When The Faithful Adaptation Is Actually Worse

the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers is weird instead of the colorful world of the video games where Mario hops around eating mushrooms and bouncing on little turtle guys this movie is set in a nightmareish city called Dino haton that's kind of like if Blade Runner had a bunch of mutant dinosaur people running around as well as Dennis Hopper as a sort of Donald Trump parody it barely resembles the games on which it's based but originally that was the point the pitch from co-directors Rocky Morton and Annabelle jankle hinged on a comedic twist that would arrive in the final scene the whole movie would play out as it does in the final version but at the end Executives from Nintendo would arrive to talk to Mario and Luigi about their life story revealing that what we've been watching is the real true story of their lives and the video games are in fact a poor adaptation as co-director Morton explained the scene was right at the very very end when the Mario brothers were back in Brooklyn and there's a knock knock knock on the door and it's two Executives from Japan from Nintendo they've come to buy this story the life story of the Mario brothers because they want to use it in this video game they're producing they write down the story dictated to them by Mario and Luigi and it all Gets Lost in Translation and that was the crucial scene of the movie because it made sense of of the entire movie and why the movie was so different to the video game because it got lost in translation by Nintendo that final scene was shot but the studio cut it from the final film and so the one scene that was a direct connection to the source material commenting on the nature of adaptations and justifying all the ways the film differed from the games was gone and without that scene what we're left with is a movie that just has abs absolutely nothing in common with its source material but is that a bad thing well according to most people in 1993 yes yes it is sitting in the movie theater with my dad and my mom and just feeling defeated and destroyed watching them murder my beloved Super Mario Brothers characters despite the massive popularity of the Mario video games the fans widely rejected the movie for how Unfaithful it was to the source material Super Mario Brothers baffled and angered audiences and critics alike was a critical and Commercial failure and for decades it has been treated as a punchline and then exactly 30 years later a new Super Mario Brothers movie was released and this time faithfulness was not a problem where once the villain was Dennis Hopper as a politician with his hair jelled into weird ridges now the villain was Bowser appearing exactly like he does in the games where once the story was set in a bizarre alternate universe version of New York City now it was set in the Mushroom Kingdom appearing exactly like it does in the games where once Mario jumped with the assistance of high-tech sci-fi jump boots now he just jumped High exactly like he does in the games where once toad was portrayed as a protest singer played by famed rockabilly musician Mojo Nixon who gets turned into a weird dinosaur man now he was exactly like he is in the games voiced by an unrecognizable Keegan Michael Key and look I could keep going basically the 2023 Mario movie is everything that fans complained the 9s movie was not and this time around it won over the fans and it made well over a billion dollar but does that mean that it's better and when we're talking about a game with basically no story no psychological depth and characters that are at best one-dimensional what is the goal of a film adaptation anyway why do we actually care about how faithful it is and what can these two Mario movies tell us about the very nature of adaptations look there's a lot to get into so Emma roll the title sequence wait am am I still on the shot Emma oh sorry I thought the cold open would last a little longer I'm just catching up on my reading look I am all for you expanding your mind through the magic of reading it's both fun and fundamental but remember we're still at work I mean it does tie into the themes of the episode I'm reading the novelization of the movie Lock wait lock the movie that's just Tom Hardy driving a car for 90 minutes that kind a novelization yeah and it is a complete betrayal of the original partway through he gets out of the car can you believe it Emma you know I don't like to use this kind of language at work but Mama Mia look just just try to stay focused okay okay right now let's go I'm sorry I'm sorry it's my last Mario impression for the [Music] episode [Music] yeah [Music] hello I'm Patrick Williams and welcome back to another episode of the show we are about a month or so into the new season and so far I think things are off to a great start this new desk is really elevating our whole presentation we just released a new drop on our hugely popular new website authenticy proms.mpg playing video games something I haven't had time for in over a decade I'm talking about movies adapted from video games but don't worry this is not going to be yet another why do video game movies always suck video you've heard that a million times before see last year when the Super Mario Brothers movie became a giant commercial smash that will soon spawn a whole wave of Nintendo movies that are sure to be artistic triumphs I did what I tend to do and and started overthinking it and I started overthinking it in comparison to the deeply weird 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie and that got me thinking about the whole nature of film adaptations which is uh yes a big Topic in my research I found out that adaptation studies is an entire field of Academia that people devote their whole careers to and look the last thing I want to do is trespass on their territory because those academics are hardcore and will absolutely beat me up and throw me in a dumpster if I get this wrong so today we are going to lightly skim the surface of adaptation studies but keep in mind there are many many very dense books on the subject and yet strangely no movies based on those books makes you think but let's take a big double jump back and ask a bigger question what's the point of adaptations on one level or level 1-1 to put it in Mario terms the very idea of adaptations is kind of weird when other people are making original movies based on ideas they thought of themselves writing their own stories then over here you got some guy who's just using a story someone else already wrote in a book years earlier like duh of course your movie is good you used a story Charles Dickens wrote it's almost cheating but also consider that the tradition of retelling stories has existed for as long as we've had stories like how else do you think stories spread in the days before writing and long before our current IP obsessed era of media where everything has to be based on an existing property adaptations were still everywhere like how many revivals of Shakespeare plays have there been hundreds if not thousands of them before movies were even invented hell in the 90 s every other teen movie was secretly a Shakespeare play this is nothing new and consider that many of our most celebrated films are adaptations of existing works I added it up and did the math and 63% of Best Picture Oscar winners are adaptations but back in the day there used to be some dissent in 1922 a letter published in the scenario bulletin digest proclaimed quote The reason an adaptation is bad is because a good one cannot be made this has been proven and when a thing is proven it ought to settle all arguments now uh I'm not sure exactly how this was proven but this person seems really insistent on it in his 1957 book novels into film George blue stone radically argued that quote adaptation is always essentially bad translation and bad art because it violates formalist semiotic and medium specificity theories and even if that last sentence sounded like complete gibberish to You Blue Stone kind of has a point he proposed that adaptations should be stopped forever and novels and films quote should remain separate institutions each achieving its best results by exploring unique and specific properties amen can you believe they added three full flashback chapters detailing the affair Ivan lock had which by the way in the movie is just described as cold wet and lonely clearly just adding smut for the Sarah J Mass fans out there I mean listen to this sultry passage please don't read sultry passages during the episode that will get us demonetized I know you're upset about this bad adaptation but you realize that you could just stop reading it right I mean you are supposed to be working right now I would but the nebula Studios book club is meeting right after this and I'm noting all the worst parts so that we can discuss them if you hate it so much why would you suggest it for book club also wait there's there's an office book club I didn't suggest this trash it was me Lock's dark Journey Into Night deserves to be seen in as many mediums as possible all the more content for me to gobble wait Nobles knew about book club before I did well of course I knew about it I set it up surely you received my Evite I uh I guess it must have gone to spam I would certainly never delete all your emails I unseen uh anyway let's get back to the essay okay that's all well and good but no matter how many infuriatingly bad adaptations we encounter people keep making them and we keep watching them so why what is it that compels us to retell and reimagine the stories we love in her essay on the art of adaptation Linda hutchon writes while no medium is inherently good at doing one thing and not another each medium like each genre has different means of expression and so can aim at certain things better than others in other words each medium has things that it's especially good at and moving a story to a new medium brings with it a new set of tools that can express aspects of the story differently or sometimes more strongly so to use an example in The Lord of the Rings the original form of the novel was ideal for the lengthy vivid descriptions of the settings as well as showcasing the different languages that tolken created for the world of Middle Earth but then when it became a film now in a visual medium it's able to prioritize showcasing the scale of the world the small Hobbits dwarfed by the giant Landscapes and Towers the armies of thousands of soldiers clashing Gandalf's Evolution from Gray to White hits more strongly when we can visually see that change and this is what often motivates adaptations the opportunity to highlight aspects of a story with the tools of a new medium like if it's an emotional character-driven story film will allow us to watch a great actor Express those feelings and deliver that dialogue but film is not necessarily better at everything first person narration usually works better in a novel when literally every word is coming from the perspective of the main character and then there are things like the cosmic abstract climax of Stephen King's It which multiple adaptations have struggled mightily to adapt nobody and I mean nobody knows what the hell to do with that giant interdimensional turtle adaptation studies splits the audience into two different types of viewer no knowing and unknowing in other words is the viewer familiar with the source material or unfamiliar for the unknowing viewer usually the film's nature as an adaptation doesn't really matter they just experience it as they would any other film assuming of course that the adaptation works for them and doesn't require prior knowledge of the original work Linda Hutchin who I quoted a minute ago and surely will again before this episode is over writes that to deal with adaptations as adaptations is to think of them as to use Scottish poet and Scholar Michael Alexander's great term okay inherently Palm sestru Works haunted at all times by their adapted texts if we know that prior text we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly when we call a work an adaptation we openly announce its overt relationship to another work or works did you say palum cestus I thought you said we couldn't read smut during today's episode no it's not a dirty word okay it just sounds that way like it means one sec hold on hold on I got to look this up uh okay okay so palum cestus means a manuscript that has been partially erased then overwritten oh why does an academic word sound so dirty well probably because in addition to being Cutthroat Maniacs adaptation study Scholars are also kinky little freaks anyway the point here is that adaptations are always to some extent in conversation with the original text The Knowing audience can't help but think about that original text the adaptation reveals the writer or filmmaker's feelings about the original text text so unless someone invents working neuralizer real soon there's no way to divorce adaptations from their original text and all the baggage that brings and erase our memories of what we've read before when we are knowing viewers watching an adaptation of something we have enjoyed in its original form be it novel or comic book or cartoon or yes video game much of the pleasure comes from recognition and repetition it is satisf in to see characters on screen looking and sounding just like they were described on the page like even though we had already seen several versions of Spider-Man we were all delighted when we first saw Tom Holland's version because hey now for the first time he looked and sounded like a real teenager and his eyes finally changed shape like they do in the comics and I know it makes a sound like trained seals clapping stupidly because we see a thing that we recognize but there's a reason that we re-watch our favorite movies and reread our favorite books and listen to our favorite songs over and over again and there's something that can be really satisfying about a great cover version of a song that we already love it gives us as Hutchin puts it repetition with variation from the comfort of ritual combined with the peeny of surprise but the real issue we're here to discuss today is [Music] infidelity and by that I mean the deeply unsexy and academic question of faithfulness in adaptations as you guessed it Linda huton points out the language around adaptations has always been deeply moralistic referring to changes to the source material as quote a tampering a deformation a desecration an infidelity a betrayal a perversion in other words very naughty this seems a bit extreme but to be fair we as viewers often have quite literally a relationship with the original work and an adaptation is someone else's treatment of a thing we love it's like meeting your best friend's new partner or to use a more exciting analogy it's like sitting in the chair while someone else sleeps with your wife anyway as hutchon writes one of the central cliches of film adaptation theory is that audiences are more demanding of fidelity when dealing with the classics with the work of Shakespeare or Dickens for instance it is said that producer David selnik did not worry about adhering to the details of the novel Jane air when adapting it in the 1940s because an audience survey determined that few had read it however he did worry about the details of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca because the novels had been recent best sellers and I think this has only become more true in recent decades when it comes to adapting works with massive deeply passionate fandoms Chris Columbus said of adapting Harry Potter quote people would have crucified me if I hadn't been faithful to the books and I would argue that he was extremely faithful but apparently not faithful enough as evidenced by Warner Brothers announcement last year that they are developing a new Harry Potter adaptation for HBO which will devote an entire season to adapting each book this is frankly insane because a why in 2024 are we still giving JK Rowling attention and money and B we already got eight movies that did Faithfully adapt all those books so the only difference here would be refusing to condense anything and just literally putting every single word on screen which in my professional opinion is dumb so is that what Fidelity is just literally transcribing every bit of the plot well if so then Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen is technically as faithful as an adaptation can get it adapts the comic book almost word for word and shot for shot but in the process accidentally it misunderstands much of what the original work is actually saying and in the end it feels like a mistranslation that misses the point or digging below the surface maybe a faithful adaptation is one that stays true to the original author's intent but this gets complicated for one thing an author's exact intentions are often unclear even to them sometimes famous ly Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining infuriated Stephen King by largely ignoring some of the deeply personal themes of the original novel it's a great movie and it does contain most of the plot of the book but is it a faithful adaptation and would it be better if it was the film adaptation of Akira cuts out almost the entire second half of the original manga which seems like an Unfaithful adaptation but also the movie is literally written and directed by katsuhiro otomo who wrote and Drew every page of the original comic so I don't think you can argue that it in any way is untrue to the author's intent Robert Stam writes when we say an adaptation has been unfaithful to the original the term gives expression to the disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative thematic and aesthetic features of its literary Source words such as infidelity and betrayal in this sense translate our feeling when we have loved a book that an adaptation has not been worthy of that love having combed through lots and lots of dense academic writing on the subject this here is the best answer I found and it's one that remains subjective for each viewer at least the knowing viewers what each of us considers to be the fundamental narrative thematic and aesthetic features of the original those are the attributes that must be included for us to deem it a faithful adaptation and with that question kind of answered let's talk about Mario if we are going to understand how different movies have adapted Mario first we need to understand the source material unfortunately my old Super Nintendo is jammed somewhere in my parents attic at this point more black molds than plastic so here to explain the sacred lore and history of that agile Italian plumber here's our good friend Matt croll from the channel extra credits thanks Patrick as the world's foremost usually animated person with both a history and game Design Channel I can safely say that I'm the most qualified guy to read you the original Super Mario Bro story description from the US booklet that came with the classic Nintendo game way back in 1985 now since I couldn't find my original copy of this sacred text I did the next best thing I bought the Super Mario Allstar manual for $5 at PAX East and then printed out the OG game story page and stuck it in there for the highest level of accuracy possible so let's go one day the kingdom of the peaceful mushroom people was invaded by the Koopa a tribe of turtles famous for their black magic The Quiet peace loving mushroom people were turned into mere Stones bricks and even field horsehair plants and the Mushroom Kingdom fell to ruin the only one who can undo the magic spell on the mushroom people and return them to their normal selves is the princess Toad stool the daughter of The Great Mushroom King unfortunately she is presently in the hands of the great Koopa Turtle king Mario the hero of our story parenthesis maybe he's about the mushroom people's plight and sets out on a quest to free the mushroom princess from the evil Koopa and restore the Fallen Kingdom of the mushroom people you are Mario it's up to you to save the mushroom people from the black magic of the Koopa now you can see this narrative here is pretty fit and the subsequent games don't do a whole lot to increase the story's complexity in all of the earlier outings Mario is always brought to a Strange Land to rescue someone or something from a large amphibian of course there are small variations right in Mario 2 it was all a dream in Mario 3 it was a stage play Super Mario World had Mario meet a dinosaur friend who he gets to sacrifice to jump across a larger pits and of course Mario 64 doesn't so much stretch the story as it does his face but what about Mario himself for parenthesis maybe the most well-known video game character of all time what do we actually know about him he can jump high he's a snazzy dresser and he has a deep-seated desire to Rescue Princesses as a side hustle interestingly one of the few facts everybody does know about him is that he's a plumber but as far as I can tell that isn't mentioned in any of the early games rather we know this because of interviews with mamoto saying he's a plumber because it makes sense with all the pipes in the game hell even our common knowledge that he's from Brooklyn mainly comes from Lou Albano's performance from the bookended skits of the Animated Series which isn't that odd when you think about it right Mario was created to enable incredibly addictive and precise platforming experiences for people to play not for us to Deep dive into his character and motivation driven by a ton of lore remember even in the Donkey Kong arcade cabinet where he made his first appearance Mario was a carpenter simply named Jumpman though I should mention we eventually got games like the Paper Mario series and the Super Mario RPG that actually do have sprawling stories and memorable narrative moments for him and his friends but the movie adaptations have yet to pull from any of that in a real way so we're going to ignore them here parenthesis maybe Patrick back to woohoo thanks Matt and this brings us now to the movies Mario had been adapted for television before most notably in the Super Mario Brothers Super Show which premiered in 1989 but then in 1990 the Mario film rights were obtained by who else Roland joffy director of The Killing Fields and the mission after a couple years of false starts he set on husband wife directing team Rocky Morton and Annabelle jankle creators of the cult TV show Max Headroom to helm the movie and the film they made Bears very little resemblance to the source material it features some characters with the same names like there's a girl named Daisy no Peach though Mario is a round plumber with the mustache who has a brother named Luigi it's worth noting here that joff's contract with Nintendo did not allow them to have any input on the story although they did retain the merchandising rights the movie uses words from the games but here they mean different things in the game there are little enemies called Goombas that look like this in the movie there are also Goombas but here they are 7ft tall mutated hybrid dinosaur people there are a lot of dinosaurs in this movie which is funny because the game is mostly about mushrooms and turtles in general the movie feels like an entirely original idea that was grafted onto an IP in order to get made most of it is a satire of early 9s New York City with evil greedy real estate developers and this bizarre over-the-top City that feels more like Terry gillams Brazil than anything that's ever been in a Mario game the Mario games are full of beloved iconography and the movie ignores almost all of it the famous koi condom music only plays once over the first 30 seconds of the movie and then for the next 104 minutes it's gone replaced by a I mean pretty solid Allen sylvestri score if nothing else Super Mario Brothers is a weird and interesting movie it's a movie where in the third act Samantha matys has an emotional conversation with her father who turns out to be a big sentient blob of fungus this is my father despite the studio is cutting the original ending which as we discussed earlier was the key part of the filmmaker's whole original pitch this is still absolutely the product of a singular Vision but it's also so completely removed from the source material that it just doesn't really engage with it at all it has nothing to say about Mario no perspective on Mario it might as well not even be a Mario movie like I en enjoy watching this movie but it totally fails as an adaptation beyond the fun exercise of going how the did that turn into this it works better completely removed from its source material okay remember that quote from earlier about how audiences are more demanding of fidelity when it comes to adaptations of Classics well for a long time Studios didn't really think that that applied to lesser Source materials like comic books or video games since you know those are for kids and kids are stupid and that is how you get something like the 1993 Mario movie or some of the Fairly insane changes in the Batman movies like The Joker killing Bruce Wayne's parents so my theory is that this really changed in the late '90s when the internet fan backlash to Batman and Robin was so strong that suddenly Hollywood sat up and realized that they needed to approach these adaptations a bit differently this was where they started to understand that fans of comic books or video games or young adult fantasy novels held those in as high regard as others do the works of Shakespeare or Jane Austin and these fans demanded that the adaptations be taken as seriously as a goddamn heart attack so here the studios realized that if they appeased those fans there was a lot of money to be made and so just a few years after Batman and Robin we had the debut of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series both adaptations that proudly advertised their Fidelity to the source material and promised to adapt one book per film and as those series went on multiple movies for one book the same goes for The Hunger Games or Divergent until they canceled the fourth movie and never finished the series hey if we're talking Fidelity when it comes to adaptations don't forget my favorite series The Neapolitan novels by Elena fante I enjoyed the HBO adaptation of my brilliant friend but I don't think it was quite able to capture the interiority of the original book Noel shut up we're trying to talk about bing bing Wahoo video games not fancy Italian literature I just think that everyone should experience these in the original Italian of course in fact it was my first choice for the book club but no one in the office speaks Italian parla per Emma okay guys guys quiet we got to get pack to talking about real art here and the times when Studios would treat the works were adapting like they used to in the ' 880s and '90s like the 2004 Catwoman movie that discarded literally everything about the source material other than the title they were met with hostility from the fans and the result was a giant Financial failure the general rule was Fidelity equals commercial success and this line of thinking is how we get to the 2023 Super Mario Brothers movie developed by illumination entertainment the studio that gave us those lovable freaks the minions this movie was made in very very close collaboration with Nintendo who had gotten way more careful with licensing their properties for film ever since the original movie which I just can't really understand because we all know that video game movies turn out great every single time anyway as we established at the start of the episode this movie is the polar opposite of the previous ones in terms of fidelity every character every color every question mark block is exactly on model with how it appears in the games the story is more or less the story of every game Mario runs around exploring the Mushroom Kingdom collecting powerups and finally beats Bowser as faithful as the movie is it does include some elements that are not present in the games there's a very modern winking self-aware tone as well as lots of pop music needle drops which is weird considering how iconic and Beloved the Koji condo music is the most interesting part of the film is the first 15 or 20 minutes which follows Mario and Luigi in Brooklyn trying to establish a plumbing business this is also the biggest deviation from The Source material since in the games we never see the Mario Brothers in our world all of this stuff is unique to the film and interestingly is actually a lot closer to the 199 3 movie and when it's doing its own thing here it's not bad but this only lasts for a few minutes until Mario and Luigi get sucked down into a pipe and traveled to the Mushroom Kingdom and then for the next hour or so it basically just turns into the experience of watching someone else play a Mario game here the film becomes mostly a parade of iconography from the games every scene has at least one moment designed to make viewers sit up and do the Leo point sh because they recognized something look Mario has the cape look he slid down a flag pole at a castle look Donkey Kong is throwing barrels look it's an arcade game called Jumpman listen it's the Luigi's Mansion music look it's a fireflower look it's a blue shell look he's wearing the cat suit look they're driving carts on Rainbow Road holy it's the DK rap look look I'm only human and when I heard the DK rap I got to admit that one got me it's a great song this movie has more of a narrative than the games which isn't really saying much and it gives the characters slightly more Dimension and motivation which also isn't really saying much but it avoids any kind of take on the material if the 93 movie is too much of a singular Vision this one is no VIs Vision at all it's like a featurelength tribute Montage that would be made for Mario's 40th anniversary and approved by the full Nintendo executive board it feels like the filmmakers were given a checklist of everything the fans would want to see and told to put all of it in the movie now I'm not criticizing anyone for enjoying the movie it's designed to provide 90 minutes of non-stop dopamine hits for anyone with any fondness for the Mario games but I am saying that its audience is akin to Lab Rats getting a morphine drip straight to the pleasure centers of their brains this movie is junk food and I truly believe that the Mario video games are much more than that and this is why I wanted to focus on Mario for this episode because these two adaptations made 30 years apart kind of perfectly form a spectrum and so folks I am proud to present what I call the Super Mario Super spectrum of adaptation Fidelity hold up hold up is it just me or is is kind of boring looking like this is Mario you know something we all love for its colorful fun Aesthetics can we like update the [Music] graphic that's a good okay so on one end we have something that barely res resembles its source material that has no interest in engaging with it at all a singular Vision that would probably be better if the names were changed and it were just a holy original thing not an adaptation and then on the other end we have something that is so faithful that it is less a movie and more as Mario creator shago mamoto put it in an interview a video asset this is a brand extension there is no vision beyond the corporate vision of Nintendo and its Affiliated companies it has nothing to say no engagement with the source material Beyond a corporate approved celebration so anyway for all you academics out there in the field of adaptation studies uh feel free to use the Super Mario Super spectrum of adaptation Fidelity you can impress your colleagues at the next conference and this all leads me to a larger question why make a Mario movie in the first place as Matt established earlier Mario is not a story there is the barest semblance of a narrative there just a simple goal to motivate the player to move forward I'm sure this will offend some dorks out there but Mario is not a character he is a fun design who barely speaks Beyond a couple of catchphrases Mario isn't a story it's a property when Roland jofy won the bidding war for the movie rights he was not a fan of the games he had no passion for the material he just recognized that this was a popular property with a built-in audience that could make money the dude just wanted some fat stacks of cheddar because Super Mario Brothers is designed first and foremost to be a game and it does that brilliantly it has really imaginative designs and Aesthetics engaging puzzles and level design and really fun gameplay but in terms of what's there to adapt to film it's really just a bunch of iconography now to be fair sometimes in situations like this when a property is developed for a film adaptation with purely commercial motivations it's such a blank slate that it can lead to exciting creative choices like on paper Barbie is pretty much nothing as a story or a character but there's so little there that Greta Gerwig Margo Robbie and Noah bomach had plenty of room to fill in new IDE ideas and turn it into a cultural phenomenon a movie that outgross the Mario movie and got a Best Picture Oscar nomination The Lego Movie is a similar situation there's no narrative and no characters just a total Blank Slate that allowed talented filmmakers to create something new on top of that or what about Peter Berg's 2012 adaptation of Battleship remember that no didn't like Rihanna fight aliens in it anyway Mario is not quite the blank slate that those are here there is a narrative and there are characters they're just incredibly thin but as faithful as the 2023 Mario is to the look of the game and the general Narrative of the game while it is theoretically on one end of the Super Mario Super Spectrum my question is is it actually a good adaptation as we've established Mario is designed to be played not watched no one's favorite part of Mario is sitting there while your sibling plays Mario 3 even though you're so much better at the game than they are and they don't even know about the warp whistle in world one as Sydney batty writes in her essay The Art of the game issues in adapting video games video games are at their core a series of rules and goals that operate in different ways than film rules are meant to complicate a players experiences while they strive towards their goal players must understand the rules intimately memorize reaction times and interactions to master a game Mario is much less about any of its characters than it is about timing your jumps and dodging enemy weapons and mastering the gamep playay sure the movie has a couple moments where the camera shifts to a wide profile view giving it the appearance of a sidescrolling game and there's a training montage where Mario gets better at jumping in so occasionally the movie feels kind of like watching someone play a Mario game but it makes no real attempt to adapt the experience of actually playing a Mario game yourself The Lego Movie is a movie literally about how we play with Legos that is designed to cinematically capture the joy and Imagination of being a child and inventing Lego constructions Barbie Faithfully adapts the various iconography from the toys but are also actively engages with the history and cultural meaning of the brand it's adapting it looks straight on into the sun confronting its nature as a palum sestu work I did it I used the word in a sentence but Mario doesn't try to do any version of that it is content to be a 90minut long cutscene that occasionally reminds you of what it looks like when someone plays the game now compare this to something like Edge of Tomorrow which is not actually based on a video game but that perfectly captures the experience of playing a really hard video game and dying over and over again as you gradually mastered the timing needed to get through a level until you were exhausted and your thumbs hurt and you know it by heart where every single enemy is and how to get through them without dying at the end of the day Mario will always be Jumpman that is his purpose the sopian task of running forward and jumping forever and Endeavor until the end of time there was nothing more to him at the beginning and there doesn't really need to be now I am open to being proven wrong but I think that Mario is something that remains fundamentally pointless to adapt into a non-interactive medium there is nothing really to be gained from it Beyond of course lots and lots of sweet sweet money like like truly so much money enough that you could do like a Scrooge McDuck dive into it and just swim through your treasure does seem like a lot of fun so why do we want film adaptations in the first place why do we as a society believe that the ultimate form of any story is to become a movie now I don't want to just Proclaim that Cinema is the best artistic medium there is although it is my personal favorite but it does have certain qualities that others don't outside of like VR video games Cinema is the most immersive medium there is as well as the most literal when you read a book you have to exert some effort to read the words you set the pace you turn the page but in a film you just sit back let it wash over you in a book when something is described you have to create your own mental image of it when you watch a play in a theater the set isn't an abstract version of a location and your mind has to fill in the blanks and imagine the world in which this is meant to take place but in film it does all the work for you you see the full cohesive reality everything that was simply described in words on the page now it's all literally there in front of you a fully realized world that you can watch as a spectator even when you read a comic book with their static panels and speech bubbles telling the story it's natural to want to see those images move and come to life and hear those voices it's why even with countless great Batman stories in comic books and on TV I still keep hoping for the Perfect liveaction movie adaptation that will capture all of my favorite elements of the source material because there is something so potentially powerful about Cinema as a storytelling medium what I'm saying is I get the impulse to turn things into movies but with video games I'm not so sure in the past 25 years as video game technology has rapidly evolved games have become more and more like movies compared to the early '90s the narratives in games are a way bigger priority now they often have real famous movie stars acting in them and the games periodically stop to just turn into realistically animated movies but look the discussion of cinematic video games is way too big a topic to cover here but maybe maybe later this season in it in its own video okay so let's return to that Hutch and quote from earlier while no medium is inherently good at doing one thing and not another each medium has different means of expression and so can aim at certain things better than others at this point in time video games can do so many of the things that movies can do they can have nuanced visual storytelling with quality acting and writing and music and cinematography but then they also have one major aspect that is unique to them they're interactive they place the player in control of the events as an active participant in the story as the one making choices those choices might be where to explore in an open world game or choices that will change the course of the narrative like in Mass Effect or even in a linear game like Mario simply the choice to move forward or if you're a weirdo to just repeatedly run off the edge of a cliff and die over and over again the appeal of quote unquote cinematic video games like Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid is that it's just like a movie but you're in it and so then when you adapt one of those to film you're just removing an essential part of the experience you're changing it from an active experience to a passive one and now as we saw with the Uncharted movie when you strip away the interactive component all you're left with is a mediocre movie in the move from one medium to another you're taking away Essential Elements but not replacing them with anything unique to cinema unless something unique is hearing Tom Holland's talk in his Peter Parker voice again hey how was last night great yeah he was cute very cute nice I'm not saying that all video game adaptations are bad that's not the case there are ones like the last of us are detective Pikachu that have actually made it work but I think most of the time you're just going to end up with a shallower experience watching 90 minutes of Mario cutscenes will never be as much fun as just playing Mario exactly and reading about lock will never match the pulse pounding excitement of seeing Tom Hardy talk on the phone while driving for 85 minutes sure and that's okay whether an adaptation takes big swings or doesn't deviate one iota there's always the original you fell in love with to take comfort in you know what thanks Patrick you've really helped me find closure with this whole thing Emma I'm glad to hear that even if you ignored your work the entire time and also missed the whole point of the episode how about you bring some of these points to book club what do you say want to talk lock over wine and and cheese it's nice of you to ask but I haven't read the book Patrick it's a book club half the people there haven't read the book just read the back cover and if anybody asks you a question you can fill your face with cheese until they move on I I can do that all right I'm just going to finish up the essay then and then we'll head over I understand why the Mario movie was such a huge hit last year it's a property that has been massively popular for decades with millions of fans of all ages and this looked just like the game Faithfully transposing the iconography and the music and the basic narrative onto the big screen and as we established earlier the greatest pleasure of adaptations comes simply from recognition seeing the thing we like given New Life on screen and after that movie success Nintendo and various Hollywood Studios decided they're going all in hoping this is the next marveles Cash Cow so there's going to be a liveaction Legend of Zelda movie as well as definitely more Mario movies now this does seem kind of Bleak like just as the superhero movie boom is slowing down now here is a way Dumber new thing to take its place and flood multiplexes for the next decade but I don't think it's that bad I'm actually a little skeptical that that's going to happen see there's something inherently exciting about seeing superhero comic books adapted cinematically making the jump from static illustrations on a page to Big flashy liveaction and those Comics are already interconnected ongoing narratives which are perfect for being turned into a series of ongoing movies but as we've established the jump from video game to movie doesn't feel like an upgrade in the same way you're actually losing a key part of the experience and honestly the animation quality in a movie like Mario isn't that much better than how current gen Graphics look in a Mario game I understand that people flocked to that movie because of the comforting familiarity but I don't really think that it will linger with people past that initial viewing now that the novelty is gone I'm not sure the sequels and spin-offs are going to be as popular like yeah parents will take their kids to see it but I don't really think this is even going to have the emotional Resonance of like the minions as we've seen proven with increasing frequency lately audiences actually do want something new and original and if it's an adaptation at least an adaptation that does something unique like Dune or Barbie or across the spiderverse instead of just serving them the exact obvious thing that they already have we're coming off of more than two decades of adaptations designs to be as faithful as possible to please the fans and give them exactly what they expect and I think at this point we are all ready to take some chances I think people can handle it I think they actually want it but I do have to say if we are going to get this whole big wave of video game adaptations the one that I really want to see is a digdug movie I think that has so much cinematic potential it's about a guy who explodes monsters with a bicycle pump I hope that movie is longer than killers of the flower Moon look this is obviously an enormous topic which is why I tried to keep it mostly focused on Mario but after all that criticism about bad video game adaptations what about a good one well since we brought in our friend Matt koll I decided to keep him around a few minutes longer for a whole conversation where we attempt to answer the question on everyone's mind is the 1995 Mortal Kombat the best video game movie ever made and that whole bonus companion video 40 minutes of Matt and me talking about fatalities and Goro and Scorpion and all that fun stuff is out right now over on nebula I'm sure you know this by now but nebula is a streaming platform owned and founded by creators like Matt and me where you could have watched this episode with no ads but there's so much more to it than that for most videos this season I'll have a bonus companion video exclusively on nebula like the one last month with Griffin Newman and me talking about Muppets it's like DVD bonus features something that we all miss nebula is also the place where you can watch the Patrick H Willams Star Wars holiday special our crazy season finale from December I'm currently working on a short film with nebula that is coming out this year and hey that reminds me it was just announced last week in variety I it's really real now wow that's that's pretty cool and anyway when that movie is finished nebula will be the exclusive place that you can watch it ever since night of the coconut we're getting into the movie business baby nebula is giving creators like me or Abigail Thorne or Jesse gender the support and budget to make movies that we' never be able to make on our own so if this sounds interesting to you just sign up at the link in the description or use this QR code right here signing up with my code gets you an annual plan for only 250 per month a pretty good deal if you ask me and part of that money goes directly to me supporting this Channel and helping fund my next movie so okay I think that's all for now uh also on nebula right now uh the new jet lag episode is out a week early so I'm going to go home and watch that bye you know I think I'm going to bring up the Super Mario Super spectrum of adaptation Fidelity like this could be a new Universal standard yeah the club's going to love that I call it my Alice's Adventures in Wonderland spectrum of adaptation Fidelity novel this is a bold new take and anyone who comes up with something similar is clearly just copying you God damn it Nobles I hate you so much all right let's get this book club started in my opinion the front and back cover are both riveting Dave the agent you're in this book club too yeah anything to hang out more with Nobles actually about that you've always called me Dave the agent why what is it you think I do you get me [Music] work what kind of work directing movies what no why would you think that one of I ever gotten you work directing movies oh god let's begin with chapter 1 dark Road darker Journey my career all those Wasted Years lost like tears and right wait so what is your job then I'm the CEO of nebula streaming service oh wa do you guys make movies [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Patrick (H) Willems

Views: 209,494

Keywords: patrick willems, patrickhwillems, patrick h willems

Id: zn3Yo5ea5L8

Length: 59min 6sec (3546 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024