Creator-Preferred Adaptation

Let's face it: Most of the time, a work is at its best in its original form. However, sometimes there are exceptions to this, and be it by Adaptation Distillation, Woolseyism or Superlative Dubbing, the new version of a story comes out so much better than the old that even the original creator admits the superiority of the new one.

Contrast Disowned Adaptation.

Anime and Manga

 * The English dub of Cowboy Bebop is officially considered superior to the Japanese version.
 * Ditto with a select few other dubs, such as El-Hazard: The Magnificent World and You're Under Arrest.
 * It's been said that Hideaki Anno prefers some of the performances in the original (non-Netflix) North American dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion to the Japanese version, though Anno tends to be nebulous about such things.
 * The staff at 4Kids! Entertainment apparently loves Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series, although Japan does not.
 * Hayao Miyazaki reportedly prefers the French dub of Porco Rosso (with Jean Reno in the title role) to the original.
 * Yasuhiro Nightow has nothing but praise for the animated version of Trigun. After the anime ended, he started having anime-only characters cameo in the manga, and cribbed the anime's climax to use in his story several years later.

Film

 * Chuck Palahniuk prefers the ending of the film version of Fight Club to his own.
 * Christopher Priest, the author of the original novel of The Prestige had this reaction to seeing the movie: "'Well, holy shit.' I was thinking, 'God, I like that,' and 'Oh, I wish I'd thought of that.'"
 * Stephen King, in an interview on the DVD of The Mist, says that he liked the movie's ending better than that of the original story, and wishes he'd thought of it himself.
 * Ditto for the original 1976 adaptation of Carrie. He's not too big on the sequel or The Remake, though.
 * Mark Millar has said that the Kick-Ass movie is superior to the comic book.
 * Gary Wolf preferred the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to the novel he wrote, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, upon which it was based. He loved it so much that when he wrote a sequel to the film, he retconned the first story as a dream.
 * J. K. Rowling has said that there are some things in the Harry Potter movies which she wished she had made up when she wrote the books. The only such thing she has named specifically is the talking shrunken head from the third film. Ironically, the fandom tends to regard the shrunken head as The Scrappy.
 * David Morrell preferred the ending of the First Blood film as Rambo doesn't die... thus allowing for sequels that ended up making him millions.

Literature

 * Umberto Eco thinks that William Weaver's English translations of his novels are better than the originals.

Music

 * Trent Reznor, describing hearing Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt", stated that "that song isn't mine anymore."
 * After Jimi Hendrix released his cover of "All Along the Watchtower", Bob Dylan publicly stated that he was going to start playing the Hendrix version instead of his own in the future.

Video Games

 * The creators of Kingdom Hearts apparently liked the dub voice actors so much that whenever special-edition re-releases of the games come out of Japan, they use the English vocal track exclusively.
 * Even though it's a Massively Multiplayer Crossover, the writers behind Super Robot Wars generally churns out favorable results from Humongous Mecha series that wind up not being well received in their original animated form (various Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion being a few prime examples). Subverted with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny in Super Robot Wars Z, where director Mitsuo Fukuda, in a series of Twitter posts, didn't appreciate how developer Banpresto rearranged the story. In a variation, Kenichi Suzumura, the voice actor for Shinn Asuka in SEED Destiny, stated he preferred how the events of Z handled the story.