Big Nate (2022): Bad Adaptation, Good Show?

the first big nate graphic novel came out in 2010 i was six years old and on mondays when my grandma picked me up from school she'd take me across the street to the bookstore where i could pick one out and the first i ever got was exactly that created by lincoln purse as a daily comic strip in 1991 big nate follows nate wright an 11 year old spiky-haired cartoonist from maine who basically just goes about his daily life he's a slob into comics and his world is filled with a variety of unique and multi-layered characters after a slight fade from the public conscious a series of graphic novels brought new life to the franchise and ended after eight installments in 2014 finishing at a point where it didn't overstay its welcome unlike some graphic novel series i know but the four panel comics have continued to this day and from what i've seen it still retains the charm that had all that time back which is pretty impressive considering that's over 10 000 comics in total as you can probably already guess i'm a huge fan read all the gns bought a ton of the comic collections drew the characters and notebooks all the time and i noticed when in 2020 the wikipedia page mentioned an animated musical series was in the works of nickelodeon hearing about that i thought making a tv show only made sense plenty like it have done the same and dilbert was pretty good please don't forget about dobert okay but yeah the only thing that kinda threw me off was a bit about it being a musical but nonetheless i was interested to see where that was gonna go we didn't get additional word for another nine months but finally the first image dropped in a variety cover for upcoming shows on nick and there he is the boy but hold on his design is a bit different from the comics most notably his eyes big nate has a pretty iconic look with single line eyes for most neutral expressions something you don't see too often in comics anymore and it would have been interesting to see how they did that in cgi but other than that for a 3d render it could have looked worse so i remained optimistic that's when the shorts were released to hype up the series on paramount plus just a month ago and to be real my doubts began flowing in i already got over the design changes by then and while some people had a problem with nate's voice i got used to it quickly but what really concerned me was the style of humor and tone which felt a lot more how do i phrase this adults not knowing what kids find funny but doing it anyway if you haven't seen the memes already and don't know what i'm talking about there's a moment where nate shoves his ass into francis and farts with this great visual an entire short is dedicated to the butt cheek song and the characters rip off chad's chest hair to glue it onto nate so overall i think i could be excused for getting a little writer's barely disguised fetish vibes going in the tone and comedy just didn't quite feel like big nate and it made me a bit worried seeing these jokes so often like wow is this gonna be the full show i'm not sure i can really vibe to that after watching all eight available episodes though i can't say that isn't the case and the show much more resembled the shorts that didn't have that kind of humor over the ones that did sorry totally spies fans there's still some stuff in there for you though look here's a great visual of chad just getting absolutely destroyed by a skunk and liking it just for you but the million dollar question is still looming what did i think of the series well i'm conflicted between two halves of my soul it's really one of those series where depending on your point of view you come out with different thoughts so as someone with both of them i'd say i'm the best person to talk about it i mean i would say that if i were a bit more confident but i don't know man you might do a better job than me i'm not a mind reader but whatever the case i'll start by talking from the side that keeps nagging me more than the other and that's how it stands as an adaptation of the newspaper comics and graphic novels spoiler warning i don't think big nate the cartoon is a good adaptation of the source material and if you want to know why it all comes down to the actual writing the first difference to catch my attention was the overall tone that for one is way more cartoony and exaggerated than before everything feels a lot more nick animated sitcomy than the original going for more outlandish concepts like nate secretly becoming a best-selling offer and ordering a tiger and a jet pack or nate poisoning the school in a zombie parody where everyone is constantly throwing up or my personal favorite nate getting a pimple that when touched in disgustingly realistic quality grants monkey's paw wishes that backfire on people before it's popped and who could forget the episode where nate got elected into office and thought it would be funny to bomb around it's also dramatic and attemptedly grander in scope than what the original tried to do which had a way more down-to-earth atmosphere and pretty much no major differences from reality of course there's only so much you could tell in a four panel newspaper comic but it had short overarching plots and the books carried over that same feeling with plots like nate trying now do people because he got a fortune saying he would nate having to do a social studies project with his nemesis nate attempting to outdo a friend at selling stuff to get a skateboard there wasn't anything too herculean epic about the stories told but they were elevated by additional unique concepts and well-written characters keeping them charming and timeless as well as re-readable on occasion we got to see more extreme stuff but that was always conveyed through nate's comics containing obviously exaggerated versions of the characters we saw in universe though most of the time the main focus would be on the original characters nate liked to draw really the only sort of supernatural stuff i remember occurring was in bignate flips out where he's hypnotized into being neat and indignate in the zone where he gets a good luck charm from chad but in both of those instances it's more or less chalked up to a placebo effect whereas something like the pimple has no direct meaning other than the most basic interpretation and ironically that kind of makes the series feel less inspired as a whole this version of big nate reminds me more of the live-action adaptation of middle school the worst years of my life with the hint of that expelled movie that no one remembers for instance just like rafe nate touches up some of the show's scenes to be more awesome or imaginative with artwork mirroring nate's drawing style having a few full 2d segments to portray it which was never something that happened in the books and it's oddly similar to the middle school movie and how both use that trick for a chase scene nate also speaks directly to the audience in a fourth wall breaking kind of way sort of like ferris bueller and that doesn't quite sit right with me while the novels did have nate as the narrator it was always from an omniscient passive point of view i don't know it could just be me but something about it doesn't seem like something he'd do maybe it's because the comics and novels have a much more laid-back tone that's not to say there wasn't conflict at all there was plenty and it was well executed conflict at that but you never got the feeling that it was in your face when it didn't need to be the characters pretty much never spoke directly to the camera not even in those fourth panel of comic waves where they looked directly at the viewer and say something they all lived in the moment and acted without the thought that there was an audience watching them basically it's the difference between lightly punching someone to show you're kidding and chopping them into the ground saying how self-aware you are there's nothing inherently wrong with having a character that talks to the camera many have executed the trope well before and as its own thing the show isn't wrong for doing it either it executes it just fine but as an adaptation the way nade does it here the vibe completely contrasts the original speaking of aspects that deviate from the source material the characters as is true of most newspaper comics bignate has a wide roster of lovable goofballs and punchable pricks all around but either way each was memorable in their own right not only for purse's great character design but also their personalities and interests if you want to know the characters i think the show did complete justice by i do have a list chad dede teddy artwor this concludes the list yeah it's not long and the characters mentioned were honestly kind of hard to [ __ ] up in the first place other than that i got problems with how the entire rest of the cast acts and i'm an uninspired hack so the only way i know how to convey all i want to say is in a list like format and i will feel no shame in it no better place to start than with the boy himself nate wright i already mentioned how he's become a much more in-your-face presence than he used to be and so with that comes a set of personality traits separate from his novel counterparts mainly this version of nate is way more of a proactive nuisance that actively tries doing things that could get him in trouble which i can only assume was a misinterpretation like nate's school ps38 has an unofficial thing called prank day on the last day of school where students prank themselves and teachers and they do it specifically on that day because there's only so much trouble you can get in on the last day nate is especially prevalent in this regard usually planning months ahead to do the most possible knowing he won't get in much trouble tv nate on the other hand pranks teachers mainly mrs godfrey on a regular basis making his chances of getting detention way higher something the original nate would never want to do this nate mentions in his theme song that he often bails on tests and sometimes forges notes but in the first book nate had an existential crisis about creating a doctor's note with his dad's fake signature to get out of the test it was made explicitly clear by purse that nate isn't someone who ever tries to get in trouble he's almost always just in the wrong place at the wrong time that was another feature that set him apart from characters like greg heffley or rafe cacchadorian nate doesn't try to get in harm's way harm's way goes to him but at the same time despite being turned into more of a fourth wall-breaking eye-winking roger rabbit ass nuisance tv nade is also more childlike he believes he can grow a tree of money and cheese doodles if he tries hard enough that cats suck your soul out through your body that people can drain your brain and so on and it kind of makes nate feel younger than he actually is the original nate had moments of childlike ignorance like the four dream moment mentioned before but he was also self-aware enough to not believe fairytale [ __ ] oh and can we talk about how nate goes from eating cheese doodles and actual food in both the comics and novels to now eating something called cheesy snacks [ __ ] off show nate eats cheese doodles you're telling me you can afford all this licensed music but not the brand name for cheese doodles go [ __ ] yours and on that same note that's another attribute i think is missing the bits that made characters feel more three-dimensional for people who've only ever watched the show did you know that nate is a massive slob like i know there was a short about his locker a running gag in the comics but not once do they ever mention how often nate's homework is completely destroyed how is desk and room mirror is locker the way he never returns library books or always gives things back in a way worse condition than they started out as none of that and likewise though we see 2d cutouts or animated segments mirroring his art style and in one episode he draws something nate is never directly stated to be a cartoonist or shown that it's his passion at best it's something he does on the side that's never expressed as being unique to him i guess we're supposed to infer that he's a cartoonist since it's just that prevalent in all other media with him but it's nowhere near as explicit as seeing him draw all over his notes or make comics or customize his shoes or whatever plus nate has so many interesting parodies and characters and the only one we've seen so far is dan cupid who wasn't even stated in the show to have been created by nate that's all just a touch the show completely lost subtlety in everything before the show big nate had plenty of small moments to show deeper character traits and they're consistently absent in the show weirder still one of nate's more prominent traits his love and constant rejection from ginny was completely changed to be about him liking her but never being able to say it and that's not only more generic but for a version that's so clearly trying to make a few personality traits stick out over others them leaving it out almost feels like a deliberate ploy to suck some of nate's more interesting traits right out of them and unfortunately he's not the only one francis nate's best friend since kindergarten who's especially close with him something they don't explain or ever indicate in the show doesn't really have any discernible personality in this iteration beyond the basic stereotype of nerd we see him doing math using slightly complicated words singing about being kissed by his mom pretty much what you'd expect wait what was that about singing okay we're never acknowledging that again but yeah he's decidedly far less interesting than his comic counterpart who was also a cacophony of nerd stereotypes and ways but brought them all together to stand out francis isn't just a nerd he's a mega nerd he looks at textbooks to expand his knowledge and spends all his free time learning additional useless bits of trivia or cleaning making for a fun dichotomy with nate that leads to them clashing in a lot of non-tv media he has a tendency to nag nate and teddy like they're his grandkids or something and the two of them are never shy about pointing that out and what do you know that's another thing that's missing the realistic portrayal of the main trio's relationship like we can all admit kids don't constantly shoot the breeze and nothing else they fight over trivial [ __ ] and get over it in the same breath they punch each other in the shoulder or bust one another's chops for fun that was something i saw in big nade that i'd never seen portrayed quite the same way in other american kids media teddy francis and nate each had distinct qualities that depending on the circumstance could annoy each other yet that kind of interaction is almost never seen during moments of down time in the show since it seemingly has almost no downtime whereas the original was all about that so fundamentally it's unable to portray something that the comics did frequently since the space to have those interactions has been removed please tell me that wasn't just words out it makes sense in my head and while we're on the topic of nerd characters there's of course the other side of the coin mirroring francis gina and this one's personal since in the context of the comics i knew someone who is exactly like gina in middle school and i never related to big nate quite as much as i did when i met that person and realized wow i can't believe how timelessly well written this all is gina by all accounts in the view of society is a good student whereas nate is a problem child she does well in school is liked by the teachers and she does well in school events but here's the thing she's also an egotistical self-indulgent condescending [ __ ] she flaunts her achievements on a regular basis to nate who she considers inferior to her she's unwilling to recognize the efforts of people like nate when he gets credit for making comics something she says are stupid and a waste of time and she always takes charge of events and does what she wants to do without the input of anyone else since she thinks her educated opinion is worth more than others what she's doing isn't blatantly evil or malicious per se but she represents a flawed worldview created by a sense of ego built up as the number one student at school and it's easy to see through context why what she's doing is so well easy to get enraged by tv gina is randall from recess the sniveling depressing student whose entire life revolves around those she despises constantly keeping tabs on them when she doesn't have to since it could get them in trouble and she feels divine justice telling on them to the teachers man it's almost like the entire point of her character went right over the showroom heads regardless of whether or not she was a good person gina used to be more three-dimensional sure she did like to tell on nate and other characters but that wasn't her old personality she exists outside the bubble of whatever current plot narrative is going on and lives her own life off-screen now i can't imagine that for a second this girl [ __ ] snaps herself out of existence when nate isn't on frame she has nothing same with randy who's gone from a jerk with a posse that's always found a way to pass the blame onto nate into a puberty kid who sometimes mean donate but on other times as i really don't know but for sure the characters to get the worst makeover in comparison have to be all the adults i don't think there's one that was originally in the comics who didn't get changed martin nate's dad used to be a pretty down-to-earth guy sure he was the dorky dad trope but like i've said for other characters that take on those basic premises he was shown to be much more than that unlike most ads in media who have no idea how to relate to their kids or understand what they're going through martin's childhood self was shown to have several parallels to nate letting them speak on a similar level though nate's dad obviously still made sure to get respect from his son and wasn't afraid to yell i can't even imagine this show's version of martin ever screaming at nate or talking on the level with him since he's portrayed as a complete wuss with a bunch of irrational fears that's constantly bemoaning how sad he is at his own life sure he's funny but that's about it principal nichols was once a no-nonsense guy who'd probably still try to say he was your principal in comparison to this kind of deranged always scheming lonely version mr galvin went from being a stone-faced easily angered fossil to pretty much nickel sidekick that tags along for his schemes worst of the adults though has to be mrs godfrey who like gina has been transformed into something that completely misses the point of her character so tell me what would you expect teachers to be like if the main lead of a mostly comedic series was a middle schooler who consistently got in trouble probably like a bunch of lunatics yeah but that's where big nate always differed the teachers were all well characters in their own right but most of the time they weren't antagonizing nate and the kids 24 7 and instead only got mad in the kind of scenarios where most actual teachers would which helps us understand why nate puts more focus on mrs godfrey than the others she's not some demon out to ruin her students dreams and eat their souls but she does choose to cull out nade more often than others since it's obvious she plays favorites making her stick out to nate as he's the one being affected most mrs godfrey works so well as a character because she isn't exaggeratedly mean she's just unfair and in her unfairness she can't understand why nate dislikes her inadvertently making her dislike him more something i and most people have probably experienced with one teacher or another they do exist and it's very frustrating seeing them treat you lesser than others making those moments where they do praise you feel all the more superficial which miss godfrey does do for nate on a few occasions it was all so well done and now she's a crazy cat lady with dentures did nate write this version of the series himself it would make a lot more sense nate's depiction of teachers and people in general are meant to make fun of them including giving them traits they didn't originally have since nate sees them as funny so is that the game they're playing at with this nah that's too easy of an excuse they could have made that apparent at any time if they wanted to but chose not to since that isn't what they're going for and with as mentioned over 10 000 newspaper comics and eight graphic novels there really isn't any excuse for it to be so unfaithful but i don't want to act all doom and gloom just for how the series ranks up as an adaptation only eight episodes are out so far there's no way that's all they're releasing and i do think there's plenty of room for improvement look i hate using this word since it's overplayed and technically applies to everything and it almost sounds like a desperate ploy to find some sort of positive but bignate as a cartoon has so much potential for ways it could be executed the characters i've mentioned so far don't even make up like half of the bignate cast list and there are a few i'd especially like to see in the future if it keeps going on mr rosa the art teacher barely gets any screen time in the first batch of episodes but he's one of my favorite characters from the comics representing the overworked underpaid but still happy teachers that always try to chill so many of my favorite big nape moments are just nate and mr rosa bantering with each other so him getting even a single episode of screen time sounds good to me since randy's character has been dumbed down you might need to add something extra so this next guy stands out but marcus the trend-setting 7th grader nate envys would also make for some good conflicts similarly i'd love to see how the show tackles chester this hulking mass of puberty that never fits on a comic panel it'd be interesting to see how that's interpreted in 3d nate hasn't hung out at the library so far but hickey the librarian is a fun character who i like the vibe of that really gets nade as a character unlike most other teachers galvin's pretty much filled the role of nickel's sidekick but mishipolsky the secretary could also have some more screen time i think i'm noticing a pattern of how all the more laid-back teachers haven't been featured that's interesting and stepping out of the comfort zone the show has made for itself already i want to talk about how i'd have done a big nate show if given the chance since i know these next suggestions can't work for the show as it is seeing as how there are two different mediums the franchise has been adapted into already comics and graphic novels both with the same lore and characters i'd want to strike up a balance between the two that satisfies both sides of fans to achieve that there's a simple structure i think would work especially well adapt the graphic novels as they are but one don't have nate speak to the camera he can act as a narrator as he does in the books but no fourth wall breaking two keep any extreme sequences restrained in nate's comics since that's where they make most sense being and the novels aren't formatted otherwise third to make the material from the graphic novels last longer intersperse between parts surrounding the continuity of the books there'd be small bits adapting various comic strips whether related or not what else is going on in the episode it did offer a break from the serialized storytelling giving some added moments of personality to characters not as prominent and it'd offer pure comedy between moments that may be more somber plus it had extended the episode count for each book adaptation making the source material last way longer in case of the show being popular enough to keep going but you know what enough of that all i've been doing this whole video is talking about how the show stands up as an adaptation of the source material but how does it do as its own thing speaking from an animation perspective big nate honestly looks godly i love everything about the aesthetic initially i was skeptical of how big nate would transfer to 3d as i'd never imagined it like that and also i'm not too big a fan of some of nick's other recent attempts at the format the rugrats reboot was really the first to do it and i wasn't hooked something like rugrats hinged on its sketchy imperfect hand-drawn style and you could never replicate that with 3d models at least that's what i thought the next show to use it the spongebob spin-off camp coral had a different problem everything was too smooth and i don't just mean the textures the characters moved too weightlessly a problem 3d shows on a tv budget often face and while it didn't necessarily look terrible or anything there was always something missing that i couldn't put my finger on big nate has solved that and improved the prospects for 3d nick shows in general tenfold from what i can tell i think the crew used a similar method to what into the spider-verse did animating the show on twos or potentially even threes instead of the usual ones for computer animation if you don't get what i'm saying in animation there are 24 individual frames per second making up any given scene and when you refer to animating on ones twos 3s etc it means how often an image changes within those 24 frames per second of movements for most 2d animated american shows they animate on twos meaning a new image shows up every two frames that's the norm for 2d as opposed to animating on ones which usually makes animations look smoother and less weighty it's also more expensive anime is even more constrained normally animating on threes since the images drawn are much more complex then there's computer generated animation which instead of having every single frame done by hand has the liberty of letting the computer fill in any gaps making it flow seamlessly with new images every frame for a film like into the spiderverse however they animate several scenes on twos making the normally silky smooth cg weightier and more like a living comic and bignate appears to be doing the exact same thing as opposed to spider-verse though it looks more like big nate is going for the stop-motion look not only in movements but in textures and you might not have even noticed this if you weren't paying attention but every model has subtle textures for hair and skin to make the characters look more like clay puppets with painted on accessories and i absolutely adore the effect it really captures the feeling of imperfection like i've never really seen on a cartoon before and on a tv budget no less we've also got some mixed media use in here whether it's fully 2d black and white notebook animation to match nate's drawings or the fully clip art sections that have their own charm while still fitting in with the overall style the series is going for and the lighting holy [ __ ] the lighting in the show is so good and they knew it because so many episodes put the characters in situations perfect for showing off the stellar lighting effects as far as i can tell most of it was done in-house by nickelodeon and i cannot overstep how gorgeous this show looks so i applaud the animators and directors you guys did a great job giving a phenomenal look to the whole thing the humor also blends the majority of the time sure there's nowhere near the same dry wit and relaxed banter that the original had but i still found myself laughing at several of the jokes finding them funny and well written much of the slapstick humor hits and has creative delivery much of it with a flare that the original comics never could taking full advantage of the animation medium as a knicks show from the shorts i did expect there to be a good amount of gross out but for the most part it wasn't even all that bad since the animators found a way for on-screen throw up to not look absolutely unappealing like they hit the perfect balance between gross and not where we understand the joke but we don't feel sick looking at it and that's a hard balance to find though it went a bit too much in one direction for the pimple episode and i couldn't go through this video without mentioning just how raw some of the jokes in big nate are like listen to this scream that is [ __ ] comedy gold that makes me laugh every time it's really different from the original comics and doesn't capture their feeling most of the time but on its own it's amazing and it does seem to be going for its own vibe yes more of this humor please it's so underutilized and it's one of the only bits i can say improve the series by being there other than that what big nade the show did to improve upon the formula of the original rather than detract from it was giving us other perspectives in the comics and novels the point of view was set on nate and no one else makes sense he's the main lead and with hal purse writes you'd probably think it was weird that the perspective shifted from the title character but since the tv show is completely episodic and dealt with mostly one-off issues other characters like principal nichols or nate's family might get more of their own screen time away from nate giving us interesting dynamics to watch outside of nate's narrative it's a small change but still appreciated for what it does and there is a good amount of hardness in conclusion i do still have many many problems with the bignate tv show as it stands from the adamant viewpoint of a person who's followed the series for so many years i feel like much of the heart and soul bignate originally had has been taken and replaced without ample substitutes with how the series is going i don't think it'll ever truly capture the same feeling the graphic novels or newspaper comics had which is a sad sight and considering how many characters personalities they changed it makes me wonder why they chose to adapt big native all properties to begin with when not looking at it from the perspective of an adaptation there is actually a lot of positive you can weigh at the show so if you're not too well versed in the other media and you don't think too deeply about the changes it's easy to have a good time and there is a lot to like about the series but it's a bit harder for me to do that sorry but when you call the show big nate you keep the names and faces the setting all of that but you don't keep the tone writing style or character depth i can't help but see it as a lackluster unfaithful adaptation i'll probably keep watching to see what happens but my disappointment will always be there man this video was meant to be so much shorter than it ended up but i had way more to say than i thought hope you enjoyed it either way and i hope to see you in the next one i've been just up and i'm going to sleep goodbye you

Channel: Just Stop

Views: 396,917

Keywords: Big Nate, Big Nate Show, Big Nate Nickelodeon, Big Nate Sus, Big Nate Review, Big Nate Retrospective, Big Nate Rant, Big Nate Comics, Big Nate Graphic Novel, Just Stop Big Nate, Just Stop Review, Just Stop Rant, Just Stop Big Nate Review, Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse, Paramount Plus

Id: QuN9j4MhgSo

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022