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movies made from TV shows royally suck. And it's why I despise it when they make them and fuck up the whole idea.
1. The TV shows featured a specific actor that might have come out of nowhere--it was rare to find a hugely well-known actor playing a part. The series then was immortalized with those actors. Some of those leads did find enormous fame after the TV series, but most of them simply went on to another TV series. Back in the day, there were two distinct forms of production--TV and film. TV was far superior in terms of continuity, because then the shows were usually self-contained per episode, and the format was designed for smaller stories and anthology shows.
2. Producers insist on giving prime roles in some of their TV inspired shows to big box-office actors, hoping to make the film do better at the theatres. And more often than not, the actors are not suited to the roles. I think if they are planning on putting a TV show inspired film together, that they need to be completely aware of this and try to find actors to better assume the roles.
3. One instant of the above that grated me was the Wild Wild West movie. I'm sorry, but neither Kevin Kline nor Will Smith made the grade as Jim West and Artemus Gordon. They could not capture the essence of the TV show and the movie suffered enormously because of it.
4. One area where the film industry actually made a solid film was the Twilight Zone film. It worked because they kept the format, and since the original series told these "shorter" tales as an anthology, the film was able to match the tone of the original.
5. The world was a whole other place in the 60s and 70s, and there is no way to capture the emotions of the time. Most shows used the atmosphere of those days to mold the series, and trying to duplicate that for a modern audience simply doesn't work.
6. Film producers have no imaginations. At least that's what the whole industry says to me. This also happens on contemporary TV as well, but it's in film where the enormous budgets allow them to get away with shoddy productions and abject failures. By turning to old TV shows and hiring a BO name to star, they are destroying both the original series and their own credibility. Let's face it: fewer movies are made each year and more of those being issued are based on some other material, including TV. Some films DO succeed because they are able to be fresh enough and have superior casting. Others don't work, and it's because the producers have turned a "small" story into a "big" one. Consider: Spiderman has the advantage that no one remembers the original TV show or the TV cartoon series. Since these all were inspired by a comic book, and that the comic book itself has evolved over its lifetime, they were able to use modern society to plot it out. As a result, the attempt to modernize the film worked out fine.
This was also the case with Superman. If you are building on a source that remains constant, you can work with it. The 50s series and the "retelling" in the films are just different aspects of the same tale. Batman, too, was able to work because of that.
Some movies failed right from the start. The Saint turned into just another James Bond rip-off instead of adhering to the original series' strengths; Bewitched failed because they removed the reasons that the show was a success--once again, "smaller" stories worked out on the show, but the movie tried to make a whole new scenario; Starsky and Hutch failed because they made it into a comedy; and My Favorite Martian movie failed because the original series was most popular because of the actors playing their roles.
I think that if film producers had better imaginations to create wholly new ideas that they could do better than trying to attract the audience of a TV show that is over 40 years old. Their attempts are just a waste of a lot of money that could be better put to use elsewhere.
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