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Overlooked Series for TV or Movie Adaptation
The Game of Thrones book series is nihilistic nonsensical bilge. But it makes for “good” television because that sort of mess seems to be popular in today’s culture, what with all the sex, sorcery, and savagery. As an actual story though? It’s terrible. Which is probably why George R.R. Martin could never finish it – it had no real logical “out”, no escape from its cycles of violence and revenge, save what the HBO writers could force together. Until HBO picked it up, though, it was unlikely fare for Hollywood treatment – Hollywood typically shies away from overly long fantasy cycles simply because such things are very expensive to cast and produce well, to say nothing of finding good writers to translate novels into scripts you can actually film. For all the awfulness of its story, I do give full credit to HBO for the solid work they put into the project over nearly a decade – one can deplore the story but still admire the brilliant and extremely skilled craftwork involved in telling it, and (more importantly) sticking with it at that high level for so long. Would that The Hobbit had been given that same dedication.
And now it seems we are to receive another attempt at telling the story of Dune. I am not excited at the prospect. The David Lynch film of the 80s was terrible. The SciFi Channel’s miniseries of 20 years ago was much better. But why Dune? Why yet another attempt? If Hollywood is looking for that next “big epic”, surely there are other and better stories to tell? Dune, the first book, is interesting, but has its weaknesses, while the rest of the series gets rather strange. Haven’t other authors written better and more compelling fantasy or science-fiction epics? Or must we continually return to just a few “classics”, like Amazon is trying to do with its pending Tolkien series? I would like to propose a few other authors and series that Hollywood should consider instead, and would invite you to make your own suggestions as well.
Jack Vance – Lyonesse – You have all the vying factions and warring kingdoms, spies, betrayals, magic, pending doom, adventures, and quests that people loved in GoT, but series is more tightly told, not predicated on the nonsense of centuries of cultural and technological stasis, and its story arcs and overall narrative have definite beginnings, middles, and ends. The characters are also far more human, and thus more clever, and more fallible at the same time. Vance is not afraid to kill off characters, but does not do so because the Plot Wheel® demands it. Vance’s other works, from his Dying Earth stories to his science fiction, would also make good candidates – they are character driven tales in vivid worlds, but the worlds are ultimately only backdrops for the people in them.
Susan Cooper – The Dark Is Rising – Yes this is a children’s series, and yes Hollywood did, in its Harry-Potter enthusiasms, already put out a film, but it was dreadful (almost Lynch-Dune dreadful at that), and we should put it aside and start over. The series is a modern blending with ancient Anglo-Celtic mythology, and as such is very richly told.
Cornelia Funke – Inkheart – Like with Susan Cooper, Hollywood tried this one and blew it once already, in no small part because they could not decide whether it was a children’s story with some mature hints, or a more mature story as witnessed by a child, and of course they Americanized it. Andrew Klavan’s Another Kingdom series deals with some similar concepts as Funke, so if you enjoyed Klavan you would find this series familiar in some respects. Inkheart is a story series about our own world intersecting with a very rich and complicated parallel magical world, through the eyes of a young woman growing up in both.
What would you like to see made? What authors or series have been either unfairly overlooked, or badly mangled and worth another shot?
Or are there series (say, like Dune) that you think ought to be put out to pasture just on principle at this point?
Published in Entertainment
Ooooh. More and better H. P. Lovecraft film?
Very slowly, or very haphazardly. Spice is necessary to safe, quick interstellar travel, not all interstellar travel.
Hot girls always lead to madness. Aye, there’s the rub.
That would be hard to improve on. Yes they took some liberties with some of the stories, and made Bertie more of a thickie than he was in the books, but they still managed to capture the spirit of originals. I think political correctness today would make the stories utterly impossible to film accurately, and PC would utterly eviscerate the humor in favor of scolding prudery.
For long form TV, I think any of Larry Correia’s series would be phenomenal, but especially the Monster Hunters franchise.
The Pendergast mysteries by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston could be a cool TV series. Each season could be a book(+), akin to Bosch. Or it could be done BBC-style, with 3 or 5 long episodes per season.
Relic was made into a film, though it didn’t include Pendergast. Strange choice, if you ask me. The film was mediocre at best. But in the proper hands, the Pendergast novels would be great as a series.
That movie is full of awesome scenes, and it had a dream of a cast. It is, however, equally full of awful scenes. How any director could manage to get Jose Ferrar to sound stilted and canned is beyond me.
I read a while back that At The Mountains Of Madness was being made into a movie but I guess the deal fell apart. I was really looking forward to that one.
My review of the film at the time was that it was a wonderful set of illustrations from the novel waiting only to be strung together into a narrative. Still waiting, of course.
The ideas in Dune fall apart without supernatural powers as well.
Much like the John Carter movie, at this point it would seem derivative of all the other movies that came afterwards.
Black Sails was a damned fine “ships and swordplay” tv show.
Many of you probably associate video games more with Pac-Man than anything with narrative potential (Adam Sandler’s Pixels notwithstanding). But several games could be adapted into great TV series: The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect, Just Cause, Sea of Thieves, Evolve, Far Cry, etc.
It came across to me as more paranormal than supernatural. Transcendence without the divine. With a tension as to whether Paul is approaching the apex of natural reality or beginning to tap into something higher.
But this can always be played to advantage. In interpreting the material, one is not stuck with ignoring all that has come after and turgidly rehashing the material. Otherwise, there would be no new Jane Austin movies of quality.
Meanwhile, GRAHAM PLOWMAN on YouTube makes great Lovecraft MUSIC.
Maybe. I never took Dune to be direct commentary and philosophy like Stranger In A Strange Land. I don’t recall Dune recommending a way of life meant for me the way Heinlein seems to do. Heinlein is advocating , but I never felt that way from Dune.
I’m not a gamer, but I thought the movie Hitman was outstanding.
This seems to be a common theme here: “Yes, I know they made a movie of X, but…”
That rather suggests a discussion of what adaptations were actually done well, or even improved on the source material, up against ones that were just awful.
In the latter category I’d put Disney’s The Black Cauldron, for instance, as a terrible butchering of Lloyd Alexander. I know they were attempting to do with Alexander what they had done decades before with T. H. White in The Sword in the Stone. While Disney took massive liberties with White too (the book is little like the film), the film at least works and is fun, but somehow Cauldron really never takes off, even though the approach is very similar.
The soundtrack was awful, electric guitar riffs while riding sock-puppet sandworms…..
I’d add Bioshock to that too.
MTV already did Shanara.
The BBC has done some Discworld: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/TV_and_film_adaptations
Edit: I see others already said this. Oh well.
Madness is all I got for reading LOTR because a hot girl liked it. She wrote her notes in tengwar with a calligraphy pen.
Others I’d like to see:
Ken Grimwood’s Replay
John Steakley’s Armor
And for something completely different, an adaptation of wonderful children’s book series The Great Brain, not done by the Osmond family.
Okay, one more. I’d love to see Bill the Warthog on the big screen. Small screen. Any screen.
“Here, try this.”
“What is it?”
“Worm poop.”
I read one of the Shanara books when I was in High School and I recall liking it…but when I re-read it maybe in the last couple of years or so, I got maybe half to three quarters of the way through and said “This is nothing but a Tolkien ripoff!”
I was fast scrolling to the bottom to add this series. Would be fantastic.
Bill the Galactic Hero.