Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

Lost in Translation 23 - Remakes Are Magic

The 80s saw a major change in how toys could be advertised. A regulation that prevented companies from making cartoons based on a toy line was dropped* by the Reagan administration. This opened the door to several lines, including Transformers, Jem and the Holograms, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, and My Little Pony**. Hasbro created the My Little Pony toy line in 1981, releasing the ponies in 1982, with several cartoons based on the toy ponies. The cartoons were aimed at young girls, the same demographic the toys were. One little girl in particular, Lauren Faust, gave her My Little Ponies distinctive personalities as she played with them.

Ms Faust grew up to be a writer and creator, particularly of cartoons. She worked on such series as The Powerpuff Girls before helming one of the biggest cartoons of the 21st century - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. In creating that cartoon, she took the personalities her toy ponies had and gave it to the Mane 6 - Twilight Sparkle (a book smart but naive unicorn), Rarity (a fashionable but vain unicorn), Fluttershy (a kind but shy pegasus), Rainbow Dash (a brash tompony), Applejack (a down to earth but workaholic earth pony), and Pinkie Pie (a genre savvy party pony).

There are many keys to the success of MLP:FIS. The big one is that it has a broad appeal. While the show is aimed at young girls, who Hasbro wants to pressure parents into buying the toys, there's enough in the series to attract a large peripheral demographic***. Shout outs and homages abound, from Looney Tunes to Benny Hill; something for everypony. In addition, Hasbro itself has not bothered to take down episodes from various sites, including YouTube, in part because company officials have no idea how to react to the show's success. Since the series exists to sell ponies and ponies are selling, the officials have decided to let things stand.

Another key is how the show presents dilemmas for the Mane 6 to solve. In the 80s, typically there was one character who was designated as being always wrong, even if that character's idea made the most sense. In the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, Eric the Cavalier held that designation - he'd would always make a suggestion that the others would reject for the group's, even if his idea made more sense. In MLP:FIS, no pony has that designation. Conflict can come from any two characters, and the solution is to work together and use each others' strengths without making either pony feel bad, using the power of friendship.

A third reason for the success is the treatment of the fans. Fanon names for minor ponies, such as Derpy Hooves and Doctor Whooves, have become canon. This is unprecidented. Yet, it lets fans feel more included, something that goes with the message of the series. The names don't affect anything with the Mane 6, but some ponies, including Derpy Hooves, have made more appearances as a result. There is a synergy between the creative crew and the fans.

Over and over, the term "respect" has come up in respect to making a successful remake. In this case, the respect isn't necessarily towards the original material. Instead, it's respect towards the fans that has made My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic a success.****

Next time, an anti-war TV series.

* Although ads for the toys still could not air during the show
** Please hold your squees until after you've read the column. :)
*** The last time I saw such a peripheral demographic was in 1995 with /Sailor Moon/. The general reaction from the older male periphery then was, "What did I watch and why am I still watching?", a reaction seen today with new bronies.
**** You may now squee. :)

Lost in Translation - Recap 2 - Eclectic Boogaloo

Over the past ten weeks, I've looked at a mix of hits, misses, and cannonball caroms. What can we take away from the morass? Well, again, taking care of the original work plays an important part.  How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a sterling example of not only having the creator take part in the process but also finding the right people. In contrast, Johnny Mnemonic, shows what happens when the creator is left out of the loop. The former had Dr. Seuss involved at several levels, including producing and lyrics. The latter had an exec take the final product and recut it before sending it out to theatres.

Executive meddling can be an issue. Flash Gordon had producer Dino DiLaurentiis and his wife casting the leads and making deals for cross-promotions that could have torpedoed the movie. However, the director was able to cast for the supporting roles and brought in veterans who could hold their own and make the inexperienced lead look decent at the same time. Coupled with a kick-ass soundtrack by Queen, the movie survives as a cult classic. Sure, not a financial success, but the movie is remembered. Having the right people can save a movie.

As Steve pointed out, sometimes the best thing is finding the right fit for the work.  A Game of Thrones definitely fit best as a TV series over a movie. There is just too much happening that is too important to cut. The build up of the threats and conflicts required the time that a weekly episodic format allows for. Likewise, the weekly format is working for Once Upon a Time, allowing for the mystery of the story to be built properly. As movies, both would lose far too much in the translation.

Sometimes, going from TV pilot to cinematic feature causes problems. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was originally the pilot to a second Star Trek series. However, the decision was made to turn the script into a full-fledged feature film. Unfortunately, this required the script to be extended. Most of the filler came from loving shots of the USS Enterprise, as the camera flew around and over her. Long shots became the order of the day, giving the movie a far slower pace than a pilot would have. Compare Star Trek: TMP to "Encounter at Farpoint", the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Both are cerebral, but "Farpoint" builds up the action through character interaction and twists while TMP relies more on lengthy approaches in space.

What about works where the creator is either long gone or a corporation? Where the work is part of a larger franchise? For this, I looked at three movies.  Rookie of the Year adapted the game of baseball into a family narrative. The plays on the field were believable; in fact, there have been stranger in the game. The movie was faithful to the sport while telling its story. It is obvious that the writers, the cast, and the crew have been to a ballgame or two. The other two, however... Oi.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was, in short, a mess. It had several good scenes tied together with a plot a 3rd grader could find plotholes in. The promise of the opening scene - Cobra's assault on an US Army convoy - provided a glimpse of the potential that was never reached. Meanwhile, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li just really wasn't a Street Fighter movie. What happened? In the case of GI Joe, it looks like the license was available and was used with a quick script that did take into account the characters and groups but, well, forgot about cohesion.  Chun Li, on the other hand, felt like an available script was taken and had the Street Fighter aspects grafted on. Both movies had potential never realized.

And that leaves Dungeons & Dragons. The movie had decent scenes and a decent plot, but completely fell apart during execution. It seemed to be suffering from having the wrong people involved. It missed on what made the game D&D interesting and didn't have many of the game's iconic monsters. Unfortunately, many studios decided that the takeaway was, "Don't make movies off tabletop RPGs".

Overall, again, respect for the creator and the work heads the list of how to make an adaptation successful. Followed, though, is making sure the adaptation is in the right format. The right format can get the work's full impact; the wrong one can mute it or draw out the impact to the point where it's not felt at all.

Next time, year-end round up.

 

Magrathean Diary #5: Organiz-ized, Pt. 1 (Getting Organiz-ized)

When I was a kid, my idea of organization was about the same as any other kid’s: throw everything into the closet and worry about it later. Or throw everything into the rollout bins under my bunkbed, and dig them out only after a centimeter-thick patina of dust had grown on them. I forgot assignments, mislaid money, lost library books. In the latter case, one of the volumes that went missing for the better part of a year was a skinny little thing that ended up sandwiched between the pages of a much larger book that I rarely opened. I’d used it as a bookmark in a moment of haste.

I’m a lot better now, not just thanks to computers (Outlook’s to-do feature is a godsend), but thanks to my own willingness to develop the right habits. Write things down. Keep things sorted. Create action items and takeaways. Learn to separate forest- and tree-level details. (“Do my taxes” is not a task; “sort out my expenses for the year” is.)

Most people are able to get some semblance of organization into their own personal lives. It isn’t hard for most of us to stay on top of our bills, our phone calls, our social obligations, and what’s playing in the theater. But the idea of creating a whole world, or a whole universe, and staying on top of that—it sounds like a tailor-made way to intimidate yourself. If heads of state and chroniclers of history can’t stay on top of their own respective nations’ narratives and policies, how is li’l ol’ me supposed to do that?

And what’s more, how do you get into something like that if you’re not the most organized person to begin with? How do you organize something as massive as a world—or a universe, depending on your ambitions—without either a) dying of old age from trying to tabulate all that detail or b) going batfruit insane from same?

The first step is the part everyone hates: getting organized. Or, for you Taxi Driver fans whose eyes lit up when you read the title: getting organiz-ized.

Far more systematic and diligent people than I have written books about the virtues of organization. Most of what they agree on, as far as it applies to what we’re doing here, can be distilled down to a few basic points:

1. Record-keeping and metadata.

Make maps, keep lists, write things down. But most importantly, find a way—your way—to make all this stuff searchable and accessible. You’re reading this on a computer (I presume); don’t use old-school technology when you’ve got the new-school variety staring you in the face. If you don’t know how, I’ll talk more about that in a future installment.

2. Habit-building.

If you’re not in the habit of writing stuff down, get in the habit. Easier said than done, to be sure, but this is where having someone else to bounce your ideas off comes in handy. They can help remind you to commit all those wonderful spur-of-the-moment insights or involved digressions to something more reliable than your own memory. That way less and less slips through the bottom of your mind, and more and more of it ends up recorded somewhere. And you also need to get into the habit of mopping up after yourself, which brings us to …

3. Maintenance.

If you throw everything into your closet for long enough, eventually you end up with a Fibber McGee Avalanche when the door is opened. If your note-taking and record-keeping isn’t cleaned up and systematized over time, it turns into a big ball of mud—an unmaintainable pile of stuff that has no particular organization or intent. Maps may need to be redrawn, not just to add new information but because the old ones are a mess of fold lines and scribbled annotations. Character summaries need to be rewritten to accommodate new aspects of the story. Plotline summaries almost certainly will need constant touching-up. The point isn’t to do all this stuff at once, but to commit to a regular rolling schedule of doing so. Clean your closet.

Each of these three things involves you and the work in different ways. The first involves the work itself; the second involves mainly you; the third involves your handling of the work.

Next time I’ll start going into detail about the exact organizational methodology I adopted for my own work, and how you’re not obliged to do the same.

-- Serdar Yegulalp

Lost in Translation 19 - How the Adaptation Made Christmas

The late and long missed Theodore Geisel madse a name for himself in the realm of children's publishing - Dr. Seuss. With an amazing sense and knowledge of the English language, he wrote many books that are still remembered and read today. In 1957, he wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, showing how one person, the titular Grinch, discovered the true meaning of Christmas, the one beyond the superficial lights, presents, and food. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the story avoided religious overtones, defining Christmas as what comes from inside.

In 1966, Geisel's production company, Cat in the Hat Productions, worked with MGM to adapt the story as a holiday special. The production team included Ted Geisel and veteran Warner Brothers animation director Chuck Jones*. The story was kept as is, with music to help fill the 25 minutes then needed for commercial television. Songs were added, with lyrics by Dr. Seuss and music by Albert Hague**. The main voice was provided by Boris Karloff***, providing a gravitas that isn't expected in a Christmas special. Not listed, but providing the male singing voice for the Grinch's theme is Thurl Ravenscroft****.

To say that How the Grinch Stole Christmas! has become a classic is an understatement. The timelessness of the original story along with Chuck Jones's deft handling of the material and utter care put into the work by the cast and crew. Having Dr. Seuss involved helped greatly, both as lyricist and producer. The animators took the illustrations from the book and brought them to life. Even the practice of animation reuse added, allowing the montage of the Grinch sneaking and stealing through Whoville to add humour and character development. The Grinch is another example of where having a staff that cares about the original helps with adapting. Another lyricist could have not had the ear that Dr. Seuss had for the language and joy of the scenes. Another narrator wouldn't have had the gravitas that Karloff provided. Unlike far too many Christmas specials, the Grinch doesn't depend on sentimentality, which helps it stand out even after forty-five years.

Next time, Cyberpunk hits the big screen

* Many many Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons.

** Who would later be seen in the role of [Shorofsky] in the film and subsequent television adaptation of Fame.

*** Noted for playing Frankenstein's monster in many movies as well as being many more horror films.

**** Also known as Tony the Tiger, voicing the mascot until his death in 2005.

Magrathean Diary #4: What Worldbuilding Isn’t

For the first few installments of this diary, I’ve been touching on all the things worldbuilding is and what it requires. Now I’m going to talk about what it’s not.

Worldbuilding is not a dumping ground

Worldbuilding is not about finding excuses to insert things that you’ve been dying to use somewhere.

Well, to some degree, it is—hell, I do this all the time, gleefully. We all want to find a place for that perfect comeback line, that zinger of a description, that amazing bit of alien technology.

But I can’t throw in stuff like that blindly. And you shouldn’t do it without performing at least some kind of test of fitness for the material. There are some elements that will complement your world—and, by extension, your story. The more worldbuilding you do, the more obvious it becomes what fits and what doesn’t without having to break your story (if only in a given draft) in the process.

Worldbuilding is not a work-avoidance exercise

I’ve touched on this before, and I’ll keep harping right on it until my tongue flops out of my head: The best reason you engage in worldbuilding (and for some folks it’s the only reason) is to make your storytelling work—to create the place where your story happens, and to give it a living environment to unfold in. If you catch yourself using your worldbuilding as a way to avoid writing, to duck out on word-count quotas or to forestall writing that really difficult clash of wills between protagonist and antagonist, quit kidding yourself.

Worldbuilding is not a way to justify lazy storytelling

This is a parallel concern with #2 above. Don’t use worldbuilding as a wholesale way to avoid blatant deficiencies in your story. If something happens that is obviously a cheat, don’t try to change the construction of your world to accommodate it.

Note that this isn’t the same as using life’s own inconsistency and incompleteness as part of the story itself. If you have a character who has an eccentricity which you can build on and maybe make part of his social background, that’s one thing. If he has an abrupt about-face of motivation, don’t try to explain that way with the same trick. Fix it on the appropriate level in the story.

Worldbuilding is not for showing off

This may seem paradoxical: What part of worldbuilding isn’t meant in some way to impress the reader? Don’t readers respond that much more to an author with vision and imagination? (I’m going to be addressing this particular canard in a future installment as well.)

Some of this, you can indeed get away with and make your story that much sexier. But when you start flirting with elements that only justify their existence as attention-getters and not as genuine story components, you need to pull back.

A random example of this is when you have a 19th-century setting that has some stray piece of 20th-century technology (e.g., radio, lighter-than-air craft) thrown in for the sake of making things snazzy. Unless you’re prepared to defend how every single one of the several hundred allied technical discoveries required for such a thing were somehow present in your setting a good century before they were ever feasible, leave it out.

Since this last rule is largely a matter of applying discipline to one’s imagination, that’s how we’ll segue into the next installment ... wherein I’ll discuss what we talk about when we use that rather overused word.

Lost in Translation 18 - The Adaptation of Chun Li

Reaching back, we find that I've already covered Street Fighter, focusing on the movie featuring Raul Julia in his last role. Instead of rewriting all the background, I'll just send you to re-read it if you want and then continue.

Done? Great!

The year 2009 had a glut of action movies. Not all of them lived up to the promise of the trailers. One such movie was Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. The movie chronicles how the titular character grows from young girl to, well, street fighter. Essentially, an origins movie. Kristin Kreuk starred as the adult version of Chun Li as she struggled to find meaning after her father disappeared and her died. Her search took her to Bangkok to study under Gen, once a member of Bison's gang who now protected the downtrodden from the villain's schemes. He took Chun Li under his wing, teaching her new techniques and leading her to find a new balance and lose her anger*. In the meantime, Charlie Nash, an Interpol agent, also arrived in Bangkok to assist the local police, including Detective Maya Sunee of Gangland Homicide, in finding who was responsible for the deaths and beheadings of eight major gang leaders.** Nash had been on the trail of Bison for several years and is hoping to finally put him away. Despite having Chun Li narrate for most of the beginning, turning "show, don't tell" into "show and tell", the movie maintains a decent pace thriough the investigation by both Nash and Chun Li and has decent action sequences.

Overall, the movie worked as an action flick, something to watch in the heat of the summer in a cool, dark theatre with a large bag of popcorn and a soft drink of one's choice. So, why was there a problem?

It wasn't Street Fighter.

Oh, sure, it's there in the title: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. Kristin Kreuk played Chun Li; it's even there in the credits. And she took on Bison, Balrog, and Vega.

But, if the audience wasn't told that who the characters were, who'd notice the difference? None of the characters were in the costumes from the video game. Unlike Street Fighter - The Movie, where everyone eventually wore the trademark costumes from the game, outside of one scene in Legend of Chun Li, they could have been called anything else. The one scene? Featured Chun Li with her hair in the same style as in the video game wearing a short blue dress as she seduced Bison's henchwoman***.

I dare say that if the movie didn't have the Street Fighter character names and links (a couple of scenes, really), the movie might have been better. Expectations would have been different. Change Shadaloo to a generic Triad, Tong or even the Russian mob, change Chun Li to Suki or Mei Lin, change Bison to Biyall, and the movie still holds together. It's as if an existing script was taken and modified to slap the Street Fighter name on to draw in more people. From a marketing perspective, this makes some sense. Action movies in the summer have a lot of competition. Adding a familiar name can get attention far easier and potentially far cheaper than putting in an effort to tweak the trailers to maximize interest. Problem is, slapping a known franchise name can backfire when the movie has a fairly generic plot and characters that could be renamed without affecting the story, the case with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.

So, the takeaway here is that if one wants to put the name of a franchise on a movie, the writing has to add recognizable elements from the franchise beyond just the names. This may fall under the concept of caring for a property. Slapping a name on a product is easy; making sure that the product reflects the name takes a bit more effort. Thus is the case of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. A decent action movie with baggage that added expectations it couldn't handle.

Next time, a holiday classic. 

*Apparently, anger not only leads to hate but to distraction.
**Yeah, guess who ordered the killings.
***Yay, fanservice? The fight in the washroom was just as fanservice-y.

Magrathean Diary #3: What’s Kept In And What’s Left Out

Martin Scorsese once said cinema was about what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Storytelling, and worldbuilding, are the same way: what you leave out is as important as what you keep in.

Many people assume the editing process is confined to the story itself—that the world is like a darkened room, and the story is like the flashlight you shine around that room to illuminate it selectively. This is true, and it’s a useful analogy when you’re actually writing the story.

Lost in Translation 17 - Once Upon an Adaptation

Fairy tales have long been a core element of Western culture, a base of storytelling that many have built from over time. Many of Disney's popular movies were based on fairy tales, somewhat cleaned up for modern sensibilities. These are stories told as bedtime stories, told around campfires, adapted as plays and movies, and expanded to tell what happened after. The tales are so common that it comes to many people's surprise when they meet someone not familiar with at least one.

The 2011 fall TV season saw ABC air Once Upon a Time. As expected from the title, the series is based on fairy tales. (Why else would I start this entry off discussing them?) However, there is a twist. The evil queen, the one who poisoned Snow White for being the fairest, showed up at the wedding of Snow and Charming to give them an unwanted gift, the knowledge that the queen herself will get her own happy ever after and take away everyone else's. Meanwhile, in the now in our reality, Emma, the lead character, spent her birthday chasing after a bail jumper followed by having a cupcake at home. She made a wish, blew out her lone candle. Immediately after, there was a knock on her door; a boy, Henry, had found her. Henry claimed that Emma is his birth mother and that his home, Storybrook, needs her help. Emma, unsure of the boy's story, took him home, listening to his farfetched stories about how she is meant to save the fairy tales and restore their happy endings.

Back in the fairy tales, Snow and Charming did what they could to prevent the evil queen's happy ending. They even went into the dungeon to speak with Rumplestilskin to find out more. Snow, pregnant, was willing to pay Rumplestilskin's price to protect her unborn child, well aware of the consequences. She received a cryptic answer, enough to figure out what the queen's plan is and brought in her trusted advisors. Ultimately, it was determined that Gepetto can use the magic in an old tree to create a wardrobe that will protect one person.

Meanwhile, Emma has arrived in Storybrook. She stops to get directions from a young man who looks lost. When she and Henry return to her old Beetle, Henry explains that the young man is really Jiminy Cricket. Emma still dismissed the boy's claims and takes him to his home, the manor of the mayor. The rest... No spoilers at this time.

The writing of the pilot was strong. Pilot episodes have a difficult job; they have to introduce the show's premise, the show's characters, and tease viewers to keep watching while at the same time providing a story on its own. Backstory needed has to be brought out without going through an info dump. Once Upon a Time's pilot managed to do all that with aplomb. Henry's stories, bordering on fairy tales themselves, slowly are revealed as truth as the characters, such as Gepetto, Rumplestilskin, the Seven Dwarves, and Charming are revealed to the audience (though not to Emma). The casting is strong to match the writing. Gepetto comes across in the modern era as a lonely old man who desperately wanted a child with his wife. The queen oozes evil when needed. Little touches, such as the mayor offering Emma a glass of apple cider, add to the mystery and the charm of the show. It remains to be seen whether the rest of the show can maintain the promise, but the first episode of Once Upon a Time succeeded in adapting fairy tales into its own narrative.

Next time, experience only works if you pay attention.

Magrathean Diary #2: Why Worldbuild?

It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Why worldbuild, indeed?

I asked myself the very same question, and answered myself with a diffident little shrug, the last time I started working on a major novel-length project. Big fat mistake. It took the near-collapse of that story to get me to confront a great many misconceptions I’d had about worldbuilding, about my story, and about my own work habits.

Lost in Translation 16 - You Win or You Adapt

George RR Martin is a prolific writer, having writen numerous novels, short stories, even teleplays. Along with writing, he has been an editor, notably on the Wild Card series of anthologies. In 1996, his latest work, A Song of Ice and Fire, was released beginning with A Game of Thrones. The epic story follows the upheavals of Westeros and its peoples as the status quo is once again upset with the death of Robert the Usuper, who had taken over the throne of Westeros after killing the previous tyrant. The books follows the politics, the maneuverings, the desires of the various pieces on the board, from pawn to queen, with chapters written from a different character's point of view. A Game of Thrones sets up the upheaval, showing how members of House Stark (led by Lord Eddard), House Baratheon (formerly led by King Robert the Usurper), House Targaryen (the family of the deposed King Aegon), and House Lannister King Robert's death. Allegiances are made and broken. Characters are promoted or killed. Script immunity is non-existant. There are children crippled, respected characters killed, and foul men who avoid karmic punishment. The plot and the characters pull the readers into the world and leave them wanting more.

In 2011, HBO takes a chance on adapting the novels. The cable channel's success rate with adaptations of late has been excellent, with True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, and Deadwood, based on the historical western town, having received critical and popular appeal. The TV series A Game of Thrones was no exception. The first season followed the events from the first book. The adaptation was relatively faithful. There were a few cuts of minor scenes, and several characters were aged up, notably the younger ones. The aging made sense, though - what was acceptable in the era portrayed in the book would result in serious criminal charges today. And, being an HBO production, a little extra sex and nudity was added, though nothing that wasn't implied in the novel.

So, was the first season a success? HBO believed so, enough to renew the series after the first episode. The minor changes mentioned above didn't detract from the story. Casting of the roles worked brilliantly from Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark to Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. The format is perfect for the story - a miniseries format with no need to expand or contract to deal with the vagaries of a 22 episode season or a two hour movie. Successful, indeed.

Next time, could this be something recent?