Thought o' the Moment
Random musings from heaven-knows-where
"The book was better..."
I'd been watching The Six Million Dollar Man for a good long while
- maybe a year or so - before I noticed that the end credits included the
words "Based on the novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin." Being the
book nut that I am, and also having little else to do, I started looking
for it. Nearly six months later, after searching through every bookstore
in town and the local library, I found it - in another county's library.
(Marion County gets major props, because they had ALL of the Cyborg
novels.) I was expecting the novel to be on the same level as the
show - kind of stupid, full of cheesiness, half-hearted plots, etc.
Instead, I discovered that, minus the characters' names and the basic premise,
the show and the book might as well be two completely different stories.
Cyborg was so much better than SMDM. Let me say that again:
THE BOOK IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE SHOW.
The book has a depth and realism that the show never approaches (one of the
book's subplots is that Steve, being a triple amputee, feels unable to perform
in the bedroom, if you get my drift; and there's a fantastic scene in which
a doctor points out that, because he's a pilot, one of Steve's arms is more
developed than the other). I read in an interview with Caidin that
he made sure 90 percent of the technology in the book existed in the real
world, at that time. The 10 percent he made up or "stretched" is almost
never noticible. And the plot - oh, the plot! It runs right along,
beautiful, until the end. No snags, no gaping plot holes... it's wonderful.
So why did such promising material end up as a hokey action show? I
believe that it was a victim of its time. Look at other action shows
from the 70s - they're not exactly high-grade stuff. Heck, look at
action movies from the 70s, specifically the spy-guy hero genre. Roger
Moore was James Bond - how good could any of it be? SMDM was also a
victim of its network; ABC or NBC, I think. Networks have never been
fans of cutting-edge and risque material, although they're loosening their
ties now. (Of course, trash like reality-TV shows aren't really progress,
but...) No, SMDM was doomed to be formulaic. But it did redeem
itself with two little things: the opening credits - "Steven Austin, astronaut.
A man barely alive..." - and that so-cool bionic ch-i-i-i-ing noise.
Dinotopia: The Series has neither of these things. What it does
have is a lot of actors and actresses and crew members gamely trying their
best to make the show into something without predictable, repetative, and
frequently stupid scripts set in a world that deviates so far from the source
material that it almost drives one to tears. And when it's not deviating,
it's muddling; I have spent many long hours trying to figure out how Will
Denison's daughter could be eighteen-ish in the present day (neverminding
non-Caucasian), given that Will was already twelve years old in 1862, and
the best I could come up with is: she's adopted.
However, D:TS is better than the miniseries that prefaced it - if you can
call six hours "mini" anything. The difference lies in the actors
(the characters were completely recast, thank you GOD), who are actually
acting. The miniseries reminded me of a line from an episode of
Mystery Science Theater 3000, where, as an actor stays absolutely expressionless
throughout an entire scene until it's his turn to speak, one of the 'bots
comment: "Three... two... one... aaaaand - ACT!" A newspaper review
said that both the script and the acting in the miniseries were vying for
the title of "most wooden," and that's a fair assessment. The new cast
includes at least two veteran Disney Channel actors, but somehow, they're
turning in (marginally) better perfomances. It makes the mind boggle.
Now, when I was young and impressionable, I read the Dinotopia books
by James Gurney first - those lusciously illustrated gems of fantasy literature,
filled with enough magic and wonder to put Harry Potter to shame (hey, HE
doesn't live on a lost island utopia full of talking dinosaurs, does he?
No? Okay then.) And then, a few years ago, I read two of the
novels. Over the last summer, I read the rest of the novels, except
for the handful the library didn't have (the library is so not scoring points
with me anymore). And as simple and, well, childish as any of the novels
got, the worst of them were infinitely better than the miniseries or D:TS
at their best.
To repeat: THE BOOKS ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE SHOW.
This is true for an even greater extent than it was for SMDM. I believe
that my case can be made by simply pointing to what James Gurney said - namely,
he feels like the show has "missed the spirit" of the books. He's being
incredibly polite, but you get the idea.
Where does Dinotopia run aground? Once again, it's partly network
sabotage. D:TS is on the Disney network, aka ABC, who previously attempted
to kill ReBoot and thus proved to me that they hate creative, unique
progamming. Apparently they're forcing D:TS to walk the same fine line
that all Disney-approved productions do: make it cool, but not cool enough
to be subversive; make it child-friendly, but not G-rated enough to lose
the older audience. This yields some strange results. For example,
the "good guys" and "bad guys" are clearly delinated, and the ending of the
first episode arc is happy as could be, but the main characters use bad language
at several different points. The main characters, mind you, the ones
who all the little kiddies are conceivably looking up to as role models.
I lost count of how many times they said "hell" in two hours. There's
something wrong with that.
As to the other part of D:TAS' troubles... the writers have committed the
unpardonable sin of making the world "modern," instead of the comfortably
retro Victorian era the story was originally set in. That, and the
writers are clearly uncertain as how to write an action show set on an island
where everyone gets along. I would discuss the failings of D:TS further,
but then I really would be driven to tears over the bastardization
of such genius source material.
All this is not to say that books are inherently better than TV shows, or
movies. I simply feel that the original medium is the best medium,
and whenever you transfer a story to a different medium - be it paper, celluloid,
or pixels - you lose something. Sometimes the loss is minor, and it
winds up not mattering. Sometimes the new story is good in an entirely
different way from the original. Sometimes, as in the case of the movie
Big Trouble, the new story is lifted verbatim from the original (the
hysterical novel of the same name by Dave Barry), and there's no grounds
for complaint. I haven't read anything by Tolkien, so I can't comment
on the LOTR movies; and I've neither read nor seen anything with the phrase
"Harry Potter" involved in it, so ditto there. But I did read the
Jurassic Park follow-up, The Lost World, and the book was better
than the movie. Hands-down better, although it was fun to see one of
the dino-hunters in the movie modeled after Dr. Robert Bakker, whom I revere
as a god amongst paleotologists. Anyway.
Books based on movies traditionally suck, as do books based on TV shows,
movies based on TV shows, and TV shows based on movies. Now, the paperback
Man From U.N.C.L.E. stories were pretty darn good, but there's always
a fluke. And I'll make an exception for The X-Files movie, because
it was really just a big episode - but Charlie's Angels has no excuse
for being even dumber than the show. And the Mission: Impossible
movies... well, that's a subject for a whole 'nother rant.
So, in conclusion, I'd like to quote a poster on the Dinotopia.com messageboard:
"Breathe deep, seek peace, and read the books."