Fill-in-blanks adaptation

[Frosty of Forochel]

One fill-in-theblanks adaptation maybe worth discussing is Wicked.

I actually despise it for a number of choices in the adaptation, but it purports to be a prequel to Wizard of Oz. The trouble comes with asking what version is Maguire adapting: the original books or the MGM film? For rights purposes he seems to be treading a line between both, which doesn’t work. Because mGM made thr witch green and that’s a plot point in Maguire, but it isn’t Baum. Yet he does bring in Baum references even while subverting and undermining it.

And then you get to the musical which downplays some of the darkest worst choices. So there you have an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation.

Meanwhile, I was actually kind of into Tarsem’s Emerald City series, which fully reimagined the themes of the books.

Because Oz is public don’t there is a lit of discussion to be had in how it’s been adapted over the last century.

 

[Yard Sard]

I wanted someone to mention Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

What a weird little idiosyncratic passion project that is

 

[Yard Sard]

Ha, I listened longer and someone did mention R&GAD. That'll teach me.

But the Wicked example is very apt, and I would say that there are lots of musicals that do the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks adaptation with their source material simply because they have to have to have twice the running time of the movie they're made from. All the Disney ones, for example; they add scenes and songs and characters until you've got a three-hour performance of a 90-minute movie. Or Shrek, or The Addams Family. They all end up building a big, fully fleshed-out presentation from something that was much sparser or shorter to begin with.

Similarly there are high-concept musicals that pull together loosely thematically connected properties and settings into an (arguably) coherent whole; Seussical for instance.

I'd bet if an exhaustive list of the fill-in-the-blanks adapations were to be made, it would be jam-packed with musicals.

 

[Yard Sard]

Come to think of it though — almost the entire history of the Oz property is a series of fill-in-the-blanks adaptations, including by Baum himself.

Famously half his own series was him taking what he had hoped to turn into a separate and unconnected story in its own right, with its own characters and universe (Trot, Rinkitink, etc) and shoehorning it awkwardly into Oz at the last minute, finding a previously unexplored corner of his world map to cram them into.

And then the successor authors were basically "ascended fanfiction" writers who spent their tenures doing basically the same exact thing. Often stylistically they went off in their own idiosyncratic directions, like Ruth Plumly Thompson doing medieval European swords-and-sorcery and knights-errant kinds of tales where Baum's taste was more toward Far Eastern dragons and South Asian lions and tigers. But there was always plenty of map left to scribble things into the corners.

I'll bet a fascinating study could be done of Oz, and I'd absolutely be down for an Olsen series on it 😀

 

[MithLuin]

Most adaptations of the Bible (particularly the Torah) fall into this category as well - The Ten Commandments, or Noah, or yes, the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream coat.