Why do conversion between media usually fail?

[Don]

After looking at yet another game-converted-to-manga failure, I'm starting to wonder just exactly why is it so hard for stuff to go between medias. I don't believe there's anything special about a form of media whether it's a book, comic, game, a movie, or a series of episodes, so I'm not going to say it fails because some forms of media is inherently superior. Now I know there certain have been cases where the conversion is successful, but it seems the majority of such conversion fails at some levels. You'd think with the amount of spinoffs in entertainment in general people would have got really good at this now and have some kind of formula to figure out how to go from one media to another, but obviously they do not. Here's what I think some common themes I see in failed conversions.

1. Not knowing the limitation of what you're converting from/to. Sine's remark about how a Pacman that was faithful to the original wouldn't make a good movie in the Megaman movie thread is a pretty good example of this. Megaman as a game thrives on 'gameplay' whatever that actually means. If you move it to a movie, you can't expect that to translate. The Star Wars franchise has a bunch of space simulation games, since games readily capture these elements. A book, however, does not, which is why you don't see a Star Wars book that primarily focuses on dogfighting, not to mention you know there's no way Luke or Wedge is ever going to get shot down anyway while in a game it's pretty obvious you are quite mortal. Fate's AD&D nerdy fights might work as a book (Saber makes a roll on her luck and save against Lancer's instant kill attack!) but looks incredibly stupid when animated. Well, I'm not even sure if it was good originally, but at least it's tolerable if you read the huge amount of background info on how their rolls and checks work as a book, but no way this works in anything else that's not a book.

2. Not knowing what made your stuff good. Although this tends to happen more often when the original creator has little input, sometimes even the original creator really has no idea. If you're going to axe your second most popular character you better have a very good reason to do so. If you're converting Touhou the game to something else, you can't ever forget that your heroines are some of the most ridiculously defender of good that's ever existed, possessing power that can demote gods to mid-boss status if they got bored. Star Wars anything always needs the Force and Jedis. I think this goes into the argument of fan service, but if a significant portion of your fanbase like XYZ, you really shouldn't cut that out unless it is an obvious conflict. A Megaman movie that also features Proto Man, for example, should not be a compromise in quality.

3. Requiring too much inside knowledge. I didn't read Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter but nothing in the movie makes me wonder what the heck is possibly going on. If you're well versed in the magic of Harry Potter maybe everything makes more sense to you, but it's not like you're wondering what the heck are these guys doing with regard to magic if you've never read Harry Potter. Whenever I read something like 'you got to read/watch the original to get this', that's almost a sure sign of failure. While there are limitations to different medias, if it's so limited that you can't possibly understand why certain things happen, then you might as well not bother converting.

I've seen two Dragon Quest mangas, and while both use the same DQ spell system, one of them you can tell it's just like 'use MP for fireball, use more MP for bigger fireball!', and the other one they basically whip out spells from nowhere as needed. Now one of my friend is a DQ fanatic could tell you like yeah they used the XYZ spell here which requires condition ABC and the moons to align in a certain way and that's totally old school DQ style, but to me I'm not going to just o play another game to understand why the heroes randomly can whip out a spell of seemingly infathomable power for no reason. If you're doing Superman, you can't really take for granted that everyone knows Kyptonite makes Superman weak (well, I suppose everyone knows this by now). You don't have to necessarily explain why this is true, but at least you've to be aware of the possibility that maybe some people don't know Kyrptonite makes Superman weak and at least try to make a reference to it in passing.

[Anarky]

Because people love to rape concepts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jafd97yJFOI

[Kupek]

I don't believe there's anything special about a form of media whether it's a book, comic, game, a movie, or a series of episodes, so I'm not going to say it fails because some forms of media is inherently superior.

No form of media is inherently superior, but they are all inherently different. They're all "special" in the sense that they all require different methods to craft good works in their medium.

[Don]

Different forms of media might be inherently different but it's not anywhere close to impossible to overcome. I'd say given how often such things happen, it must not even be very hard since people should have more than enough experience dealing with them.

A lot of times I just see converted stuff that don't remotely resemble what made the original good. It's like between going from medium A to medium B, they somehow managed to forget everything that worked before just because it's a new medium.

[Kupek]

Creating a good work in any medium is hard. I think that's a given. Starting with a good work in another medium doesn't change this.

[Anarky]

One of my favorite examples of messing up crossing video game to movie had to have been Resident Evil. Originally George Romero had inked a screenplay that was much more faithful to the original game, but they ended up scraping it. Mostly due to the director if I remember correctly, when you get people with suits and money backing a project you lose creative freedom a lot of times.

Hell I work as a web designer, and day in day out I sell my soul and design skills down the river because clients and sales people want things a certain way.

[Don]

You already have the blueprints to make something reasonably good, otherwise you wouldn't be converting in the first place. Let's say you're going to make a new Star Wars whatever from some latest movie. We know Star Wars converts readily to space shooter games. It's usually okay at being action games. We're pretty sure it doesn't make a good turn-based RPG or RTS. So it doesn't matter what this incarnation of Star Wars is, you'd probably expect an action based game that has some space shooter elements and the Force. Now you can obviously botch the actual game itself, but you at least shouldn't have a case where you started with a Star Wars turn-based RPG which probably just isn't going to work.

In fact, Star Wars is probably the one franchise that does conversions reasonably well. I'm not aware of any game in the franchise that obviously plays poorly to its strengths save for the one RTS game they have and the one 1on1 fighter game they have, and these mistakes don't get repeated.

[Kupek]

You already have the blueprints to make something reasonably good, otherwise you wouldn't be converting in the first place.

That's what I'm saying is not true. My claim is that what makes a work good in any given medium is so ingrained in that medium that it does not give you a blueprint for another medium.

[Don]

You at least always have the basic characters, story, and the world set up. Star Wars in any medium still always involves space battles, Jedis and Sith, the Force, and in most era will always feature Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and so on. I'm not going to say it's guaranteed success but certainly you've saved a lot of work that'd normally go into creating a new brand new world.

Even if you didn't start with something very good, it shouldn't get much worse when you convert. Naruto from manga to anime didn't become worse for the most part, since it seems to be just exactly copy the same stuff until it caught up. Prince of Tennis was able to retain an equal level of incompetence in either medium. You should at least be able to perform at a level that's not significantly worse than whatever you started with.

[Tessian]

Kupek's got the right point-- every medium is different and they DON'T translate between each other well because of that. Each media has its own constraints and strong suits. The easiest one to point out is the difference between movies and books. In books you have to describe everything to a person, AND you can spend plenty of time doing so; there's no time limit to a book. Movies are almost 100% graphic rather than text, so not only do they have to create the world for you, but they also have a time limit. You simply can't tell everything in a movie that you can in a book. People will read books for months, picking them up and reading a chapter here or there, but they wont' do that with a movie. Even 1.5-2 hours is the average movie length, LOTR stretched it to 3 - 3.5 but that really wears on the audience and is pretty much the absolute length.

Nobody's going to sit through a movie over 3 hours long, but they'll spend half a year reading a 800page book. The process of converting 800 pages of solid text into a < 3 hour movie is in itself an EXTREMELY difficult process. Movie adaptations of books live or die based on this process, the same can be said of other mediums-- I just picked the most obvious

[Don]

Kupek's got the right point-- every medium is different and they DON'T translate between each other well because of that. Each media has its own constraints and strong suits. The easiest one to point out is the difference between movies and books. In books you have to describe everything to a person, AND you can spend plenty of time doing so; there's no time limit to a book. Movies are almost 100% graphic rather than text, so not only do they have to create the world for you, but they also have a time limit. You simply can't tell everything in a movie that you can in a book. People will read books for months, picking them up and reading a chapter here or there, but they wont' do that with a movie. Even 1.5-2 hours is the average movie length, LOTR stretched it to 3 - 3.5 but that really wears on the audience and is pretty much the absolute length.

Nobody's going to sit through a movie over 3 hours long, but they'll spend half a year reading a 800page book. The process of converting 800 pages of solid text into a < 3 hour movie is in itself an EXTREMELY difficult process. Movie adaptations of books live or die based on this process, the same can be said of other mediums-- I just picked the most obvious

An 800 page book can still be summarized in 3 pages. I'm not saying this is a trivial task but if you've guys who are supposed to be in charge of big money and don't even have the skill to do this, then they probably shouldn't be doing this stuff in the first place. I've never read LOTR but nothing in the movie makes me wonder what the heck is happening. I'm not talking about a purist will tell you all the background info of some specific scene. I only need something that roughly makes sense. I don't need to know the history of halflings or how the elven language works.

Some of Jin Yong's book go on for 2000 pages. All of his books have a plot that's something like 'main guy fights people, beats them and becomes more powerful, and picks up girls along the way.' And this guy is supposed to be like the Chinese Tolkien. If you take one of Jin Yong's books and make it into a 2 hour movie, you'd probably have less girls to pick up along the way and less people to beat up compared to if you make it into a 30 episode X 1 hour TV series, but the underlying story doesn't change very much. Now the Chinese is pretty consistent at coming up with cheap flicks and all of Jin Yong's conversions are consistently medicore, but they are not worse or better whether the it's a 2 hour movie or a 30 hour drama series.

[Kupek]

Summirzing an 800 page book in 3 pages and summarizing an 800 page book in 3 good pages are two different things. One can be done by a middle school student with the patience to read an 800 page book. The other requires the skill of a good author.

You concede that it's not a trivial task, which I equate with saying "it's hard," so we may be violently agreeing at this point. But I get the impression you feel there should be some mechanical process that lets you transform a good work in one medium to a good work in another. My reason for why this isn't so is that adapting another's work is still a creative process.

[Don]

I'd say with the frequency these spinoffs occur, if the process is creative, it must have happened enough times that it can be made somewhat automated.

Take Prince of Tennis, which starts out as garbage manga. During its transformation to Anime, the guy who did it figure that:

1. People who like this stuff are usually drooling fangirls.
2. None of the tennis stuff in PoT ever made any sense anyway.

Now it's easy to get resources to know who the female viewers consider as the hottest guys in PoT, so the story was rewritten to accomodate for people like Atobe, Sanada, and Tezuka for more screen time. Also, the Anime abandoned all pretense of this is supposed to be logical so you start seeing stuff like the dinosaur went extinct because of a smash from Tezuka. This, in term, helps to make some of the memorial quotes like: "Sanada hurt his foot because he was moving at the speed of light, which is a bit too straining since it exceeds the limitation of humans" actually sound like parody as opposed to utterly ridiculous.

The result is that the Anime ended up selling like hotcakes and has its own series of spinoffs merchandise that features the hot guys of PoT. There's no way either can be considered good on a merit-based basis, but it sure satisfied the core fans of the series.

I'd say that at worst you should at least always come up with something that a purist might label as 'sellout', but even a sellout implies a lot of people must thought it was good. Boda Fett crawling out of the pit might be a sell out, but obviously most of the fanbase preferred that over just having him die. It should not be too hard to figure out what are the marketable qualities of your stuff when you need to change medium. I'd prefer the transition to be more than just a fan service galore, but a lot of stuff even fails as fan service.

[Kupek]

I submit there is a difference between good and engineered to be popular.

[Don]

I submit there is a difference between good and engineered to be popular.

Sure, but what happens when it's neither? I don't know how something can miss so far that it's neither good nor popular.

[Kupek]

Most of everything is both not good and not popular.

[Don]

Well I assume if something is making a conversion, it is at least either good or popular, since if it's neither you probably won't be porting it to some other medium. And it seems like it's relatively easy to capture success in terms of popularity. Like if you take FF7, it's like when in doubt add Cloud and Sephiroth in a sword fight = guaranteed popular. Prince of Tennis is garbage but it's popular, and its conversions retained its popularity, so it can't be *that* hard.

[Zeus]

I got through the first 6 volumes of this post but didn't have enough time to read the last 4.

Basically, like Kup said, they're different mediums. So if you're doing a conversion, you don't convert it exactly from one medium to another. You basically have to convert the essence or spirit of the work. Even Lord of the Rings, arguably one of the best book-to-movie conversions ever, took liberties, lots of them. Jackson and co took the essence of the book and translated it to a movie. Look at the outrage the omission of Tom Bombadil caused.

Also, often people who are doing the conversion ain't fans of the material. So they don't care about the essence or spirit. It's an art form not science.

[Don]

Like I said before I don't really care if some purist has a problem with the new converted work that didn't go into the history of the elves as much as it should. That's not what I'm concerned about. It's stuff that'd be equivalent of say a Star Wars turn-based RPG where it has to make you wonder anybody could possibly thought that was a good idea that I don't get, and there are a lot of such examples.

[Zeus]

Like I said before I don't really care if some purist has a problem with the new converted work that didn't go into the history of the elves as much as it should. That's not what I'm concerned about. It's stuff that'd be equivalent of say a Star Wars turn-based RPG where it has to make you wonder anybody could possibly thought that was a good idea that I don't get, and there are a lot of such examples.

Not all of the weird ideas are bad. I mean, Pokemon Snap was a bit odd, an on-rails picture-taking game based on a turn-based RPG. But it worked very, very well.

It's all back to the essence/spirit thing. If you can sense that it belongs in whatever source material it's from, it'll be good.

[Don]

Well Pokemon is generic enough that you can probably fit it into a lot of stuff.

Like I said, a Star Wars turn based RPG should just raise a red flag before you start doing one, unless you're absolutely sure it's going to work. Obviously a purist will always find some problem going between mediums, but even if you just look at stuff with the standard of the masses, a lot of conversion simply fails that test. I don't know anything about Hulk, but from what I understand it's about this big guy that smashes stuff when he gets angry. Whether you make it a game or a movie or anything else, you have to at least remember that's what makes this character interesting. And I don't think you can argue just because some poeple aren't fans of this stuff that they can miss the boat on something so obvious. You don't have to be a fan of FF7 to know people will buy anything with Cloud and Sephiroth in it.

[Don]

Also I don't think a conversion has to necessarily belong in the original world. I stopped thinking the original work is some kind of sacred work that cannot be surpassed or modified or contradicted a long time ago. If Cloud can make a deal with Hades to bring Aeris back and then fight Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts in the name of greater sales, I am quite willing to accept cool stuff that isn't exactly the pure. Omega returns in Megaman ZX for no reason whatsoever, so it's not like there's very much integrity to begin especially in the world of gaming. Even Star Wars allowed Boda Fett to live because he was popular.