I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now

Edna Mode – The Incredibles

Why does the idea of spending time with different adaptations as well as the source material for literary works appeal to me so much? I would be hard pressed to find a clear answer to this question, so I figure I may as well write about it for a bit, perhaps looking at some examples of adaptation that I have enjoyed recently.

Adapted media comes in various forms, though the most common seems to remain the book to film adaptation, though now we are also seeing more books adapted for the small screen. There are also examples of works going through various phases, usually involving a musical, so that The Producers can refer to the original film, the musical based on the film, or the film based on the musical based on the film, or for a more recent example, Matilda: The Musical, a film adaptation of the stage play based on the book, unrelated to the existing film from 1996. I don’t usually leave much time for reading outside of the required course material so I will rarely read books before watching the film adaptation. Whenever I do read a book, I will often wonder about how best it would be adapted to the screen, what characters would look like and how much they would differ from my initial reading. This thinking on adaptation also extends to my enjoyment and playing of video games, where often I wonder how an existing world would be adapted in a similar way to the game I am playing, be it thinking on how a hypothetical Lego version of Avatar or Scooby Doo would look like, or what Sherlock Holmes as a character would look like in the world of Hitman. We have somewhat of an answer for the last question, given Hitman 3’s Dartmoor level.

Often times there will be claims that the book is better than the film, and that one should not expect a film to live up to the world of the book we have imagined in our heads. I think in much the same way, I shouldn’t think about how these characters and stories would work in video game form given the various attempts over the years for tie-in video games. While technically games like Lego The Hobbit and Lego Incredibles can be considered tie-in games, I think they are different enough to the classic examples of cash-grab movie tie-ins that have existed since video games started gaining in popularity, through the notorious E.T. game that is thought to have contributed to the video game crash of the 80s, all the way through the 2000s up to now, where tie-ins are mostly relegated to mobile phone games and in-game products for existing, popular games.

I think I mostly enjoy adaptations for different reasons to most people, who will often want to see their fantasies move from page to screen in multi-million dollar special effects driven films, only to end up disappointed when the limits of technology and budget are reached and the end result winds up lacking. I enjoy watching TV and film adaptations of material I have various degrees of familiarity with and will usually enjoy the end result no matter how different or similar it is to the source material. Take, for example, the Wheel of Time TV show which has been criticised by the devout fanbase of the book series for diverging greatly from the plot of the pages. I am right in the target audience for it, as someone who listened to the audiobooks years ago and has forgotten most of it, so is only vaguely familiar with the characters at this stage and would prefer 10 hours of television to a 50 hour audiobook or an 800 page novel. The differences made, the ones that I am familiar enough with the source material to notice, fascinate me rather than anger me, as I try and think about why such decisions were made from the perspective of the creators, rather than the fans.

All this to say, that the Lego Incredibles game is among the best in the series, and really captures what makes the films fun, superhero films for the family while also including a bunch of characters and locations we don’t see in the films. I enjoyed it enough to re-watch the films after playing, in much the same way someone would read the book after a poor film adaptation, but in a much more positive way. Who knew playing as a lamp in Municiberg could be so much fun?