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Truer to the Text

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If a book or comic becomes sufficiently popular, it will almost definitely get a TV show or a movie. While some fans rejoice upon hearing that their favorite series is getting an adaptation, all too often the hardcore fans will find themselves bitterly disappointed, and problems are especially likely to surface when the story is ongoing and the staff has to work with incomplete source material. The result of such circumstances tends to be a Base Breaker.

Sometimes, these complaints are heard, and the result is a Truer to the Text adaptation. When this happens, the story gets another adaptation, or at least go out of their way to cover what they missed out on last time. This time there will be no annoying additions, no alternate ending, no important details ignored, just the original story, pure and proper. If done well, the Fandom will probably be quite pleased.

However, it's important to keep in mind that this is not necessarily a good thing. There are four closely related problems with this sort of adaptation.

  • The first is that, however divergent, a series' first adaptation will probably at least begin with the same basic plot, which could give it a repetitious feel; the reboot starts by covering ground that's already thoroughly trodden.
  • Thus the second problem: the beginning might have to deviate from the original story to make a re-adapted story seem new.
  • Thirdly, not all fans of the movie/show actually read the source material. This means that they have no idea what they're supposed to be waiting for, so it might feel like this second version is just more of the same.
  • Finally, depending on the differences between mediums, such as the inevitable problems that come with adapting a book into a film, "more faithful" does not necessarily equate to "better".

Compare Mythology Gag.

Examples of Truer to the Text include:

Adapted from Comic Books

Adapted from Literature

  • Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein were intended as faithful adaptations of two books that had been quite heavily changed in previous film adaptations. They had their own changes and quirks, though.
  • The 2000 Dune miniseries took some liberties with Frank Herbert's book, but compared to the 1984 David Lynch movie, its fidelity is nigh-slavish.
  • The 1997 miniseries of The Shining was far closer to Stephen King's book with the huge exception of the Bowdlerised ending. This is a strong example of "more faithful" not equaling "better": the miniseries was underrated (and scarily effective in its own right), and the 1980 film has significant weaknesses, but Kubrick's vision—however un-Kinglike—still resulted in a better movie.
  • The Coen Brothers said this was their intention when they made their film adaptation of True Grit.
  • Carson McCullers adapted her novel The Member of the Wedding for the stage herself, despite never having written a play before, to preempt the production of a more conventionally theatrical adaptation by another writer.
  • The first two Harry Potter films are noticeably closer to the text than the movies the followed. On the Sliding Scale of Adaptation Modification, the first two movies would score a "4" and the rest would score a "3". Fans are divided over which approach was better. Critics are less divided and prefer the later films (except for Roger Ebert).
  • John Carpenter's The Thing compared to A Thing From Another World. The older film used the beginning of the plot of them finding UFO in the ice and it containing an alien, but from there diverged quite a bit. Carpenter's version had the alien keep its assimilation powers and overall stayed much closer to the plot of the book.
  • The 1982 animated version of The Wizard of Oz featuring Aileen Quinn as Dorothy and Lorne Greene as the Wizard is Truer to the Text of L. Frank Baum's original book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, retaining many elements of the book that were omitted from the 1939 classic movie (such as the Kalidahs, the wolves and crows, and the Wizard's other guises), though it lacks the staying power of the 1939 classic.
  • The 1939 classic film of The Wizard of Oz, meanwhile, is Truer to the Text of the original book than the earlier 1925 film starring Larry Semon and Oliver Hardy, which, aside from the basic premise of Dorothy being transported to Oz by a tornado, made no attempt to follow the original story. Semon and Oliver Hardy's Scarecrow and Tin Man are actually farmhands in disguise, Dorothy in this version is allegedly not just an ordinary Kansas girl sent to an extraordinary land but Princess Dorothea the rightful heir to Oz, and instead of the Wicked Witch the villain is Prime Minister Kruel, an authoritarian ruler who casts a curse on Dorothy in an attempt to maintain his power. Rarely talked about by people other than film history buffs and Oz scholars, this earlier film is largely regarded as a curiosity at best.
    • The 1939 film went through several earlier drafts that departed greatly from the original story, including a plot where the Cowardly Lion was actually a prince transformed into a lion. In the end, they dispensed with that plot thread and several others, and settled on a version that was fairly faithful to the original book, minus episodes and incidents that really only served to pad the story (such as the Kalidahs, the wolves, crows, and bees, the Wizard's other guises, and the journey to Glinda's palace), adding only a few elements of their own (Kansas counterparts for many of the Oz characters, the Horse of a Different Color, the All Just a Dream/Or Was It a Dream? ending, and the deleted Jitterbug sequence).
  • Return to Oz, though not an entirely faithful adaptation of the books The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, is nonetheless truer to the text of those books than the earlier animated movie Journey Back to Oz, using a far greater number of characters and plot elements from both books.

Adapted from Manga

Adapted from Visual Novels

  • The anime version of Tsukihime left many fans quite bitter over how much it deviated from the source material. Correction, there was no Tsukihime anime. There was, however, a manga that retold the original story quite faithfully.
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