. As a fan of the real thing, well.)
Ok, I’m probably going to annoy a lot of people by saying this, but it’s true nonetheless. I actually thought the adaptation of The Colour of Magic was better than the original!
Yes, it was different. By necessity. But different doesn’t necessarily equate to bad. The novels (the adaptation included The Light Fantastic) were very obviously early works by a writer who still was trying to find his voice. They’re fun, but hardly the sort of great work that Pratchett gave us later in his career.
So yes, the adaptation changed things and left out bits. But I think the result was a better story, even if it was a somewhat different one. They really smoothed out a lot of the rough edges, and gave us a very entertaining work. I’d much rather re-watch the show than go back and re-read TCoM/TLF again.
Wait, what? OMG please pull it off well
Also, better adaptations – Jurassic Park as well as Angels & Demons immediately come to mind. I would much rather introduce people to them, than to the source material. To a lesser extent, Daredevil/ Jessica Jones as well.
I’m sure there are others, where as a live-action adaptation, and within that medium, were superior to how their source material were within their own medium
@John M. Cowan:
You’re not alone. I kept wondering why I couldn’t find it at the library…