Adaptation Displacement: Difference between revisions

 

Something of a subjective trope, since it all depends what your personal and cultural fields of reference are. Age and date of birth tends to shed light on fields of reference. Just because there must be some people who are more familiar with the adaptation than with the original doesn't make it an example.

 

== Displaced by Anime or Manga ==

* There are many fans of the [[Studio Ghibli]] movie ''[[Film/Howls Moving Castle|Howls Moving Castle]]'' who are entirely unaware of [[Howl's Moving Castle (Literature)|the children's novel]] by [[Diana Wynne Jones]] on which it is based. It veers off into its own plotline and themes rather quickly. Those who take the time to read the book tend to be shocked by the difference. However, [[Diana Wynne Jones]] was apparently expecting this, and told them to do whatever they wanted with her script.

* In Japan, the ''[[Pokémon (Franchise)|Pokémon]]'' games came first, then [[Pocket Monsters (Manga)|some manga]], then the [[Pokémon (Anime)|anime series]], and finally [[Pokémon Special (Manga)|the more]] [[Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure (Manga)|popular]] manga. However, when the franchise was launched in North America, the games and anime were launched around the same time, with ''[[Pokémon Special (Manga)|Pokémon Special]]'' following shortly thereafter. Some mainstream articles [[Cowboy Bebop At His Computer|refer to the Pokémon and human characters]] as anime characters, often completely ignorant of the franchise's video game origins. A few articles have even stupidly implied that the card game came first.

** This came full circle with ''[[Pokémon (Tabletop Game)|Pokémon]]: Trading Card Game'' for the Game Boy, which was a [[Recursive Adaptation|video game based on a card game based on a video game]].

** Likewise, ''Pokémon Yellow'' is more or less a video game based on an anime [[Recursive Adaptation|based on a video game]]. The [[Puzzle Game]] spin-off ''Pokémon Puzzle League'' for the Nintendo 64 was also influenced by the anime, though the Game Boy Color [[Puzzle Game]] spin-off, ''Pokémon Puzzle Challenge'', was based on the ''Gold'' and ''Silver'' versions of the video games, despite having similar gameplay.

* Same goes for ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh]]'', whose manga wasn't even about card games at first. Once the anime got to the US, it took a few months for the card game to show up as well. It doesn't help that 4Kids deliberately picked up the franchise because of the card game plot after how much money they'd made on ''Pokémon'' and its various components. The makers of the second anime did this too, so it's also not a surprise they sold it overseas on this -- even elements of the storyline they adapted that had little card game elements in the manga had the Duel Monsters segments played up for the anime to sell the cards.

* Hands up if you didn't know that ''[[Sakura Wars]]'' was originally an RPG. Unfortunately, the game was [[No Export for You|never released outside Japan]].

** Aside from a rather bizarre case of two first games getting an official release in Russia, of all places.

** Even [[Lady and The Tramp]], which was based on a short story called "Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog". Walt read it in ''Cosmopolitan'', bought the rights, and actually had the author write a novelization of the planned movie which came out two years before the film itself. This was so people would be familiar with the story, since most people associated the Disney studio with adapting famous tales, and it was thought that people wouldn't watch the film if they didn't know there was a book. How many of you knew there was a book? Thought so.

** Disney's ''[[The Jungle Book (Disney)|The Jungle Book]]'' is so well known, some people aren't aware that there really were Jungle '''[[The Jungle Book (Literature)|Books]]'''. Or that Baloo was the serious one, and Bagheera the playful one. And Kaa was Mowgli's third mentor.

** How about ''Pinocchio: the story of a puppet'' by [[Carlo Collodi]]? This was possibly for the best; the original Pinocchio story was just plain ''weird'', as Roberto Benigni unfortunately proved by making a more faithful live-action adaptation. The original was also an extremely irritating and tedious [[Author Tract]] about obeying your elders, a moral that definitely would not sell will in this modern age of pop-culture rebellion.

** While not entirely Disney's fault, their 1951 adaptation of ''[[Alice in Wonderland (Disney)|Alice in Wonderland]]'' forever linked the events of ''Through the Looking Glass'' with the very different book it was a sequel to. However, several adaptations in film and theater before it had been doing this well before. In fact, very few people even realize that characters like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum never appeared in the book ''Alice in Wonderland'' and it's not uncommon to hear people complain about their absence in works that are more faithful to the source material because they have become so accustomed to seeing the two books presented as ''Alice in Wonderland''. It doesn't help that the two books are often published as a single volume under that title.

*** ''[[The Aristocats (Disney)|The Aristocats]]''

*** ''[[Dinosaur (Disney)|Dinosaur]]''

*** ''[[Brother Bear (Disney)|Brother Bear]]''

*** ''[[Home On the Range]]''

* How many of you have heard of or read ''[[The Brave Little Toaster]]'' by Thomas M. Disch? Now how many have seen the three animated films?

* ''[[Rock a Doodle]]'' is based on a fairly obscure play by Edmond Rostand (more famous for ''[[Cyrano De Bergerac]]'') called ''Chanticler''. To name a few differences, the Edmond character isn't there, there isn't any magic, the Grand Duke is only a minor villain, and the [[Aesop]] of the play is centered around how, even though the rooster hero's crowing doesn't make the sun rise, he is still important to the farmyard by waking everyone up and keeping away predators.

 

 

* Movies based on [[Alan Moore]]'s work for DC usually follow this trope pretty well, though, because of his disgust with working with them (and hence Warner Brothers Films); he often insists his name be taken off the projects.

** ''[[Watchmen (Film)|Watchmen]]'' has mostly avoided this do to it being based a graphic novel being heavily advertised and accompanied with a huge re-surge in the comic books popularity and media attention.

* Most people outside Germany, where it remains a literary classic, have ''no idea'' that ''[[The Neverending Story (Literature)|The Neverending Story]]'' was in fact a bestselling book first - and that the book contains about twice as much material as the first film. The author, [[Michael Ende (Creator)|Michael Ende]], was not pleased with the changes even with the first film and wanted his name to be removed from the credits.

** Another one of Wolfgang Petersen's films, [[Das Boot]] is an icon of the war genre, but most people don't realize it was actually based on a novel written by a man who actually served aboard a real-life U-Boat during World War II.

* Not only is the 1941 film ''[[The Maltese Falcon (Film)|The Maltese Falcon]]'' an (incredibly faithful) adaptation of a novel, there were two other adaptations, one with the same title, before it. [[Dashiell Hammett]] is still widely known as a highly influential and often-imitated author, but ''[[The Maltese Falcon (Film)|The Maltese Falcon]]'' is considered one of the greatest films of all time.

* Maybe one of the most magnificent examples of adaptation displacement is in the progression of [[Dashiell Hammett]]'s novel ''[[Red Harvest]]''--the story began as a [[Film Noir]] novel (''Red Harvest''), then became a [[Jidai Geki]] film (''[[Yojimbo]]''), and was '''then''' adapted once more as a [[Spaghetti Western]] (''[[A Fistfulof Dollars]]'') before being again adapted as a Gangster Film (''[[Last Man Standing]]'').

** In addition to "[[Millers Crossing]]".

* Jerzy Kosinski's novella ''[[Being There]]'' is still in print, but it's with a picture of [[Peter Sellers]] on the U.S. cover and a tagline that it was the basis for a film on the U.K one. Arguments that the movie was an improvement on the book don't help.

** To put it in further perspective: the original casting choice was Dustin Hoffman, and had elements closer to a slasher film than an action flick, with the unique twist that the slasher himself was comparatively innocent. Sure, he was a threat to everyone around him, but only due to the law provoking him to the point where he had flashbacks.

*** Colleges and high schools actually used to teach First Blood (Stephen King used in it when he worked as a teacher). The association of the novel with reactionary produces grows doubly ironic.

* ''[[Taxi]]'' was a remake of a French film by the same name, few people knew it was a remake due to the fact that the original ''Taxi'' and it's sequels were never officially released on DVD in the U.S., although series director Luc Besson was a producer for the remake.

* Most people know [[Richard Strauss]]'s tone poem ''Also Sprach Zarathustra'' as "that song from ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]''." Not many of them realize that there's still ''30 minutes of music left'' after that iconic opening. ...Or that Richard Strauss's tone poem was inspired from a philosophical [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra treatise of the same name] by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]].

* Kubrick's controversial ''[[A Clockwork Orange (Film)|A Clockwork Orange]]'', aided by a legendary score and a star-making performance by Malcolm McDowell, overshadowed [[A Clockwork Orange (Literature)|the book]], which has enjoyed much of its later success due to the film. Burgess later regretted the book and was particularly displeased by the film, in part due to the attention it continued to give the book.

* Although it wasn't a commercial nor a critical success, the Steven Soderbergh film ''[[Solaris (Literature)|Solaris]]'' is more famous than the Soviet classic cult film by [[Andrei Tarkovsky]], if only because the Soderbergh version enjoys better distribution. And both movies are better known than the original Stanislaw Lem novel.

* ''[[Babes in Toyland]]'' is best known as a [[Laurel and Hardy]] movie from 1934, which was subsequently remade several times. Its true origin was thirty-odd years earlier as a stage extravaganza (which was produced as a [[Spiritual Successor]] to a highly popular adaptation of ''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Literature)|The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]]'').

* The silent science-fiction film ''[[Metropolis (Film)|Metropolis]]'', which codified many sci-fi tropes, was written concurrently with a serial novel of the same name by the screenwriter, Thea von Harbou. English translations of the novel have been reprinted over the years, but the reason was mainly because previously available copies of the film were incomplete; the only way people could piece together the original plot was by reading the novel. Now that a (nearly) complete cut of the film has been found the novel might fall into obscurity again.

* In many cases, if you say "[[Transformers]]", [[First Installment Wins|people will think you're talking about]] [[The Transformers (Animation)|the original cartoon]] thanks to [[Popcultural Osmosis]]. However, kids, teenagers and mainstream audiences will think you're talking about [[Transformers (Film)|the live-action film series]], due to the relatively low popularity of the cartoon outside its designated fandom.

** Psssssst... they were toys first.

* To say that this trope happens often in Westerns would be an understatement. Who remembers that ''Three Godfathers'', ''[[Rio Bravo]]'', ''The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'' and ''[[True Grit]]'' were based on novels or stories (by Peter B. Kyne, B. H. McCampbell, Dorothy M. Johnson, and Charles Portis, respectively)? And it is a pretty good bet that few people will have read or even heard of ''Stage to Lordsburg'' by Ernest Haycox, ''Massacre'' by James Warner Bellah, ''The Blazing Guns of the Chisholm Trail'' by Borden Chase, ''The Search'' by Alan LeMay, ''The Tin Star'' by John W. Cunningham, or ''The Stars in Their Courses'' by Henry Brown but almost everyone knows the movie versions, ''[[Stagecoach]]'', ''[[Fort Apache]]'', ''Red River'', ''[[The Searchers]]'', ''[[High Noon]]'', and ''[[El Dorado]]''.

* Whenever someone mentions ''[[Titanic (Film)|Titanic]]'' most people will think of the famous [[James Cameron]] film. To be fair, it is still a well-known fact that the film was inspired by a real-life disaster, but normally upon hearing the name, they'll still think of the movie first before the actual event. What most people also fail to realize is that there were at least nine different films about the Titanic (most of which [[Similarly Named Works|also go under the same title]]) that came out before it, including [[A Night to Remember]] (which inspired James Cameron to make his film) and a made-for-TV film that came out only a few months before Cameron's.

* Most people(especially if they're younger) know [[Starship Troopers (Literature)|Starship Troopers]] from the Paul Verhoeven film, not the [[Robert Heinlein]] novel. Though the book and the movie are sufficiently different enough for one to get away with treating them as two different entities with a similar plot(the book focuses more on political commentary of the society the story takes place in, while the movie is more of a straight action-adventure flick).

* ''Hairspray'': Everybody knows the 2007 musical... which was adapted from a broadway show that was based off of [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095270/ a much better movie released in 1988] which ''wasn't actually a musical''.

* Most people nowadays are unaware that the story for ''[[Avatar (Film)|Avatar]]'' was inspired by ''[[Dances With Wolves]]'' and [[Pocahontas]].

** Though it's common on the Internet for people to say that it's basically both of those movies [[In Space]].

* What? ''[[Kick Ass (Film)|Kick Ass]]'' was a comic book before it was a movie?

* While not completely displaced, ''[[The Little Rascals]]'' movie is a lot more well-known than the original show with modern audiences.

* The movie ''[[Fast Times At Ridgemont High]]'' is remembered for many things today—Sean Penn's breakout performance as Jeff Spicoli, his "Hey bud, let's party" [[Catch Phrase]], his battles with Ray Walston and the [[Caught With Your Pants Down|poolside scene with Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates]]. It has been almost totally forgotten that it was based on a novel by Cameron Crowe, which was itself based on his year undercover at a Southern California high school.

* In this day and age, far more people are aware of the 1980 ''[[Flash Gordon (Film)|Flash Gordon]]'' movie, or the [[Flash Gordon (TV)|2007 TV series]], or even the ''[[Flash Gordon Serial (Film)|1930s serials]]'' than are aware that it was a [[Flash Gordon (Comic Strip)|daily newspaper comic]] that ran for nearly 70 years.

* ''[[The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed]]'' was originally a novel.

* The original ''[[Match Game]]'' had two celebrity panelists, four contestants, and no [[Double Entendre|double entendres]]. It's the second version, ''Match Game '73'', that everyone remembers.

** It doesn't help that virtually all of the original series no longer exists on tape.

** Most people seem to think the NES version of ''[[Bubble Bobble (Video Game)|Bubble Bobble]]'' (that is also out on Virtual Console) is the original. There was an arcade version, and it didn't include a compulsory crystal ball!

** ''[[Contra]]'' and its sequel, ''Super Contra'', were originally arcade games that were adapted to the NES. The NES versions were more successful than the coin-op versions, and all the subsequent sequels were released specifically for home consoles.

** ''[[Punch Out]]!!'' started as an arcade game which even had an arcade sequel titled ''Super Punch Out!!'' Most players are more familiar with the console versions, ''Punch Out!!'' for the NES and ''Super Punch Out!!'' for the SNES, both which were completely different games from their arcade counterparts. Even the [http://punchout.nintendo.com/ official site] for ''Punch Out!!'' for Wii doesn't acknowledge the arcade games.

*** Which is bizarre not only because these games not only introduced many of the opponents, but the entire Title Defense level, which is nothing more than a souped-up version of the "Top Ranked" matches you had after winning the championship.

** The NES version of ''[[Super Dodge Ball]]'' is a cult classic, with most people not even aware that it was based on an arcade game of the same name.

** As little as it's remembered today, ''[[Legendary Wings]]'' is much more known for its NES port (who made quite a few changes to scenery and gameplay) than its arcade original.

* ICOM's adventure games ''[[Deja Vu]]'', ''Uninvited'' and ''[[Shadowgate]]'' are most recalled in their NES versions, though they all were originally for the Macintosh.

* Whenever somebody mentions playing ''Warcraft'', most people would automatically assume this being ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' MMO, not one of [[War Craft|several RTS games]] preceding it that, you know, actually were called simply ''Warcraft''.

* Many have played the ''[[Sam and Max Freelance Police (Video Game)|Sam and Max Freelance Police]]'' games without ever knowing they were based on a comic series. Others are only aware of the cartoon series. With the more recent games, many players might not even be aware of the older adventure game adaptation ''[[Sam and Max Freelance Police (Video Game)|Sam And Max Hit The Road]]''.

* Seemingly very few on the internet know that there was an original ''[[Rainbow Six]]'' novel (to be fair, the original game and novel were being produced and written at the same time, and the game was released before the novel was published).

* The cult [[Game Boy]] RPG ''[[Magi Nation]]'' was made to advertise a card game made during the TGC fad. The game is more fondly remembered then the cards.

* While quite a few fans of the ''[[Persona (Video Game)|Persona]]'' video game series know that it is a spin-off of the ''[[Shin Megami Tensei (Franchise)|Shin Megami Tensei]]'' series, some of them do not know that ''Shin Megami Tensei'' is a spin-off of another RPG series (''Megami Tensei'') that was in turn based off the ''[[Digital Devil Story (Literature)|Digital Devil Story]]'' novel trilogy. Most don't even know that there ''were'' regular Megaten games that were released before ''[[Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne]]'' yanked all the [[Cyberpunk]] tropes from the series and got translated.

** The arcade and NES versions of ''Ninja Gaiden'' were made simultaneously, but they don't really have much in common other than the main character in both games being a ninja.

* Pretty much any song that gets covered on a ''Dance Mania'' album and brought into ''[[Dance Dance Revolution]]'' (Konami relies on the ''Dance Mania'' series for much of its licensed songs). And for that matter, any song that gets ported from another Bemani series into ''DDR'' gets mistaken as a song that debuted in ''DDR''.

 

== Displaced by Web Comics ==

* Likewise, ''[[Bob and George]]'' has done the same thing for ''[[Mega Man (Video Game)|Mega Man]]'', to the point where certain fan-characters are often mistaken for canon, and a good chunk of the fandom takes the "Zero kills everyone" version of the end of the Classic timeline as fact, despite its [[Fanon]] status and [[Word of God]] later [[Jossed|debunking]] it.

* Many people don't realize that ''[[Pastel Defender Heliotrope]]'', a webcomic that defines [[True Art Is Incomprehensible]], was based on a light-hearted, straightforward ''Pinocchio'' story for the Kamishibai program that Reitz and her husband produced. It's quite jarring for those few souls who read the Kamishibai story first and then tried to read the webcomic.

* You'd be surprised to know how many people are unaware that the "[[My Little Pony]]" franchise originates from the toys, and not the 1980's cartoon. The cartoon was actually made to promote the toys.

* ''[[A Charlie Brown Christmas]]'' has arguably begun to overshadow everything else in the ''[[Peanuts]]'' universe, including the actual newspaper strip, which is ironic because most of the special's dialogue is taken verbatim from the strip. For example, a lot of people think that Linus is supposed to have a lisp because of Christopher Shea's voice acting in ''A Charlie Brown Christmas''. This carried over into the 1999 Broadway version of ''You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown''.

** And almost NOBODY remembers that the character was originally created for an old Montgomery Ward ad campaign.

* Speaking of Christmas specials, while the animated version of ''[[How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Animation)|How the Grinch Stole Christmas]]'' hasn't exactly displaced the book -- partly because [[Dr. Seuss]] is one of the most famous authors of children's books in the world -- we challenge anyone to read the book to himself and ''not'' hear [[Boris Karloff]] narrating it.

 

== Displaced by All of the Above ==

** In fact, a lot of people are under the impression that Cthulu is not a creation of Lovecraft, but an actual mythical being from an ancient religion. Some don't even realize he's copyrighted, which leads to some issues.

*** Especially considering Lovecraft actively encouraged people to borrow from his works.

** Ditto for "The Hey Song", which is actually ''Rock and Roll Part 2'' - Part 1 actually having words besides "Hey" and "Huh".

** ''Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye'' - how many people know the verses to this song and not just the chorus?

* Since language is a living entity, old language is displaced by new all the time. It's a byword (and frequent complaint in some quarters) that [[Have a Gay Old Time|the 1900 New York criminal-classes meaning of "gay" has become the common one, displacing the previous meaning of "happy"]] (which might cause some [[Agatha Christie (Creator)|Agatha Christie]] readers to wonder why she "so often wrote about homosexuals"). Likewise, in the 1990s "sad" came to mean "stupid" (though fortunately this meaning didn't catch on).

** An amusing example of this form of semantic drift is that the original word referring to a woman's makeup table has shifted so dramatically that it now refers to an entirely different piece of furniture, with a different function, in another room of the house. This gets rather jarring when reading stories that take the original meaning, and have women stepping out for the night in style by splashing themselves with toilet water (now known as perfume).

[[Category:Audience Reactions]]

[[Category:Adaptation Displacement]]