More Adaptation Station Blog Posts That Weren’t to Be

Posted on October 23, 2026 by stationmaster

Sorry, no Halloween post this year.

Some of my readers may remember that a while back I did a blog post about ideas for this blog that ended up remaining ideas. I enjoyed that so much I’m doing it again here. Last time, I eventually ended up making some of those rejected ideas into real posts. That’s probably not going to happen this time since, well, you’ll probably see why. This time, they’re all about movies and I’ll go through them alphabetically.

Coyote vs Acme (2026)

I’ve mentioned before that I feel bad that so little space on this blog is devoted to non-Disney animated films. Most of my Animation Station series are about Disney stuff and, since I’m really interested in fairy tales and classic children’s fantasies, plenty of my regular Adaptation Station posts are too. With the cinematic release of the delightful Coyote vs Acme, I had a great opportunity to finally write about Warner Bros’s classic Looney Tunes characters. It would also have been the second time I got to recommend a movie to my readers while it was still in theaters.[1]The first time was The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. However, Coyote vs Acme is the kind of movie that it’s impossible to describe in detail without spoiling. Such is the nature of high concept comedies. The best thing I could probably have done was a two-sentence blog post, saying, “This movie’s great! Go see it!” If I tried to get into the film’s flaws, I’d probably end up underselling it since its virtues can be expressed in single sentences[2]For example, Will Forte and John Cena are hilariously deadpan straight men to the cartoon characters. whereas its problems-or potential problems-require some explication.[3]For example, some viewers may be disappointed that some of the biggest stars of Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird) get barely anything funny to say. You can argue that this was … Continue reading

The most interesting thing I can say about Coyote vs Acme is that it won me over even though I’m not a fan of the classic Wile E. Coyote vs Road Runner shorts. I prefer the ones that pit Wile E. against Bugs Bunny. In those, he talks and it’s fun to see this arrogant character humiliated. While the Road Runner cartoons are funny for a few minutes, I usually end feeling sorry for the coyote by the end of them. Coyote vs Acme, however, pits him not against the Road Runner but against Acme, the corporation that makes all the traps and gadget he uses in his failed attempts at road runner hunting.[4]Wile E. is still ultimately trying to catch the Road Runner in Coyote vs Acme, of course, but that’s not where the viewers’ interest lies. Rooting for him is a feature, not a bug.[5]Maybe I shouldn’t say “bug” since apparently one of Chuck Jones’s rules for the Road Runner shorts was that the audience feel sorry for Wile E. Coyote by the end.

David Copperfield (1993)

One of my favorite posts that I’ve ever done was the one about that weird old VHS, The Talking Christmas Tree. It was just fun to describe something so outlandish. I’ve sometimes wanted to do another post along those lines and a good candidate for the topic seemed to be this animated adaptation of David Copperfield, which portrays all the characters as anthropomorphic animals after the fashion of Disney’s Robin Hood. But while it’s silly compared to the original book-young David is forced to work in a cheese factory with something called a cheese monster lurking in the basement-it’s not actually that entertainingly silly. For a children’s cartoon, it’s actually quite slow paced and dull. Even the unintentionally funny moments, like a weirdly Freudian fantasy sequence where young David imagines himself as a knight in shining armor saving his mother from a dragon that looks like Murdstone, are few and far between. It might be entertaining to describe the plot for a while, but I’d get bored before I got to the end and so would any hypothetical readers.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

Part of me feels like I’ve written enough about Disney nostalgia bait movies but if I were to write about another one, this would be it. In my experience, movies of mixed quality are more interesting than totally good or totally bad ones. And this remake is a good example of what I like about Disney’s recent nostalgia bait movies while also being a good example of the problems with what I’ve termed Type B nostalgia bait movies.

You see, on an intellectual level, I honestly do think it makes a lot of improvements on the 1989 animated Little Mermaid‘s plot. In that movie, the reason the sea king hated humans so much was that they killed and ate fish which was…actually pretty reasonable.[6]Of course, in real life, sea creatures eat each other all the time but I’m not sure if the movie knows that. When you think about it, the little mermaid’s love for the creatures that habitually killed and ate her friends was rather creepy. In the remake, humans kill mermaids but only because they superstitiously believe they bring bad luck. This creates a situation where the sea king’s prejudice is understandable, but his daughter’s defense of humans make sense too. The problem is ignorance, not malice. And I like that the mermaid rather than the prince is the one to defeat the sea witch in this version. No, it’s not that I have a problem with stories about heroes rescuing heroines. If I did, Nicholas Nickleby would not be one of my favorite stories. But I feel that since the little mermaid was the one who made the mistake of bargaining with the sea witch, which led to her rise in power, it makes more dramatic sense for her to be the one to save the day, redeeming herself.[7]And, for the record, the prince still has a moment in the climax where he saves the mermaid. I also find the remake’s slower paced ending to be more emotional than the faster paced one of the 1989 movie.

But not all the changes made to the story work as well. A few are clunky and not even all of the ones I like are executed brilliantly. For example, while I approve of changing the climax so the mermaid is the one to save the day, the remake simply switches her role with the prince’s in the 1989 climax rather than doing anything really original or interesting. While Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer-King are appealing as the young lovers and the second half of the movie, focusing on their romance, is the better half, few of the other actors make much of an impression compared to the cast of the 1989 Mermaid.[8]Melissa McCarthy does occasionally bring a layer of tragedy to her villain, which at least serves to differentiate her from the version voiced by Pat Carroll. And the first half of the movie suffers from trying to match the original beat for beat. The designs are pretty uncreative too. It never quite shakes the feeling that this was greenlit because recent Disney nostalgia bait movies had done well at the box office rather than because anyone had a great idea for a Little Mermaid remake. Art about which I have mixed feelings may make for interesting writing but I’m afraid with this one, my feelings are too mixed to come to any interesting conclusion. I can’t decide if the movie is a net improvement on the animated original, inferior to it at the end of the day, or about equal to it all things considered.

Peter Pan & Wendy (2023)

Since everyone who says they enjoy Disney nostalgia bait movies is called a “shill” for the company online, I’ve sometimes thought I should prove I’m not by writing about this movie, which I consider pretty bad. But the thing is it’s boringly bad, not interestingly bad. As long as I’m not forced to watch them, I don’t get mad at boring movies. And it’s not even the most boring of boring movies. I remember Jude Law being pretty good as Captain Hook and there being a couple of fun action scenes. Also, there are so many people complaining about Disney nostalgia bait movies that I find it boring too. I’d rather, if anything, do another contrarian post pointing out their virtues. I suppose I could do a post about Peter Pan & Wendy highlighting how some of its defects are not shared by the better DNB movies.[9]For example, I appreciate that some of them, such as Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016) Beauty and the Beast (2017) and (surprisingly) The Little Mermaid (2023), feature elements from older, … Continue reading But I think I’ll just not write about this particular Peter Pan. Anyway, even if I needed to prove I wasn’t a shill for Disney, I already did negative posts about Maleficent (2014), its sequel and Cruella (2021.)[10]Actually, my post about Cruella sort of ended up being a backhanded recommendation since the movie was so ridiculous I found it kind of engaging.

I confess though I sometimes have an idle inclination to rewatch this dull film, though I haven’t succumbed to it yet, since Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez is in it as a Lost Boy and I really enjoyed his performance in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2024.) It’d be interesting to see if he was always charismatic or if he just needed the right script and the right director.

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

I’ve mentioned before that I wish I could blog more about Shakespeare adaptations, but I’m held back by my views on nudity onscreen. I understand why Shakespeare movies include nudity since Shakespeare tends to use a lot of sexual metaphors and imagery in his language. But I still don’t like it. Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which features a lengthy look at Romeo’s bare backside and a brief but explicit glimpse of Juliet’s bare breasts, is a case in point. I might have given in and written about it anyway since the movie is so good but recent claims by the actors, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, that the nudity may not have been entirely consensual make me really not want to promote it.[11]Mind you, I think there are legitimate reasons to be cynical about those accusations but there are also reasons to be cynical about the nude scene itself.

If I were to do a blog post about this Romeo and Juliet, I would analyze how it consistently makes the younger characters appealing, even the bloodthirsty Tybalt, while caricaturing the older ones. I think this a legitimate interpretation of the original play to an extent. Shakespeare does give his most lyrical poetry to the younger generation while the older one speaks much more prosaically. But it’s also a bit of an oversimplification. Pretty much every character in Romeo and Juliet behaves unsympathetically at some point[12]Juliet sleeps with Romeo the night after he kills her cousin! Granted her cousin was a jerk and Shakespeare’s original audience believed that once she was married, her loyalty to her husband … Continue reading and every character at some point is an object of pity. The movie lessens this complexity, making some characters much more sympathetic than others but it doesn’t completely remove it. Franco Zeffirelli was an interesting interpreter of Shakespeare. The post I did about his Taming of the Shrew is one of my favorites. I wish he’d left behind more than three Shakespeare movies. I guess I could write about his Hamlet, but I don’t have much to say about that one.

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

This one I actually started writing before I threw in the towel. You see, I’ve sometimes regretted that I’ve blogged so much about Maleficent (2014), which I don’t really like, while not doing any posts about the 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty which is one of my favorite movies.[13]I did manage to sneak in a few things I love about it into my Maleficent posts. The reason for that is it’s a pretty popular movie and I don’t know if I have much to say about it that other blogs haven’t already said. And, as I wrote before, I don’t want this blog to be all about Disney. It occurred to me however that I could do a new kind of post about this particular movie, one that directly related to this blog’s theme of adaptations. The opening credits claim it’s based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault but there’s an argument to be made that the film’s story is actually closer to the Brothers Grimm version. I thought I could go through the movie’s plot and award it Grimm points for every detail that was closer to their story and Perrault points for every detail closer to his. Then it occurred to me I could also do this with the Faerie Tale Theatre episode; another great adaptation about which I’ve blogged before.[14]The credits for the episode actually don’t credit either literary version of the fairy tale.

But before I’d gotten very far with the project, I found it was less fun than I thought it’d be. Comparing four versions of the same story in one post was rather a headache. Even when I decided to do one post about the Disney movie and one about the Faerie Tale Theatre episode, it felt like a pain keeping track of which was which. And it didn’t help that I had to skip over many of the best parts of both the movie and the episode since they were original and came from neither Perrault nor Grimm, making them irrelevant to the post’s topic. I just couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to read my post when they could just read both literary Sleeping Beauties and then watch the two adaptations.

Wonka (2023)

While this movie was generally well received, if not enthusiastically so, a criticism of it I’ve seen online is that the main character isn’t creepy enough to be Willy Wonka. I’ve thought of doing a post arguing that the idea that W.W. has to be creepy comes from movie adaptations and not from the original book. Well, that’s not entirely true. In the literary Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka has moments that can be interpreted as creepy, but he generally just seems like a guy who’s really enthusiastic about making chocolate and is thrilled to finally have the opportunity to show his creations off to people. Timothee Chalamet’s Willy Wonka matches that description nicely. It’s true there are other aspects of the character he doesn’t embody but it’s fair to say that earlier depictions of the character didn’t embody the more genial qualities of Willy Wonka.[15]I’m tempted to say Johnny Depp’s Wonka in the 2005 movie didn’t embody anything from the book, but I know there are people who really like that adaptation. Just compare Roald Dahl’s description of the character on the boat ride through the tunnel to the famously creepy version in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Mr. Wonka was jumping up and down in the back of the boat and calling to the rowers to row faster and faster still. He seemed to love the sensation of whizzing through a white tunnel in a pink boat on a chocolate river and he clapped his hands and laughed and kept glancing at his passengers to see if they were enjoying it as much as he.

But if I were to write a defense of this prequel, I’d want to round up quotes from around the internet criticizing its depiction of Willy Wonka to make sure I wasn’t attacking a strawman. And I don’t think I’m enthusiastic enough about the project to do that. For one thing, again, the movie was generally well received so I don’t think it necessarily needs a big defense. Nor do I feel it necessarily deserves one. For another thing, it’s clearly supposed to be a prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, not the original book so arguing that this Wonka is somewhat similar to the one from the latter rather than the former doesn’t hold up very well. And while the film is generally true to the spirit of Dahl, with its grotesquely evil villains who get a humiliating comeuppance, blandly nice heroes who go from rags to riches, and pleasingly absurd plot points, it doesn’t do any of those elements as well as he did at his best. For me, it was a fun thing to watch once and that was it. Of course, I’ve written blog posts about movies I’ve enjoyed even less so…maybe someday.

I feel like these abandoned ideas for blog posts aren’t as interesting as the ones in my other post about posts that weren’t to be. Most of them are just “I’d like to write about this movie,” not “I have something specific to say about this movie.” I doubt I’ll get any comments asking me to expand them, this time. But, hey, if you disagree with me and find them intriguing, comment away. And I promise my next blog post will be a real one.

References

References
↑1 The first time was The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
↑2 For example, Will Forte and John Cena are hilariously deadpan straight men to the cartoon characters.
↑3 For example, some viewers may be disappointed that some of the biggest stars of Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird) get barely anything funny to say. You can argue that this was intentional though. The movie is trying to deconstruct or maybe reconstruct classic cartoon characters, treating them like real human beings and not just clowns.
↑4 Wile E. is still ultimately trying to catch the Road Runner in Coyote vs Acme, of course, but that’s not where the viewers’ interest lies.
↑5 Maybe I shouldn’t say “bug” since apparently one of Chuck Jones’s rules for the Road Runner shorts was that the audience feel sorry for Wile E. Coyote by the end.
↑6 Of course, in real life, sea creatures eat each other all the time but I’m not sure if the movie knows that.
↑7 And, for the record, the prince still has a moment in the climax where he saves the mermaid.
↑8 Melissa McCarthy does occasionally bring a layer of tragedy to her villain, which at least serves to differentiate her from the version voiced by Pat Carroll.
↑9 For example, I appreciate that some of them, such as Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016) Beauty and the Beast (2017) and (surprisingly) The Little Mermaid (2023), feature elements from older, literary versions of the stories, showing that the filmmakers did research beyond watching the original Disney movies. Peter Pan & Wendy, on the other hand, makes mistakes about Peter Pan lore I didn’t know anyone could make. For example, it emphasizes that Tinker Bell can’t talk when anyone who’s read J. M. Barrie or even watched the average adaptation knows she speaks but can only speak the fairy language.
↑10 Actually, my post about Cruella sort of ended up being a backhanded recommendation since the movie was so ridiculous I found it kind of engaging.
↑11 Mind you, I think there are legitimate reasons to be cynical about those accusations but there are also reasons to be cynical about the nude scene itself.
↑12 Juliet sleeps with Romeo the night after he kills her cousin! Granted her cousin was a jerk and Shakespeare’s original audience believed that once she was married, her loyalty to her husband should outrank her loyalty to her birth family. But Juliet forgives Romeo so quickly that I think Shakespeare must have wanted his audience to interrogate their belief.
↑13 I did manage to sneak in a few things I love about it into my Maleficent posts.
↑14 The credits for the episode actually don’t credit either literary version of the fairy tale.
↑15 I’m tempted to say Johnny Depp’s Wonka in the 2005 movie didn’t embody anything from the book, but I know there are people who really like that adaptation.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Disneyfication of Long John Silver

Posted on August 29, 2026 by stationmaster

Are we, as a culture, forgetting that John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is the bad guy?

Spoilers ahoy! To explain what I mean, I’m going to have the reveal crucial plot points from the original book, Disney’s 1950 movie adaptation, Muppet Treasure Island (1996) and Treasure Planet (2002.) You have been warned. It’s true that in the book, John Silver keeps the other mutineers from killing young hero Jim Hawkins, but this is explicitly so Jim and the other good guys will put in a good word for him if he ever stands trial back in England. When it seems like the treasure will be in his grasp, Jim can tell that “All else had been forgotten” and “he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the Hispaniola under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at first intended, laden with crimes and riches.” Then when the treasure isn’t in his grasp after all and his crew turns on him, he teams up with Jim again, giving him a pistol, but Jim is less pleased by this than disgusted by Silver’s mercenariness. In the end, John Silver escapes with a portion of the treasure and Jim and his comrades are “pleased to be so cheaply quit of him.” Jim wishes Silver well but in a rather backhanded way.

That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old Negress[1]Stevenson’s word, not mine., and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.

This blog post is going to look at Disney’s three adaptations of Treasure Island in chronological order to demonstrate how each one makes Silver more genuinely friendly to Jim than the version before until he finally becomes an outright hero. It should be noted that the Disney company isn’t alone in making this character more sympathetic or positive than the original literary John Silver.[2]The 1999 Columbia movie actually ends up making him the hero and Captain Smollett, Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney the villains, completely inverting the book’s moral universe. But sticking to Disney adaptations simplifies things and makes for a catchier blog post title.[3]Also, it’s more convenient since I have access to a Disney+ account.

The 1950 live action movie is the one that sticks closest to the original book, which, I suppose, is what you’d hope, it being the only straightforward adaptation Disney has done. No puppets or sci fi or anything. The biggest change it makes is how it depicts Silver’s ultimate escape. In the book, he makes a break for it while most of the heroes are elsewhere. In the movie, he takes Jim Hawkins (Bobby Driscoll) as a prisoner. But when the boy refuses to help him, Silver (Robert Newton) finds he can’t bring himself to kill Jim. Jim, in turn, finds himself unable to see the man, whom he’d once thought of as a friend, struggle helplessly to shove off his longboat and assists him to escape. He feels a bit guilty for this and is relieved to hear Dr. Livesey (Denis O’Dea) say “I could almost find it in my heart to hope (Silver) makes it.”

While none of that is from the book, it’s not too big a stretch. Practically every other scene is true to the source material. I suspect the motivation behind the addition was to make the climax of the story more exciting, more than it was to soften Silver’s character and his relationship with Jim. Muppet Treasure Island goes further. In an early scene, when Silver (Tim Curry) learns that Jim (Kevin Bishop)’s father is dead, he seems genuinely sorry for him.[4]In both this movie and Treasure Planet, the absence of Jim’s father hangs heavier over him and the story than it does in the book which dispenses with the father without much fuss. When this Silver’s crew turns on him, he actually tells Jim to make a run for it while he holds them off by himself. “Why are you doing this for me?” asks Jim. “Because I like you, boy,” Silver replies. “I hope you didn’t think I was lying about that.” And that does seem to be the truth. There’s no indication or hardly any, as there is in the book, that Silver is saving Jim for reasons of self-preservation. In a scene similar to the 1950 adaptation’s climax, Silver can’t bring himself to shoot Jim and Jim can’t bring himself to condemn Silver to death by preventing his escape. Moreover, this version of Silver expresses genuine admiration of Jim’s moral qualities, telling him, “You’re honest and brave and true,” adding ruefully, “You didn’t learn that from me.” Earlier, Silver had forced Jim to hand over his late father’s compass, but he returns it to him as a parting gesture of genuine friendliness.

The Disney adaptation that goes furthest in softening John Silver’s villainy is the animated Treasure Planet. I’d argue that this, rather than the science fiction setting, is the biggest change it makes to the story.[5]OK, maybe the second biggest change. Here Silver (voiced by Brian Murray) becomes an outright father figure to Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt.) When Jim is depressed, wrongly believing he was responsible for the death of Mr. Arrow (Roscoe Lee Browne)[6]Interestingly, in the 1950 Treasure Island, Jim actually was responsible, having given John Silver access to the liquor that he used to get Mr. Arrow (David Davies) drunk., Silver encourages him, assuring him he has “the makings of greatness” in him. Closeups on Silver’s face, when Jim isn’t looking at it, assure us that he’s genuinely motivated by compassion and isn’t just manipulating the boy. Later, a mutineer called Scroop (Michael Wincott), who corresponds to Israel Hands from the book[7]There’s another pirate in the movie who’s actually named Hands, but he doesn’t really have Israel’s role in the story., accuses Silver of having a soft spot for Jim, he claims, “I cozied up to that kid to keep him off our scent.” Jim overhears this and sadly believes it, but the viewers don’t. At the movie’s climax, Silver has to choose between escaping with a boatload of treasure or saving Jim’s life and he chooses the latter. Consequently, Jim allows Silver to escape in the end much more cheerfully than he does in either of the other Disney adaptations. As a parting gift, Silver actually gives him some of the treasure so he can fix up his mother (Laurie Metcalf)’s inn, which Silver and his crew had earlier destroyed in their search for the treasure map.[8]In this version, most of the treasure ends up being destroyed in the climax. See the movie if you want details or check out the Wikipedia synopsis. The movie even ends with Jim warmly reminiscing about the pirate chief, implying that he, rather than the more consistently virtuous captain (Emma Thompson) or doctor (David Hyde Pierce), was his true mentor.

I didn’t write this blog post to bash any of these adaptations.[9]Well, I confess I don’t really like Treasure Planet, but Silver’s character is probably the best thing about it. For me, the comic relief characters are what really don’t work. In a way, the fact that they all try to make John Silver less of a complete villain is a tribute to the character. As with the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist fame[10]“The Disneyfication of the Artful Dodger” could be its own blog post., adapters enjoy Silver so much that they want him to be something better than he is in the text. After all, the literary Silver may be a monster but he’s also the most charismatic character in the book.[11]Truth be told, he might be the only really memorable character in the book. He’s certainly more competent and admirable than the other villains, a pathetically greedy, superstitious and alcohol-addicted lot. But, as with the Artful Dodger, I fear, especially in an age when more kids have Disney+ subscriptions than will read the book, that we, as a culture, are losing sight of what the made original character memorable in the first place and how much of his charm was meant to be deceptive.

References

References
↑1 Stevenson’s word, not mine.
↑2 The 1999 Columbia movie actually ends up making him the hero and Captain Smollett, Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney the villains, completely inverting the book’s moral universe.
↑3 Also, it’s more convenient since I have access to a Disney+ account.
↑4 In both this movie and Treasure Planet, the absence of Jim’s father hangs heavier over him and the story than it does in the book which dispenses with the father without much fuss.
↑5 OK, maybe the second biggest change.
↑6 Interestingly, in the 1950 Treasure Island, Jim actually was responsible, having given John Silver access to the liquor that he used to get Mr. Arrow (David Davies) drunk.
↑7 There’s another pirate in the movie who’s actually named Hands, but he doesn’t really have Israel’s role in the story.
↑8 In this version, most of the treasure ends up being destroyed in the climax. See the movie if you want details or check out the Wikipedia synopsis.
↑9 Well, I confess I don’t really like Treasure Planet, but Silver’s character is probably the best thing about it. For me, the comic relief characters are what really don’t work.
↑10 “The Disneyfication of the Artful Dodger” could be its own blog post.
↑11 Truth be told, he might be the only really memorable character in the book.
Posted in Comparing Different Adaptations | Tagged | Comments Off on The Disneyfication of Long John Silver

The Best of Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales & Legends

Posted on July 11, 2026 by stationmaster

This is a post I wish I’d thought of doing before for the United States of America’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Actually, I had thought of doing it before. After all, I’ve done three blog posts about Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. Why not one about Tall Tales & Legends, her very similar show about American folk heroes? It’s true that Tall Tales & Legends was a less famous series than Faerie Tale Theatre but to my way of thinking, that just makes a blog post about it more potentially interesting. However, I felt like I wouldn’t be as qualified to write a blog post about adaptations of American tall tales as I was about adaptations of (mostly) European fairy tales. Still, with the big anniversary of my country, I feel compelled to write about something distinctly American which isn’t easy for me as my tastes tend towards English literature. I do have a soft spot in my heart for this show though. Hopefully, this post will be better late than never.

Tall Tales & Legends, which ran from 1985 to 1987, followed closely in Faerie Tale Theatre‘s footsteps with famous actors, obviously fake scenery and special effects and surprisingly great music. Besides Duvall herself, production overlap between the two series included production designer Michael Erler, producers Bridget and Fredric S. Fuchs and writers Rod Ash and Mark Curtiss. If there’s a major difference between the shows, besides choice of subject matter, I’d say it’s that Tall Tales & Legends might be even more consistently goofy in tone than Faerie Tale Theatre. For one thing, the acting is hammier-and I mean that as a compliment. You really get the feeling that the actors on this show were having a wonderful time, playing their parts as broadly as possible. For another thing, Faerie Tale Theatre tried to do some serious adaptations of fairy tales alongside the more parodic ones. Maybe if Tall Tales had run longer than nine episodes, it would have dipped its toes more into drama. As it is, the show’s tongue stays pretty firmly in its cheek-except for a few memorable moments.[1]The story that the episode Darlin’ Clementine tells is a tragedy though not a particularly effective one.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I’m going to give a rundown of my four favorite episodes.[2]That’s not to say these are the only good episodes. Casey at the Bat and Ponce de Leon are fun too, just not my favorites. I don’t recommend The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Darlin’ … Continue reading

Pecos Bill

This episode takes many things from the traditional Pecos Bill mythos. Bill (Steve Guttenberg) is still raised by coyotes until discovered by a cowboy (Dick Schaal) near the Pecos River. He goes on to revolutionize cattle herding by inventing the lasso (though we don’t see him use a rattlesnake) and the branding iron. The adaptation even goes further than that and has him be responsible for the first bandanna, the first saloon brawl, the first stagecoach stickup and the first wanted poster. His horse, Widowmaker, is included in the episode and so is his love interest, Slew Foot Sue (Rebecca De Mornay) and her giant catfish though her tragic death is averted. And Pecos does indeed lasso and ride a tornado. All of those things however are given a new context by the episode’s original storyline which pits Pecos Bill against the antagonistic but not villainous governor Ambrose Peasley (Martin Mull) who wants to keep the state of Texas quiet and tidy. Speaking of Texas, if you hail from there, you may be offended all the cartoony stereotypes about the state which this episode perpetuates. But you may also be highly amused by this entertaining farce.

Johnny Appleseed

Whereas the Pecos Bill episode kept many incidents from the traditional tall tale while putting them in the context of a new story, this episode is pretty much an entirely original story. The only details from either the real John Chapman’s life or the legends of Johnny Appleseed are the basic idea of a man (Martin Short) traveling across America by foot, wearing a potato sack shirt and a pot for a hat, planting apple seeds. Funnily enough, the last time I blogged about a cinematic take on Johnny Appleseed, I wrote that it suffered from a lack of conflict. Even pacifist heroes need obstacles to nonviolently overcome. This episode answers that criticism by pitting Johnny against Jack Smith (Rob Reiner), a mustachioed, black hat-wearing town leader who is threatened by the new ideas that Johnny brings with him. Smith is such an obvious villain that you’ll laugh at the sight of him. That may not sound like a compliment but I mean it as one. The unsubtlety is clearly supposed to be funny. I’m not always a fan of Martin Short but he’s perfectly cast here too.

I suppose some may criticize this episode for being a “white savior narrative.” The Native Americans are portrayed as eating nothing but corn until Johnny introduces them to the apple and becomes their hero. Ridiculous? Of course, but to take offense is to miss that the white settlers are also portrayed as equally clueless until Johnny comes along and are, if anything, given less dignity than the native characters. The residents of Smithville are portrayed as only knowing how to hunt. Farming never even occurs to them until Johnny suggests it. It’s all part of the show’s tall tale spirit. You might as well complain that the Pecos Bill episode wrongly attributes the composition of the song, Yellow Rose of Texas, to its hero or that the Casey at the Bat episode wrongly attributes everything we associate with baseball to its hero or that the Ponce de Leon episode gets the etymology of the word alligator completely wrong.[3]Ponce dubs the beasts “ugly gaters” because they’re ugly and their jaws are like the gates of Hell. Of course, there are, no doubt, legitimate reasons to be offended by the Native Americans in Johnny Appleseed, like their costumes being stereotypical and inaccurate to the area, but stereotypes and inaccuracies are sort of this show’s Rason Detre. Either it works for you or it doesn’t.

Davy Crockett

Something I haven’t mentioned about Tall Tales & Legends yet is that the episodes typically use a framing device, something Faerie Tale Theatre seldom did. They typically begin in modern day with two characters, one of whom (typically, the younger one) will ask a question which the older one will answer by the telling the episode’s story. In this episode about Davy Crockett, the framing device is actually so elaborate that it becomes the main story. It begins in a classroom where a mysterious substitute teacher (Michael McKean) gives a rebellious young student named Ben Parker (Adam Carl)[4]His name is probably as a shoutout to actor Fess Parker who portrayed Davy Crockett on the Wonderful World of Disney. a biography of the famous frontiersman to read. Ben finds that whenever he reads the book, he is magically transported back into past where he meets Crockett (Mac Davis) and learns about courage and responsibility from him. (Amusingly, Ben becomes so invested in the book that his mother (Mimi Kennedy) is implied to suspect it may be pornographic in nature.)

Don’t let the fact that this episode starts out in a history class or involves time travel give you the impression it’s historically accurate. According to the biography Ben reads, “as stories about Davy become more plentiful, it became more difficult to tell truth from legend.” But you don’t have to be an expert on American history to guess that the talking raccoon, the bear who is defeated by Davy grinning at him, the other bear who is his pet and the scene of Davy hurling an approaching comet back into space belong to the legendary category. The hero’s squeaky clean, fatherly persona also owes more to the Disney version than to the real person. This is the third time in this blog post I find I’ve written something that sounds like a criticism and now have to hastily backtrack and clarify that I mean it as praise. Well, maybe “praise” is too strong a word. I wouldn’t recommend something so hagiographic be used in the classroom. But outside of the classroom, I find it charming. There’s plenty of the same enjoyable silliness that characterizes Tall Tales & Legends in general but there’s also a certain earnestness to this particular episode’s silliness. That scene with the comet may sound ridiculous but the music by Stephen Barber actually invests it with a kind of mythic power unusual for this show. Also unusual is the surprisingly emotional ending in which Ben has to bid farewell to Davy as he heads off to the Alamo. It’s one of the series’ biggest attempts to be dramatic, as opposed to comedic, and for me, it elevates the episode to my favorite.[5]If you’re confused why I didn’t save it for last, I’m writing about these in the order that Wikipedia lists them, not ranking them from least favorite to favorite.

Annie Oakley

We’ve seen this isn’t the only episode to be based on a real historical figure but it’s the one that could pass as a real biopic. “Everything I’m going to tell you in this tale is true and actually did happen-one way or another,” Shelley Duvall says cheekily in her intro. All of the major characters are based on real people including Phoebe Ann Mosey AKA Annie Oakley herself (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband, Frank Butler (Cliff De Young), her boss, Buffalo Bill Cody (Brian Dennehy) and her coworker Chief Sitting Bull (Nick Ramus.) And, compared to the characters in other episodes anyway, they feel like real people. There’s still plenty of the show’s trademark wackiness in evidence though. Not only is Annie portrayed as an amazing markswoman but as having great aim in general even as a baby. When she congratulates Queen Victoria (Lu Leonard) on her fiftieth jubilee, the monarch confides that she prefers “rustic simplicity. Windsor Castle. Now that’s simple living!” Still, this story does stay grounded in real history to an unusual extent for Tall Tales & Legends. And you know what? The combination of a relatively grounded story with the show’s signature style actually works, making something more fun than a serious biopic and more relatable than an average episode.

This series isn’t for everyone, but I do think it captures something of the American spirit. That can even be said of things it adds to the traditional folklore, such as Johnny Appleseed teaching the settlers to be self-sufficient, getting them out from under Jack Smith’s thumb or Pecos Bill’s wild and wooly ways inspiring the Texans to rebel against Governor Peasley. It’s all part of the American theme of the little guy going up against the big guy.[6]The show also touches on less admirable parts of United States’ legacy, mainly its treatment of Native Americans, though it probably doesn’t focus on it enough to make a modern liberal … Continue reading Of course, the larger-than-life heroes of these episodes aren’t entirely underdogs. With true American exaggeration and no apologies, they’re depicted doing things like lassoing cyclones and hurling comets back into the sky. Tall Tales & Legends may be even goofier than Faerie Tale Theatre, but it still has a real affection for its material. Americans watching just might feel a surge of patriotic pride or wipe a tear from their eyes as each episode ends.

OK, not really but, like I said, this show is all about the joys of hyperbole. Happy birthday, America.

References

References
↑1 The story that the episode Darlin’ Clementine tells is a tragedy though not a particularly effective one.
↑2 That’s not to say these are the only good episodes. Casey at the Bat and Ponce de Leon are fun too, just not my favorites. I don’t recommend The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Darlin’ Clementine or John Henry.
↑3 Ponce dubs the beasts “ugly gaters” because they’re ugly and their jaws are like the gates of Hell.
↑4 His name is probably as a shoutout to actor Fess Parker who portrayed Davy Crockett on the Wonderful World of Disney.
↑5 If you’re confused why I didn’t save it for last, I’m writing about these in the order that Wikipedia lists them, not ranking them from least favorite to favorite.
↑6 The show also touches on less admirable parts of United States’ legacy, mainly its treatment of Native Americans, though it probably doesn’t focus on it enough to make a modern liberal happy.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on The Best of Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales & Legends

Robin McKinley’s Fairy Tales (Well, Six Fairy Tales and One Legend)

Posted on June 19, 2026 by stationmaster

I’m going to do something new for me on this blog. Instead of blogging about a movie or a play or a miniseries that’s based on a book or a play or another movie, I’m blogging about books that are based on other books. That means there aren’t going to be many images in this post. Hopefully, my words will be engaging by themselves. We’ll see.

Robin McKinley is a wonderful writer, but I wouldn’t necessarily call her a great storyteller. Or maybe it’s the other way around. She does a great job telling her plots. It’s the plots themselves with which I take issue. In this post, I’m going to look at all her fairy tale adaptations, as well as The Outlaws of Sherwood, which is an adaptation of a popular legend, in the order they were published. [1]Why am I including The Outlaws of Sherwood? Because I feel like it. We’ll see what that tells us about McKinley’s evolution as an artist.

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty & the Beast (1978)

The main criticism that I’ve read of this book-not that there’s much criticism of it out there-is that it just retells the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast in novel form without putting any twist on it. That doesn’t bother me at all. I believe the original fairy tale is a strong enough story that it doesn’t need any big twist. And even if it did, McKinley’s telling isn’t entirely without original ideas. For one thing, the titular character’s name becomes an ironic one as she starts the book, in her own opinion anyway, as gawky and awkward. The nickname isn’t intended as sarcasm though. She got it when…you know what? I’m not going to spoil the story behind that. It’s entertaining and it appears right at the beginning of the first chapter, so it’s not like you need to read far to learn it.

Another fairly major twist on the classic fairy tale is that Beauty’s older sisters, Grace and Hope, aren’t negative characters. They actually have a very loving relationship with her and even get appealing love interests of their own. [2]Technically, the sisters had love interests in the fairy tale by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, but they were negative foils meant to make the Beast look better. When these sisters ask their father to bring them back riches and finery from the city, they’re clearly joking. And when Beauty begs the Beast to let her return to her family in this version, it’s because she wants to help her sister, not her father. As a matter of fact, every character we meet in the book is likeable. (When Beauty’s merchant father loses his money at the beginning, we’re told that some of his creditors would forgive his debts for friendship’s sake, but he refuses out of honor.) Beauty is a lovely, cozy, comfort read. I’m sorry that praise sounds condescending rather than hearty. This really is an excellent book. It’s full of likeable characters, the romance between Beauty and the Beast is compelling and best of all is the enchanted castle, which practically becomes a character in itself. When I read the book as a fantasy-loving kid, my inclination was to skip the early chapters about Beauty’s family’s descent into poverty and move to the countryside and go straight to the wonders of the castle. As an adult, I appreciate what a good job McKinley does of writing those early realistic parts and slowly introducing the ominous threat of magic. Beautifully written, sometimes dryly humorous, only occasionally eerie, but mostly warm and cozy, this Beauty shines.

The Door in the Hedge (1981)

This short story collection features two original fairy tales and two reimaginings of old ones. In them, McKinley’s goal seems to be to take stories that weren’t very romantic as told by the Brothers Grimm and make them so. This is especially true of the first one, The Princess and the Frog which is, of course, based on The Frog Prince. [3]Or The Frog King if you want to translate the original German literally. In McKinley’s version, it’s not a golden ball that Princess Rana accidentally drops in a pool, but a necklace gifted to her by her unwelcome suitor, the evil Prince Aliyander. (I love McKinley’s fantasy names.) On the one hand, she’s relieved to be rid of it since it was bewitched to enslave her. On the other, she’s terrified of what Aliyander will do if he doesn’t see her wearing it. So when a talking frog offers to retrieve the necklace for her in return for a small favor, she doesn’t ask questions. The Princess and the Frog is the shortest story in The Door in the Hedge but it’s a very gripping read. I feel it would be even better if there were an explanation for why the pool’s water has the effect on Aliyander’s magic that it does. The lack of an explanation though is pretty true to the spirit of the Brothers Grimm. The story operates more on emotional logic than on logical logic. Take it or leave it.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses sticks closer to its source material. The main difference is that the princesses aren’t just sneaking off to dance every night for fun. They’re under an evil spell and the beautiful subterranean world to which they go is much more sinister and downright demonic than it is in Grimm. [4]The anime series Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics does something similar with the story. This makes both the princesses and the soldier, who uncovers their secret, much more sympathetic characters and the prospect of the soldier marrying the eldest princess much more appealing. [5]My favorite version of the fairy tale, by the way, isn’t the Grimms’ but the one by Charles Deulin. I guess Andrew Lang agreed with me since that’s the version he included in his … Continue reading McKinley’s Twelve Dancing Princesses is a superb piece of writing. Her descriptive powers make the everyday castle just as magical as the underground one. I do feel like the story could have used an added complication in the middle though to make it more suspenseful. There’s an indication that the soldier might be corrupted by the magic of the underground world himself that could have been expanded. But, again, the lack of a complication is pretty true to Grimms’ fairy tales. [6]If you’d like my reviews of the two original stories, the first one, The Stolen Princess, begins wonderfully. McKinley does a great job getting you invested in the characters in only a short … Continue reading

The Outlaws of Sherwood (1988)

Robin Longbow isn’t nearly the great archer that his deceased forester father was, but when a couple of local bullies force him into a private archery contest one day, he wins by a lucky shot. The bullies aren’t happy and Robin accidentally kills one of them in self-defense. His friends, Much, a fellow yeoman, and Marian, a half-Saxon noblewoman, help hide him. They suggest that his story could be a rallying point for the oppressed Saxons and eventually, Robin is leading a band of heroic outlaws in Sherwood Forest.

The Outlaws of Sherwood is what TVTropes.org would call a Decon-Recon Switch of the Robin Hood mythos. When Much and Marian first make their proposal to Robin, he points out all the impracticalities and inconveniences that the more romantic Robin Hood stories ignore. “Do you understand what the isolation of living in Sherwood would mean? It would be a short life, for one thing; we would only be able to kill the king’s deer to feed ourselves for as long as our arrows held out, for we would not be able to buy steel and twine to make more. Even if we knocked a travelling fletcher on his head for his supplies, where could we leave the wood need for shafts to season, when we had not even a place to sleep dry?” He goes on like that for a couple of paragraphs. When Robin and Little John have their famous staff fight over who gets to cross a bridge, Robin is disgusted by his own pettiness. When the sheriff of Nottingham tries to entrap him by holding an archery contest with a golden arrow for a prize, Robin’s response is “And what would we do with a golden arrow?” Yet these outlaws ultimately prove to be as heroic and competent as their more romantically drawn counterparts (or nearly so anyway.) This balance between being a deconstruction and a reconstruction leads to genuine suspense as we’re not sure whether King Richard is going to pardon our heroes or punish them.

What keeps all the “demythification” from being simply boring is that the characterizations are so engaging. Of all the books discussed in this blog post, this is probably the funniest, largely thanks to Much’s wisecracking. It’s a good thing the humor and the characterizations are so good because the structure of the story isn’t the best. The first half is mostly character introductions-the book includes pretty much every famous figure from the legend and at least one major original character-with very little action. In the second half, there’s suddenly so much action and violence that it’s a little jarring, as if the book has turned into something totally different. When I first read The Outlaws of Sherwood, I found it worth a read but wasn’t sure if it would be worth more than that. Having given it a second read in preparation for this blog post, I’m glad I did so. It wouldn’t surprise me if someday I read it a third time.

Deerskin (1993)

The other books discussed in this blog post are Young Adult or could pass as Young Adult. Deerskin is for adults and I mean Adults. Seriously, the subject matter is so sensitive that I advise readers faint of stomach to just skip to the next section. It’s a complete 180 from the coziness of Beauty.

You see, Deerskin takes its inspiration from Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault. The premise of Donkeyskin is that a crazy king, grieving for the death of his beloved wife, realizes his daughter looks like her and lusts after the girl. To avoid being forced to marry her father, the princess flees the court, disguised in a magical donkey skin. It’s less gross to read than that description makes it sound. After all, it’s a fairy tale so the king’s sexual obsession isn’t depicted in detail. After Donkeyskin, as she’s called, runs away, the story focuses on her romance with a young prince and becomes a variation of Cinderella. [7]Jim Henson’s The Storyteller adapted a variant of the story in an episode, but their king didn’t want to marry his daughter any more than she wanted to marry him. The characters were … Continue reading McKinley, however, goes for the worst possible scenario. Her king beats and rapes his daughter, Lissar, before she manages to escape. Mercifully, this act isn’t described in detail. McKinley just writes that the king “did to her what he had come to do.” She doesn’t shy away from the ensuing pain and trauma though. Not at first anyway. Eventually, a benevolent goddess-like figure known as Moonwoman, loosely corresponding to the fairy godmother from Donkeyskin, not only gives Lissar her disguise but magically lets her forget her trauma until she’s strong enough to do so.

I’m surprised at myself for reading this book, considering its subject matter. It’s the kind of thing I would read because it was a college assignment rather than of my own free will. Generally, I restrict reading about incestuous rape to Greek mythology books and the Bible. The decision was due to a number of factors. (a) I had a sudden hankering for books by Robin McKinley that I hadn’t read before, (b) I was intrigued by her choice of a less famous fairy tale, (c) I wanted to write this blog post and (d) I was curious to see if her beautiful writing could make the intolerable tolerable. Well…it kind of did. I was sucked in initially by her depiction of the king’s creepy obsession with his beautiful queen, the queen’s creepy obsession with herself and their daughter’s lonely, neglected childhood. As sickening as Lissar’s tragedy was, I was too invested in her to stop reading, which I wouldn’t necessarily say about the similarly miserable stories I sometimes had to read for college. While a book like this can never have a completely happy ending, McKinley manages a cautiously hopeful one. I don’t regret reading Deerskin but I’m also glad to be done with it.

Rose Daughter (1997)

In this book, McKinley returns to her favorite fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, with a new retelling. [8]Her books, Sunshine and Chalice arguably also use the Beauty and the Beast motif. Rose Daughter is clearly the work of a more mature artist than Beauty. This one paragraph where Beauty sees the Beast’s face for the first is more powerful than anything in the earlier book.

Had she had the opportunity to choose, she would still have chosen to look immediately into the Beast’s face upon meeting, to have the worst borne and past at once. But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt.

Beauty’s sisters in this version, the brash Lionheart and the somewhat acerbic Jeweltongue, are not as immediately lovable as Grace and Hope, perhaps because they’re less domestic, but they also have more distinct personalities and emerge as more interesting. Her father is also a less uncomplicatedly positive figure than his counterpart in Beauty. After his beloved wife’s death, he has all the magicians driven from the city because he blames them for not warning her ahead of time about her fatal accident. When he loses all his money and the family has to leave the city themselves, he sinks into listlessness and his daughters have to take all the initiative. Again, this makes him less immediately likeable but more interesting. Beauty herself is quite different from the heroine of McKinley’s earlier take on Beauty and the Beast. Both Beauties are introverts who see themselves as being in the shadows of their older sisters. But the Beauty of Rose Daughter is quiet and lacks the other Beauty’s bluntness and academic ambitions. She has no misgivings about her looks but feels she lacks any gift besides those looks-until her family moves to a cottage in the country, mysteriously left to them, and she discovers a seemingly magical talent for growing roses. When her father’s life is on the line though, this Beauty proves to be just as determined as McKinley’s earlier, more obviously stubborn version.

For most of Rose Daughter, I was ready to declare it superior to Beauty. But I can’t do that. For one thing, this book’s enchanted castle, while perfectly magical on its own terms, just isn’t as interesting as the one in Beauty. A much bigger reason is the ending. Major Spoilers Ahoy! Beauty is given a choice. She may return the Beast to his human state and be married to a wealthy, powerful, handsome man or she may keep him as he is, and they can both live a humble life together in the village where she was happiest. When she hears that her name and her husband’s will “be spoken in fear and in dread” if she makes the former choice, Beauty chooses the latter. The Beast’s only regret is that he won’t be as handsome as he was for Beauty’s sake. But she says, “I love my Beast and I would miss him very much if he went away from me and left me with some handsome stranger.” I can’t avoid the implication that she’s going to have sex with some kind of animal. Eeeewwwww! And, unlike the disturbing parts of Deerskin which were supposed to be disturbing, this is meant to be heartwarming. It sours me on the whole book. Is there anything more frustrating than a great book with a terrible ending? [9]To be fair, the physical descriptions of the Beast are a bit vague, apart from him being big and hairy. But we’re told he can see in the dark, doesn’t mind the weather and can “walk … Continue reading

Spindle’s End (2000)

To an unusual extent for McKinley, this reimagining of Sleeping Beauty owes something to Disney. (No shame, the 1959 animated movie is a favorite of mine.) On her name-day, an infant princess is cursed by the evil fairy Pernicia to prick her finger on a spindle sometime before or on her twenty-first birthday and fall into a poisoned sleep forever. For her safety, the baby is secretly sent to live with nicer though not as powerful fairies in the obscure hamlet of Foggy Bottom. Due to a combination of a gift one of the fairies gave her and drinking the milk of various animals on her journey to Foggy Bottom, Rosie [10]short for Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domina Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose grows up with the ability to communicate with animals. As the deadline for the curse looms, her allies come up with a plan to trick Pernicia. [11]Both Spindle’s End and Deerskin, by the way, take place in the same universe as McKinley’s other books, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.

I really want to like this book. It has the most sparkling opening of any of the tomes discussed in this blog post.

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory…)

It’s that combination of the magical and the practical that I love about McKinley. [12]I was also amused by how when describing local tall tales in the book’s world, she lists “large silver carriages with long stiff wings that flew through the air like birds” and … Continue reading Spindle’s End also has the most fun villain of any of her fairy tale retellings though the story’s structure sadly requires her to be offstage for most of it.

But there’s no getting around the fact that the book drags. The middle section is mostly about Rosie growing up in Foggy Bottom which might have worked if she were a better character. But the only idea for her personality seems to have been that it be the opposite of a stereotypical fairy tale princess. Not that that can’t work. Beauty of Beauty was also different from a stereotypical fairy tale princess, being blunt, unsentimental, academically minded and self-deprecating without being particularly angsty about it. [13]Beauty of Rose Daughter was closer to the stereotypical fairy tale princess though she had an un-princess-like penchant for getting her hands dirty gardening. But with Rosie, this translates into her being defined by not being things (mainly not being girly) rather than by being anything. If she’s likeable, that’s all she is and sometimes she’s not even that. As a little girl, we’re told that when adults called her pretty, she’d say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.” This gives me the impression that she was incredibly self-righteous at an incredibly young age. I also got tired of the running joke about her hating her golden curls. It’s funny at first when a character is disgusted that her fairy godmothers, who could give her anything on her name-day, give her things like “golden hair, gold as corn-tassels in August” and “eyes as blue as love-in-a-mist or summer sky after rain.” But the book keeps bringing it up to an obsessive extent. Once Rosie learns her true identity, she realizes that her hated hair was given to her by a fairy and she comes across as angrier about that than that a fairy cursed her to sleep forever. It’s just hair! Get over it! There is an interesting idea with Rosie’s friendship with a girl called Peony who’s almost her exact opposite in personality. I find friendships like that interesting but, unlike with Beauty and her sisters [14]This could apply to either Beauty or Rose Daughter., McKinley just tells us they’re friends despite their differences and doesn’t do any of the heavy lifting necessary to actually make us believe in the friendship.

You’d think the book would become more exciting as it reaches the climax, but it doesn’t, mainly because the climax is hard to follow. The following paragraph is chock full of spoilers. Read at your own risk. The good fairies use Peony as a decoy so that she ends up pricking her finger instead of Rosie. But even though she was never cursed, Peony ends up falling asleep anyway for reasons that are not very clearly explained. So does everyone else except for Rosie and another character for reasons are also not very clearly explained. Then Rosie defeats Pernicia by…honestly, I’m not sure how to describe it. I wrote above that the climax of The Princess and the Frog runs on emotional logic rather than logical logic and much the same could be said of the surreal climax of Deerskin but I’m not sure if the climax of Spindle’s End runs on any kind of logic. I even looked at the plot summary on Wikipedia to help me understand it but the person who wrote it seemed at a loss to explain the climax too. (Maybe someone who’s a fan of the book will read this blog post and edit Wikipedia to rectify this.) The ending, in which Rosie and Peony permanently switch places so that Peony becomes the princess and Rosie stays in Foggy Bottom, also rubs me the wrong way. McKinley piles up reasons for this. It’s Peony’s only chance at a loving family, she’s the more princessy of the two girls, Rosie would rather be a horse leech, and the switch allows both girls to end up with their love interests when otherwise class would be a barrier. She piles up so many reasons, I daresay, the resolution is downright predictable. But it bugs me and it’s McKinley’s own fault. In the early parts of the book, she makes me feel sorry for the Queen who is separated from her firstborn child that it angers me that she’s never allowed to get to know her real daughter. For me anyway, Spindle’s End is the weakest of McKinley’s fairy tale-inspired books.

So Which Book is the Best?

I’d have to give that honor to Beauty. I write that with some reluctance since I do think some of McKinley’s later work is more interesting and even more well written. And that’s not faint praise since Beauty, on its own merits, is a beautifully written book. But if Beauty doesn’t reach the high points some of her later works do, it also doesn’t hit their low points. There are no pacing problems, no confusing climax and no problematic resolution. It’s just a great story, well told. What can I say? Sometimes it pays to stick close to your source material.

References

References
↑1 Why am I including The Outlaws of Sherwood? Because I feel like it.
↑2 Technically, the sisters had love interests in the fairy tale by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, but they were negative foils meant to make the Beast look better.
↑3 Or The Frog King if you want to translate the original German literally.
↑4 The anime series Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics does something similar with the story.
↑5 My favorite version of the fairy tale, by the way, isn’t the Grimms’ but the one by Charles Deulin. I guess Andrew Lang agreed with me since that’s the version he included in his Red Fairy Book.
↑6 If you’d like my reviews of the two original stories, the first one, The Stolen Princess, begins wonderfully. McKinley does a great job getting you invested in the characters in only a short space. But the resolution is anticlimactic and leaves you wondering, “why didn’t they just do that a long time ago?” The Hunting of the Hind is arguably anticlimactic too, but the protagonist’s victory is rooted more in their character and for me, that story just might be the highlight of the book.
↑7 Jim Henson’s The Storyteller adapted a variant of the story in an episode, but their king didn’t want to marry his daughter any more than she wanted to marry him. The characters were forced into an engagement by an ancient law saying that the king must wed the woman who can wear a certain ring.
↑8 Her books, Sunshine and Chalice arguably also use the Beauty and the Beast motif.
↑9 To be fair, the physical descriptions of the Beast are a bit vague, apart from him being big and hairy. But we’re told he can see in the dark, doesn’t mind the weather and can “walk as silently as sunlight.” To me, that says animal.
↑10 short for Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domina Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose
↑11 Both Spindle’s End and Deerskin, by the way, take place in the same universe as McKinley’s other books, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.
↑12 I was also amused by how when describing local tall tales in the book’s world, she lists “large silver carriages with long stiff wings that flew through the air like birds” and “long-distance speaking devices involving no magic.”
↑13 Beauty of Rose Daughter was closer to the stereotypical fairy tale princess though she had an un-princess-like penchant for getting her hands dirty gardening.
↑14 This could apply to either Beauty or Rose Daughter.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Robin McKinley’s Fairy Tales (Well, Six Fairy Tales and One Legend)

The Year Hollywood Made Two Snow White Movies

Posted on May 15, 2026 by stationmaster

That year was 2012 and the two reimaginings of the Snow White fairy tale were Mirror, Mirror from Relativity Media and Snow White and the Hunstman from Universal Studios. [1]Actually, it wasn’t just Hollywood. There was also the Spanish-French coproduction Blanca Nieves and on TV, there was ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It was really the year of Snow White. Both movies begin with prologues in which we learn that Snow White’s mother died when she was a child and her father, the king (Sean Bean in Mirror, Mirror, Noah Huntley in Huntsman), remarried a beautiful but evil witch (Julia Roberts in Mirror, Mirror, Charlize Theron in Huntsman) who put him out of the picture and took over the kingdom, plunging it into darkness. In the present, when Snow White (Lily Collins in Mirror, Mirror, Kristen Stewart in Huntsman) comes of age, the Queen realizes she’s a threat and tries to have her killed. Snow White flees into a monster ridden forest where she meets a band of dwarfs (Jordan Prentice, Mark Povinelli, Joey Gnoffo, Danny Woodburn, Sebastian Saraceno, Martin Klebba and Ronald Lee Clark in Mirror, Mirror, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones, Johnny Harris and Brian Gleeson in Huntsman) who have been reduced to bandits by the Queen’s tyranny.[2]Incidentally, in the Italian variant of Snow White, Bella Venezia, the equivalents of the dwarfs are also robbers. Did the filmmakers know this? With the help of these dwarfs and a love interest or two, Snow White defeats the Queen and restores the blighted land to its former glory.

Despite those similar outlines, the two movies are mirror images of each other in many ways. Snow White and the Huntsman is a dark action movie aimed at adults. Mirror, Mirror is a wacky family comedy, somewhat in the style of Shrek. Of the two approaches they take to adapting Snow White, I theoretically prefer Snow White and the Huntsman‘s. I like it when fairy tale adaptations take their source material seriously rather than simply parodying it. Not that parodying fairy tales can’t be fun, but they play by such different rules from those of modern storytelling that it’s almost too easy and can reek of “chronological snobbery.” It’s more interesting to watch modern storytellers try to accept fairy tales on their own terms. That’s not to say either of the two movies under discussion in this blog post hew very closely to the original Grimm fairy tale. But Snow White and the Huntsman includes relatively more plot points from it.

Again, that makes Huntsman more interesting (to my way of thinking) in theory.

But in practice, Snow White and the Huntsman is so lacking in humor that it’s honestly quite boring and the characters are all sort of flat and lifeless, apart from the occasional hamminess of the villains. (When they get angry, they tend TO TALK! LIKE! THIS!!!) Of course, the characters of fairy tales are designed to be archetypes, not three-dimensional human beings, so I guess this is also true to the spirit of the source material. But I’ve seen fairy tale adaptations that captured the spirit of their source material while also having much more memorable characterizations than this one.

Does the humor of Mirror, Mirror work? Well…comedy is so subjective. Mirror, Mirror is the kind of silly comedy that some people find really funny and others find stupid. There are a lot of goofy sound effects and jokes about underwear being exposed which will appeal to kids but not many adults. On the other hand, there’s also some explicit sexual humor which many parents won’t feel comfortable enjoying with their children. (The Queen really enjoys seeing the prince (Armie Hammer) in his underwear.) I’m not sure if there’s a good audience for the movie except that, well, I enjoyed it on the whole. For me, there were enough clever jokes (mostly in the first half) to balance out the less than clever ones (which are mostly in the second half.) Your mileage may vary.

Let’s talk about the leading ladies. I know Kristen Stewart has been roasted to death on the internet for her dull performance in the Twilight movies. From the clips of them I’ve seen, I’d say she deserves it but during the first half or so of Snow White and the Huntsman, I was prepared to defend her acting chops a little bit. Not that she’s exactly livelier here but I felt like her quietly miserable performance made sense for a character who has been kept imprisoned in a tower with barely any companionship and finally escaped only to be lost in a hostile environment and hounded by an evil queen.

But here’s the thing. She’s like that the entire movie with no progression. At the end, when she’s crowned queen, she smiles and it feels like she’s barely any happier.

To be fair, Stewart’s quietly miserable performance matches the tone of the movie. And it’s not like the script gives her much with which to work. Even more so than Disney’s 2025 Snow White, this one spends too much time telling us that its heroine is special, how she’s the only one who can defeat the Queen, and not enough time actually showing her do anything special. Weirdly, even though a lot of emphasis, is put on Snow White’s purity making her the antithesis of the Queen, the way she ultimately defeats her doesn’t have anything to do with purity. It’s just a generic fight scene.

Mirror, Mirror‘s Snow White doesn’t have the best structured character arc. Ostensibly, her goal is to help the common people who have been bled dry by the Queen’s taxes but there’s only one scene of her doing that. (To be fair, that scene is one of the movie’s nicest character moments.) Most of her heroic deeds are her rescuing her comrades. There’s also a scene late in the movie where she gets discouraged and ready to throw in the towel and the dwarfs encourage her by reminding her of all she’s accomplished which feels more like it’s there because such scenes are standard in third acts rather than because it makes sense for Snow White to be so discouraged all of a sudden. Still, I’d say she’s a more engagingly written character than the Snow White in Huntsman and the writing is elevated by Lily Collins who is sweetly appealing in the role.

This is her moment that’s the equivalent of the one portrayed by Stewart above. World of difference, isn’t there?

Both Snow White’s though are inevitably upstaged by their stepmothers who are the most charismatic characters in their movies. Charlize Theron’s Queen is a vampire-like villain who sucks the youth, beauty and life out of young women. (At one point, we meet a community of women who have deliberately disfigured themselves out of self-preservation.) There are some attempts to make her a tragic villain. She seems to genuinely love her equally evil brother (Sam Spruell) and has a tragic backstory albeit a thinly sketched one. In one scene, she claims she’s actually kinder to the poor than people were to her as a child. In another, Snow White says she used to hate her stepmother but now feels sorry for her though I’m not really sure why. (She isn’t privy to that tragic backstory, not at that point in the story anyway.) The defeat of the Queen seems like it’s meant to be partially a mercy killing, putting an end to her cursed immortality. All that is conceptually interesting anyway though I find it too undercooked to actually be very interesting. Julia Roberts’s Queen is also obsessed with retaining youth and beauty but she’s a more prosaic tyrant who bleeds the common people dry with taxes to support her lavish lifestyle and there are no tragic undertones to her character.[3]Except perhaps in the very last scene. She’s easily the funniest part of the movie with her cattiness and unintentionally self-indicting complaints. When narrating the film’s prologue, she snarks that Snow White’s parents chose her name “because that was the most pretentious name they could think of.” Her interactions with her long-suffering servants (Nathan Lane and Mare Winningham) are also great.

Both movies are creative in how they depict the magic mirror. In Snow White and the Huntsman, it’s a gold disk that melts and reforms into a featureless figure who advises the Queen. I say it has no features, but the Queen can still see a reflection of her face in its. In Mirror, Mirror, it’s a full-length mirror which the titular incantation turns into an entrance to the Queen’s inner sanctum where there’s another mirror within the mirror. The Queen’s reflection in that mirror is a spirit with whom she communes and who acts as a twisted conscience to her. Well, she’s not exactly the Queen’s reflection. “I have no wrinkles,” she observes.

It’s in the visuals that Mirror, Mirror really shines. An arthouse director like Tarsem Singh seems like a surprising choice for this kind of kids’ movie but he really elevates the script with his visual imagination. Production designer Tom Foden’s sets are sumptuous, surreal, almost Seussian.

Also, visually fun are Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs, especially at a costumed ball in an early scene.[4]Remember what I wrote about the Queen’s lavish lifestyle.

Snow White and the Huntsman also has some surreal visuals, mostly to do with creature design when the characters a fairyland called Sanctuary. They’re not so much Seussian as Guillermo Del Toro-esque.[5]I’m not into horror so I haven’t actually seen any movies by Del Toro but his name has come up in criticism of Snow White and the Huntsman.

Generally, though, the visuals are pretty prosaic compared to Mirror, Mirror‘s. That’s part of taking the material seriously, which I’ve gone on record as theoretically preferring. But I’m afraid watching the two movies back-to-back doesn’t do Huntsman many favors.

Compare this castle to the one from Mirror, Mirror. It’s handsome on its own terms but the other one looks so much more interesting.

Something else that elevates Mirror, Mirror‘s script is the movie’s soundtrack by Alan Menken. He’s mainly known for composing showtunes but he’s capable of great film scores as well. His music makes Mirror, Mirror at least twice as good as it might otherwise have been. James Newton Howard, who did the soundtrack for Snow White and the Huntsman, is another talented composer but his work on it isn’t his best. The music is fine, but it doesn’t really make the movie any better than it would otherwise have been.

This post is coming across as very pro-Mirror, Mirror and anti-Snow White and the Huntsman. Maybe I should mention something about the former that doesn’t work. Well, the romance is rather flawed. The prince is brave and honorable, but he also comes across as something of a “twit,” to use the dwarfs’ word. He’s condescending to them and even to Snow White herself at times. And he walks right into the Queen’s trap even though Snow White twice tells him that she’s evil.[6]It’s an ironic accident of history that the 2025 Snow White got all the reputation for being all obnoxiously girl power-y when it leaves its male characters with far more dignity than does … Continue reading What does our heroine see in him? He does help out in the climax, but a speech given about his heroism in the end really doesn’t feel earned. Spoiler Alert. Why is this the only modern Snow White movie to explicitly end with a wedding when it has the least worthy love interest?

The duel between the Snow White and the prince is kind of interesting. I’d expect a “girl power” movie like this to have the female lead mop up the floor with her male opponent. Instead, he has the upper hand for most of the duel and Snow White only wins in the end, thanks to a clever trick. I don’t know what that says about the movie’s gender politics but it’s different from what I expected, which is nice.

Snow White and the Huntsman has two love interests for the heroine or two potential love interests anyway. There’s her childhood flame, the prince (Sam Claflin), and the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) who was initially hired by the Queen to destroy her but ends up becoming her protector and mentor. The latter character gets points for having an occasional sense of humor, giving him a tad more personality than everybody else in the movie. The huntsman and Snow White are sort of like Han Solo and Princess Leia if you extracted 90% of the humor from Han and 100% of it from Leia. The rest of this paragraph is full of spoilers. The story seems structured to make us root for the huntsman to be the one to end up with Snow White. The prince is absent for large periods of time and when the Queen tricks Snow White into eating the poisoned apple, she’s disguised as him. That’s not the prince’s fault, of course, but it feels like a subliminal way to make the viewers root against him. He kisses the unconscious Snow White to no effect. Later, in private, the huntsman kisses her and his kiss revives her.[7]I keep waiting for an adaptation of this fairy tale to have the piece of apple be dislodged from her throat by the jostling of the coffin as in the source material. Or did she need both kisses to bring her back? I’d probably find the ambiguity interesting if I found the characters in general interesting. In the end, it’s not clear if either love interest ends up with Snow White.[8]An earlier draft of the screenplay, available to read online, had the huntsman explicitly leave Snow White and go back to the forest in the end. Was this supposed to make us angry about the class … Continue reading

So, yeah, I’ll take Mirror, Mirror over Snow White and the Huntsman. Sometimes dumb but fun trumps tasteful and boring. For me, this is one of those times. Of course, I still prefer the 2001 made-for-TV movie Snow White: The Fairest of Them All to either of them. That movie, in my opinion, manages to be both tasteful and fun.

References

References
↑1 Actually, it wasn’t just Hollywood. There was also the Spanish-French coproduction Blanca Nieves and on TV, there was ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It was really the year of Snow White.
↑2 Incidentally, in the Italian variant of Snow White, Bella Venezia, the equivalents of the dwarfs are also robbers. Did the filmmakers know this?
↑3 Except perhaps in the very last scene.
↑4 Remember what I wrote about the Queen’s lavish lifestyle.
↑5 I’m not into horror so I haven’t actually seen any movies by Del Toro but his name has come up in criticism of Snow White and the Huntsman.
↑6 It’s an ironic accident of history that the 2025 Snow White got all the reputation for being all obnoxiously girl power-y when it leaves its male characters with far more dignity than does Mirror, Mirror.
↑7 I keep waiting for an adaptation of this fairy tale to have the piece of apple be dislodged from her throat by the jostling of the coffin as in the source material.
↑8 An earlier draft of the screenplay, available to read online, had the huntsman explicitly leave Snow White and go back to the forest in the end. Was this supposed to make us angry about the class divide or something? Maybe it was to imply that he still wasn’t over his deceased wife. From what I understand, the sequel has his wife turn out to be alive after all, so that checks out.
Posted in Comparing Different Adaptations | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Year Hollywood Made Two Snow White Movies

A Look Back at Some of my Old Blog Posts

Posted on May 2, 2026 by stationmaster

I thought it might be fun to write about some of my old blog posts and what I’d do differently if I were writing them now. Well, I thought it might be for me. I don’t know about you guys. Some of the things I’d do differently would be because of information I have that I didn’t have then. Some of the things I’d do differently would be because my opinions have grown more complex.

Which Friday Is the Freakiest?

In this post, I speculated that Mary Rodgers, the screenwriter for the 1976 Freaky Friday movie and author of the original book, had been forced by the producers to put in the overelaborate slapstick climax since it didn’t really fit in with the rest of the film and felt like a concession to the Disney formula of the 70s. It turns out I was right, even more so than I suspected. According to her memoirs, while she was the only credited screenwriter, Rodgers despised the 1976 movie, claiming that Disney destroyed her vision by forcing to include things like that slapstick climax and a scene with a sexy secretary (played by Brooke Mills), which she considered a sexist cliche. I’m a little surprised by that last bit since the secretary scene is actually entertainingly written and doesn’t feel shoehorned in the way that climax does.[1]The acerbic Rodgers seems to have forgotten that she apparently won a minor victory with that scene as the secretary ends up being humanized by a twist at the end. Anyway, none of that changes my own positive opinion of the movie but I wish I’d known that when I wrote the blog post since it’s interesting behind-the-scenes trivia.

I was really ignorant of how to do blog posts when I wrote this series on Freaky Friday. I didn’t even know how to do YouTube screenshots hence the complete lack of images in the section on the 1995 made-for-TV movie, the most obscure version. Thankfully, my brother told me how to do them before I did my post on the Peter Pan musical. I suppose I could go back and add YouTube screenshots now. But the 1995 is my least favorite of the Freaky Friday movies and that feels like too much work for it. Here’s one screenshot at least.

When writing the Freakiest Friday series, I titled the section on each movie with a thematically linked line from it. (“I’d like to be you for a day” “Someday you ought to try my life” etc.) This was back when I tried to be creative with my titles on this blog. Nowadays, I’m lucky I can come up with even a generic title. There are actually five Freaky Friday movies now with Freakier Friday, the recent sequel to the 2003 film. Maybe I should do a new post to finish my series, especially since I’m so strapped for ideas that I’m writing about blog posts I’ve written years ago. But I just don’t really have any interesting thoughts on Freakier Friday. It’s not that good. It’s not that bad. Whatever.

Davies Does Dickens

The thing I (sort of) regret about this two-part series on screenwriter Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Charles Dickens is that Bleak House (2005) and Little Dorrit (2008) are actually not the only ones. While I had seen The Signalman (1976), I wasn’t aware that Davies had written it. The reason I only (sort of) regret it as opposed to just regretting it is that I don’t really have anything to say, good or bad, about The Signalman, either the original short story by Dickens or the made-for-TV movie by Davies. Honestly, I think the series works better with just Bleak House and Little Dorrit even though it’s technically incomplete. Those two miniseries feel of a piece with each other, yet their strengths and weaknesses are just different enough to make for interesting contrasts. The Signalman, on the other hand, would just feel random.

The Storyteller and his Sources

I’m not sure if this old post really works at all. I wanted to write about how Jim Henson’s The Storyteller combines different fairy tales into new stories. But the result may be that if you’re familiar with the tales I mention, the blog post spoils a first-time viewing experience and if you’re not familiar with them, well, then the blog post is just incomprehensible, isn’t it? But what can I say? I love this little show, and I really wanted to write something or other about it and this was the best I could do.

What I really regret though is that I only wrote about how the episode Sapsorrow combines the stories of Cinderella and Allerleirauh without typing a word about how it takes some cues from the Norwegian fairy tale, Katie Woodencloak.[2]Or Kari Woodengown. English translations vary. The reason for this was that I wasn’t familiar with that particular tale at the time. Here are the relevant parts. Like Katie Woodencloak, Sapsorrow, when disguised as a lowly and dirty servant, delivers clean towels to a handsome prince who responds rudely. But he falls in love with her when she appears to him later in her true form as a beautiful princess. Before she runs away, he begs to know from where she comes, and she leaves him with a riddling clue to her identity. (“I live where hens catch mice and cats lay eggs.” It makes sense in context.”) Sapsorrow might not do as much as it could to do redeem its snobby prince but to its credit, it does more than Katie Woodencloak, which does nothing.

A Mild Defense of Disney’s Recent Line of Nostalgia Bait

I wrote this one in a spirit of defiance-well, as defiant as can be while only defending something mildly. To hear the internet talk, you’d think Disney’s recent nostalgia bait movies were the coming of the antichrist. While only the 2015 Cinderella is a huge favorite of mine, most of the Disney nostalgia bait movies that had been made at the time I wrote my defense struck me as solid B+. Like a certain Disney heroine, I didn’t see how a world that made such wonderful things could be bad. (Of course, that heroine’s love for that world led her to make a disastrous bargain that ended up turning her father into a polyp and an evil witch taking over her kingdom, so maybe not the most felicitous analogy.) I’m still happy with the three blog posts I wrote about my three favorite Disney nostalgia bait movies, but I’ve come to feel like my initial (mild) defense was something of a failure. While I enjoyed organizing the movies into different categories and I still think their focus on parents is an interesting trend, the main body of the blog post would have been better spent detailing the ways in which I thought the various movies were well done, such as which visuals impressed me, which actors’ performances I enjoyed, which lines I thought were well written, etc.[3]I guess what I was trying to say with the thing about different categories was that some of the complaints about Disney nostalgia bait strike me as selective and therefore dishonest. When people … Continue reading I could do a new blog post that does so but the reason I wrote the original when I did was because I wanted to do it while there was still more good Disney nostalgia bait than bad. Nowadays, it’s probably half and half, so the new blog post would be less contrarian and therefore less fun for me.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t get angry about remakes of movies I like. I even enjoyed that gender flipped remake of the beloved It’s a Wonderful Life from the 70s. If remakes are good, they’re good and if they’re bad, to me, they just make the original look even better. [4]Though, again, I don’t think Disney’s recent remakes have all been that bad. The ones I dislike I’d describe more as boring than as unpleasant. Some of them even rise to the level … Continue reading I don’t see how they tarnish the legacy of the originals or whatever. I guess for cinema aficionados though (and apparently people who aren’t cinema afficionados but really like Disney), the memory of a bad remake sours the experience of rewatching the original. That’s kind of how it is for me with bad adaptations of books. (Thankfully, I can usually put the adaptations in the back of my mind and just enjoy the originals again after a year or so.) So the people who most hate nostalgia bait and I will probably never understand each other. Ah well. C’est la vie.

Another List of Great Screenplays

This blog post, in which I listed the best movie scripts based on classic literature that are available to read online, is the only one where I’ve actually changed my opinion about a movie’s quality. I was always a little unsure whether Eleanor Catton’s screenplay for Emma (2020) deserved to make this list, even as an honorable mention. But I told myself that most of my problems with the movie were problems with the direction and the actors’ performances, not the script. Time has convinced me though that significant problems were in the script right from the beginning. I won’t go into how because I already did an entire blog post about this revelation. Suffice it to say, I now feel like the problems with this script are too glaring for it to earn even an honorable mention. It really is a pity Douglas McGrath’s screenplay for the 1996 Emma[5]The theatrical one, not the made-for-TV one. That was written by Andrew Davies. isn’t available to read online. If it were, it would have gotten more than an honorable mention on the original blog post.[6]You can purchase an earlier draft of that screenplay online from ScriptFly.com but, being an early draft, it’s not as polished as the final version. You can also, by the way, purchase an … Continue reading

Sometimes I wonder if I should have included Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie’s screenplay for Macbeth (2015.) It’s quite an interesting read. I ultimately didn’t include it though because I felt like it’s interpretation of the source material was a little forced. While the violence of war and the pain of childlessness are major motifs in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, I’m not sure that they’re supposed to explain the main characters’ actions the way Louiso, Koskoff and Lesslie seem to want them to do. In general, I wish I could blog more about movies adapted from Shakespeare plays but they tend to feature nudity and I’m against onscreen nudity, so I don’t like to promote them.

The Adaptation Station’s Two-Year Anniversary Top Ten List (in Alphabetical Order)

With this post, the challenge I imposed upon myself was to find new things to say about ten things about which I’d already written.[7]Eleven things, actually, since I counted Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 as one movie. I think I succeeded with all but Les Misérables (2012) and the Fantasia movies. With those, I basically just repeated what I’d already written in the original blog posts. I still don’t have anything new to say about the latter two, but I thought of something for Les Misérables. I read a thesis somewhere online that men are deeply moved by movies about men struggling to do the right thing while undergoing great physical suffering and women are deeply moved by movies about women struggling to do the right thing while undergoing great emotional suffering. Well, it occurs to me that Les Misérables has both men and women struggling to do the right while undergoing great physical and emotional suffering. It’s the total package! Of course, as I wrote in the original post, there are plenty of people who dislike the 2012 Les Misérables and even some who dislike the story in general, so that thesis arguably doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny but, hey, I found something to write about the movie that I previously hadn’t.

Well, hope you enjoyed that slightly rueful little retrospective. I promise my next blog post will be about an adaptation about which I haven’t already blogged.

References

References
↑1 The acerbic Rodgers seems to have forgotten that she apparently won a minor victory with that scene as the secretary ends up being humanized by a twist at the end.
↑2 Or Kari Woodengown. English translations vary.
↑3 I guess what I was trying to say with the thing about different categories was that some of the complaints about Disney nostalgia bait strike me as selective and therefore dishonest. When people complain that the movies are all carbon copies of the originals, they’re referring to what I dubbed Type B nostalgia bait and ignoring the other kinds. When people complain that they all subvert the originals, they’re referring to Type A nostalgia bait and ignoring the other kinds.
↑4 Though, again, I don’t think Disney’s recent remakes have all been that bad. The ones I dislike I’d describe more as boring than as unpleasant. Some of them even rise to the level of guilty pleasures.
↑5 The theatrical one, not the made-for-TV one. That was written by Andrew Davies.
↑6 You can purchase an earlier draft of that screenplay online from ScriptFly.com but, being an early draft, it’s not as polished as the final version. You can also, by the way, purchase an earlier draft of Mary Rodgers’s Freaky Friday script if you want some insight into how her vision and the Disney company’s differed.
↑7 Eleven things, actually, since I counted Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 as one movie.
Posted in Remakes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

You Can’t Take It with You: Another Great Adaptation of a Stage Play

Posted on February 15, 2026 by stationmaster

I really should have sold this domain months ago. I’m not exactly rolling in money and it’s silly to pay for a blog month after month if you’re not going to do any new posts. But I loved making this thing and I can’t bear for it to vanish off the internet. Now I’m glad I didn’t sell it because I recently had the idea for this blog post. Appropriately enough, a big theme of the play/movie under discussion is doing what you love even if it doesn’t make financial sense.

You Can’t Take It with You (1938) begins with a group of evil businessmen plotting to take over a neighborhood for some evil business purposes.[1]Do the specifics really matter? They’ve been able to buy every house except one owned by an extended family of kooky bohemians. The family’s easygoing patriarch, Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) refuses to sell his home at any price. The leader of the evil businessmen, Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), has his real estate broker (Clarence Wilson) try to get the family in trouble with the law, to pressure them into selling. Little does he know that his son, Tony (Jimmy Stewart), has fallen in love with his secretary, Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur) Vanderhof’s granddaughter. Disaster and hilarity ensue when Tony brings his parents[2]Mary Forbes play his mother by the way. to a dinner at Alice’s family’s place.

You Can’t Take It with You was based on a stage play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Its screenwriter was Robert Riskin, and its director was Frank Capra. If you’re familiar with any of the creators, you can guess which elements the film owes to which. The breezy comedy is attributable to Kaufman and Hart and the earnest, moralizing melodrama to Capra and Riskin.[3]Well, maybe that’s not fair. While his most famous work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) is dramatic, Capra directed more than a few screwball comedies. Still, the … Continue reading In the play, Kirby was only upbraided by Tony and Grandpa for giving up his hobbies to focus on the joyless pursuit of money and pressuring his son to do the same. This is still a theme in the film. In an early scene, Grandpa convinces a man (Donald Meek) to leave his boring desk job and pursue his real dream of making music boxes and Halloween masks.

But the cinematic Mr. Kirby is condemned less for putting the pursuit of money over hobbies and more for putting it over human relationships.[4]Given the iconic status of It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s rather amusing to watch a Frank Capra film in which Lionel Barrymore plays the relatively poor guy and Jimmy Stewart the rich one. A late scene of Ramsey (H. B. Warner), Kirby’s business rival and former friend, warning him that they’re both going to die friendless is particularly contrary to the fluffy spirit of the source material.

Some Kaufman and Hart fans may feel like Capra and Riskin sullied the tone of the play, but I’m inclined to say they improved upon it. Mind you, I don’t want to dismiss Kaufman and Hart’s contributions. A big part of the movie’s appeal is the zany characters they created like Alice’s mother, Penny (Spring Byington), an amateur playwright and painter, Alice’s father, Paul (Samuel S. Hinds), whose hobby is making fireworks in the basement with his friend, Mr. DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes), Alice’s sister, Essie (Ann Miller), an aspiring ballerina who makes candy on the side, and Essie’s husband, Ed Carmichael (Dub Taylor), who plays the xylophone and prints revolutionary materials, not out of any revolutionary sentiment but simply because he enjoys printing anything.

But to my way of thinking, it’s the combination of the comedic and the dramatic that really make You Can’t Take It with You great. Both the save-the-neighborhood plot and the class-crossing-romance are pretty generic but combining them makes for something special. I love the irony of Kirby trying to get Grandpa in trouble with the law, only to get arrested himself for being at his house. It’s also great fun to see the Kirby family’s night in jail, something we only hear about in the play.

Alice is the most interesting character in the original play, dramatically speaking, since she loves her kooky family but is also the only member to find it somewhat embarrassing. The movie makes her even more interesting. In the play, after the mortifying meeting between the two families, she simply became despondent, sure that a marriage between herself and Tony would never work. The movie has her be mortified too but also angry at the Kirbys and she memorably stands up for her family’s dignity.[5]I’m sorry to be spoiling so much of the plot but hardly anyone watches movies from the 30s nowadays. Hopefully, those who do will have seen this one already. I also love the habit the film gives her of sliding down the banister, giving her an embarrassing eccentricity of her own, not just an embarrassing family. Despite Alice and her grandfather being such major characters, they barely interacted with each other in the play. This adaptation gives them a touching conversation in which we learn about Alice’s grandmother.

Tony also has a bit more of a character arc in the movie. I like that he’s a bit more overwhelmed by Alice’s family at first than he is in the play but never is he as snobby towards them as are his parents. The film also emphasizes how spoiled he is initially, boasting that his whole life all he’s ever had to do to get what he wants is scream. This makes his eventually turning his back on his father’s lucrative business even more impressive. And giving both Tony and Alice stronger character arc also makes their romance more compelling.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention something the movie adds which is very much in the spirit of the play: the emotional finale in which Mr. Kirby plays Polly Wolly Doodle on the harmonica with Grandpa. Two old men playing Polly Wolly Doodle on the harmonica may not sound like much of an emotional finale, but You Can’t Take It with You makes it one.

References

References
↑1 Do the specifics really matter?
↑2 Mary Forbes play his mother by the way.
↑3 Well, maybe that’s not fair. While his most famous work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) is dramatic, Capra directed more than a few screwball comedies. Still, the more earnest parts of You Can’t Take It with You do strike me as Capra-esque.
↑4 Given the iconic status of It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s rather amusing to watch a Frank Capra film in which Lionel Barrymore plays the relatively poor guy and Jimmy Stewart the rich one.
↑5 I’m sorry to be spoiling so much of the plot but hardly anyone watches movies from the 30s nowadays. Hopefully, those who do will have seen this one already.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on You Can’t Take It with You: Another Great Adaptation of a Stage Play

This blog probably isn’t really going away forever. I’ll probably revive it in some form or do some new posts in the future. But I won’t be doing regular posts. This really does feel like the end of an era for me, so I decided to do something special: A recommended reading list of my favorite source materials for the adaptations about which I’ve blogged (in, more or less, the order I’ve blogged about them.)

By the way, the books that didn’t make the list are not one’s I dislike. Really, every adaptation about which I’ve blogged is based on something I consider to be at least OK. Who am I to say that Emma or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are not great in their own ways? But this list is for what I consider the creme de la creme. It’s also worth noting that these books were written by different authors with different worldviews and I’m including them based on artistry (and, I’ll admit, nostalgia), so don’t assume they all reflect my own worldview.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

This is a book where I’m inclined to recommend you read an abridged version first and then tackle the whole doorstopper if you love the material. However, there’s no abridgment that specifically cuts and retains the same the parts that I would. So I guess what I really recommend is that you get an unabridged copy, but feel free to skim when you feel like it. I warn you though that the final chapter in the Waterloo section has a scene that’s critical to understanding the rest of the plot. For the record, there are some great quotes hidden in Victor’s Hugo infamous digressions in this book anyway.

I’m in love with the poetic style of Charles Wilbour’s English translation. If you insist on one that’s more accessible to modern readers though, Christine Donougher’s seems to be the best and, to its credit, it translates all the songs and poems, which Wilbour’s doesn’t, and handles some of the puns and the slang better.

Les Misérables by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Herbert Kretzmer

Since the 2012 movie is technically an adaptation of the both the book and the stage musical, why don’t you read the libretto while you’re at it? It’s available online.

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan as both a stage play and a novel. (The latter was originally titled Peter and Wendy, but most editions today just call themselves Peter Pan.) The adaptations I’ve covered typically use elements of both and they’re both well worth reading, so I’m including both on this list.

If you check out the play’s script, try to get your hands on a copy of Peter Pan and Other Plays which features three others by J. M. Barrie. Two of them, The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows are just as great. The other, Mary Rose, is fine. Of course, getting The Complete Plays is ideal but difficult.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

There are plenty of great English translations of Grimm out there. I personally recommend the one by Jack Zipes, which feels very modern but, in his own words, also “retains an eighteenth-century flavor.”

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

Many of Perrault’s tales, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, have counterparts in the collection of Brothers Grimm. In some ways, his versions are more fun. In other ways, they’re less fun. Perrault includes more humorous touches in otherwise serious stories, such as Sleeping Beauty’s prince refraining from mentioning that “she was dressed a little like his grandmother.” But they’re also less fast-paced and zippy. Nevertheless, both had a huge impact on our idea of a fairy tale.

I recommend the recent English translation by Alex Lubertozzi, Tales of Times Past: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

I’ll admit that the beginning of this novel is rather slow paced. You can easily skip the section from Chapter One about the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company. And the stories of The Five Sisters of York and The Baron of Grogzwig in Chapter Six aren’t really necessary either, though they’re well written. But if you can handle the longer and more digressive Les Misérables, this should be a snap. Once the main characters are established, it becomes, for me, the most fun of any of Dickens’s books.

The Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers

The Personal History, Experiences and Observations of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz

Fantagraphics has released the entire long running comic strip in a series of books. Or you could read the whole thing online at the Peanuts Wiki.

A Christmas Carol in Prose by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy’s Progress by Charles Dickens

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Nowadays, these books are numbered in, more or less, the order the stories take place with The Magician’s Nephew being listed as No. 1 and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as No. 2. The reasoning behind this was the author saying he thought it made more sense to read them in this order rather than the one in which they were published. However, the fan consensus, with which I heartily agree, is that it’s better to experience them in publication order or at least read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before The Magician’s Nephew. The latter really works best as a prequel.

The Miss Bianca books by Margery Sharp

OK, these books aren’t quite as great as the others on this list, not as consistently great anyway. Around the fourth or fifth books, the plots start to get gradually dumber and less satisfying. But at their best, they’re so charming and they’re so little known, that I had to give them a shoutout here. (I would have done it when I made my list of obscurities, but I hadn’t blogged about the Disney adaptation then.)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Babara Robinson

Robinson wrote two companion novellas to this one, The Best School Year Ever and The Best Halloween Ever. Neither is as interesting as The Best Christmas Pageant, but both are fun.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

As far as English translations go, I recommend the one by Brian Hooker or nothing. It’s possible some others are closer to Edmond Rostand’s intent but if so, Hooker must have improved upon Rostand.

The God Beneath the Sea by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen

OK, so I haven’t blogged about adaptations of this book or the following two, but I mentioned them in my post about posts I didn’t do and they’re awesome.

The Golden Shadow by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis

The Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo

The Alice books by Lewis Carroll

Nowadays I don’t reread these as often as I did when I was a kid. But I feel like I have to include them because otherwise I’d be implying that Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh are better than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and I am not prepared to make that statement.

Well, there you go. That should be enough reading material to keep someone busy for a long time. I see that most of the books on this list for kids are fantasies of some sort and most of the books for adults are melodramas of some sort. My friends probably could have predicted that.

Posted on October 25, 2025 by stationmaster | 1 Comment

The Best Version of War Horse

Posted on October 11, 2025 by stationmaster

I’d like to dedicate this post to my late landlord who recommended the movie to my family.

My first “real” blog post[1]I also did an introductory post for this blog that has mysteriously disappeared. Sometimes the ways of WordPress are beyond me. was about a movie based on a play that was based on a book. Actually, the movie was something of an adaptation of both the play and the book, reinstating elements from the latter that had been cut from the former. This blog post will probably be my last “real” one[2]I’ll also be doing a farewell post of sorts., at least for a long time, so I’d like to close with something similar.

It occurs to me that if you’re a fan of the theatre, you’re probably not a big fan of The Adaptation Station.com. I’ve gone on record as loving the 2012 movie Les Misérables more than I love the stage play, though I’m a fan of both, since I believe it does a better job of telling the story. And while I consider the original stage play Into the Woods better written than the 2014 movie[3]Though both were written by James Lapine., I’d rather rewatch the movie that the 1999 filmed production-ProShot, I believe, is the technical term-of the play with the original Broadway cast since, with the exception of Meryl Streep vs. Bernadette Peters, I enjoy the movie actors’ performances more. In my defense, I did write a very positive post about the 2000 ProShot of the Peter Pan musical-well, the part of the post about the 2000 ProShot was very positive, not so much the parts about the 1960 and 2014 versions.[4]I’d also probably recommend the 1999 ProShot of Oklahoma! over the 1955 movie. Theatre fans should appreciate that.

It’s probably not a surprise then that I like the 2011 movie War Horse better than Nick Stafford’s award-winning stage play. What may be a surprise to people who know me well is that I even like it better than the original book by acclaimed children’s author Michael Morpurgo. Coming from a book lover like me, that’s a real compliment.

I should stress though that each telling of the story has its charms. I like that the character of Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan in the movie), alcoholic father to Albert (Jeremy Irvine) the English farm boy who is the titular horse’s original owner[5]Well, his first owner to be a real character in the story anyway. Technically, he must have been owned by someone else before being auctioned off at the beginning., has a character arc in the book. In the play, he remains unsympathetic throughout despite Albert’s mother Rose (Emily Watson)’s speech in his defense. In the movie, he’s sympathetic throughout despite all the decisions he makes that hurt his family. In the book, he starts out as a negative figure but is implied to have redeemed himself by the end.[6]Of course, since the entire book is told from the horse’s perspective, we barely see any of this character arc, but I like the idea. The book’s version of the story is probably the one which makes the impossible plot elements, like Joey a half-thoroughbred being able to plough a field, plausible.[7]The steed has many different owners and names over the course of the story but I’m calling him Joey because that’s the one he gets at the beginning even though it’s weird for me … Continue reading While all three versions are about the horrors of World War I, the stage play is probably the darkest and grittiest if that’s what you like. The play’s elaborate horse puppets are also able to act and create characters in a way that even the most well-trained film horses can’t and they’re just some of many great stage effects the play boasts.

So why do I like the movie best? Well, I love the soundtrack by John Williams. For all the iconic scores he’s composed, I actually find this one to be the most beautiful. But the stage play also makes good use of music and it’s not fair to hold it against a book that it doesn’t have any. The movie’s first act, which takes place in the countryside of Devon, boasts some beautiful scenery. But it’s also not fair to criticize a stage bound for its lack of realistic scenery and readers of the book can imagine the setting to be as beautiful as they wish.

Casting Jeremy Irvine as Albert in the movie, even though he wasn’t a big-name star at the time, was a very wise choice. A big-name star might have felt it was beneath him to direct serious speeches to a horse. But Irvine, likely because he was so thrilled to be working under Steven Spielberg at this early point in his career, never condescends to the material and completely sells his character and his bond with Joey. If Albert hadn’t been well cast, the movie-well, it might not have been entirely doomed from the start. The story focuses on whoever happens to own Joey, which includes several characters of various nationalities over the course of the war. But the movie would have had to work harder to gain my attention if Albert weren’t convincing and endearing right from the start. Still, there have also been many fine actors who have portrayed Albert onstage and reading the book, you can imagine Albert as well as you wish, so that’s not a great justification for favoring the film either.

I don’t know why he’s putting his face so close to the horse’s. I’m pretty sure that would freak it out in real life.

No, I think the reason I consider the movie adaptation of War Horse the best version is because of the script by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral.) For example, there’s the way it writes the character of Emilie (Celine Buckens), the French girl who cares for Joey during the middle part of the story. In the book and the play, she’s mostly just cute. The movie ages her up a bit and makes her endearingly sassy too. “I was in love with a boy called Francois who had your lovely eyes,” she confides in Joey in one scene. “Unfortunately, he was in love with a girl called Marie who had your teeth. She fell for a boy called Claude who broke my heart and who I intend to marry one day.” You’ve got to love her!

While Emilie’s section of the movie does provide a nice break from the story’s general gloom and doom, more so than it does in the book or the play, it still has some well-done sad moments related to the Emilie’s physical frailty and the absence of her parents.[8]It is sort of annoying that the film never explains exactly what happened to her parents though it teases the question. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect.

Warning: If you’re not familiar with the story, the rest of this post is chock full of spoilers. The movie also has the best written version of the climax[9]Well, it’s the climax in the play and the film. You could argue it’s a bit before the climax in the book. in which Joey is tangled up in barbed wire in No Man’s Land and two soldiers from opposite sides, a Welshman and a German, work together to help him. Here’s how Morpurgo portrays their meeting.

“Now what do we do?” (the Welshman) said, walking toward us and looking at the German who stood head and shoulders above him. “There’s two of us here and one horse to split between us. ‘Course King Solomon had the answer, didn’t he? But it’s not very practical in this case, is it? And what’s worse, I can’t speak a word of German, and I can see you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, can you? Oh, hell, I should never have come out here, I knew I shouldn’t. Can’t think what came over me and all for a muddy old horse too.”

“But I can, I can speak a little bad English,” said the older man… “I speak only a little English-like a schoolboy-but it’s enough, I think for us.” And even as he spoke, I felt a rope slip slowly around my neck and tighten. “As for our other problem since I have been here the first, then the horse is mine. Fair, no? Like your cricket?”

“Cricket! Cricket!” said the young man. “Who ever heard of that barbarous game in Wales? That’s a game for the rotten English. Rugby that’s my game and that’s not a game. That’s a religion, that is-where I come from. I played before the war stopped me and in Waldes we say that a loose ball is our ball.”

“Sorry?” said the German, his eyebrows furrowed with concern. “I cannot understand what you mean by this.”

“Doesn’t matter. Not important, not anymore. We could have settled all this peaceful like-the, the war, I mean-and I’d be back in my valley, and you’d be back in yours. Still, it’s not your fault, I don’t suppose. Nor mine, neither come to that.”

As you can see, the two men speak in the same friendly/confessional tone that all of Joey’s owners in the book speak when they confide in him. (Part of the inspiration for War Horse came when Michael Morpurgo and his wife were part of a charity that allowed urban children to spend some time on farms, and he overheard a troubled boy with a stammer speaking fluently in private to a horse.) What works well in that context doesn’t work as well in this one. Anyway, after they agree to flip a coin for the horse and the Welshman wins, the scene concludes in much the same vein.

“In an hour, maybe, or two,” (the German) said, “we will be trying our best again each other to kill. God only knows why we do it, and I think He has maybe forgotten why. Goodbye, Welshman. We have shown them, haven’t we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between two people if only they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?”

The little Welshman shook his head in disbelief as he took the rope. “I think if they would let you and me have an hour or two out here together, we could sort out this whole wretched mess. There would be no more weeping widows and crying children in my valley and no more in yours. If worse came to worst, we could decide it all on the flip of a coin, couldn’t we?”

“If we did,” said the German with a chuckle, “If we did it that way, then it would be our turn to win. And maybe your Lloyd George would not like that.” And he put he put on hands on the Welshamn’s shoulders for a moment. “Take care, my friend, and good luck. Auf Wiedersehen.”

The play, in my opinion, improves upon this by having the German unable to speak English and the two of them communicate by pantomime. This is entertaining and moving in performance, but the movie’s version really takes the cake if you ask me.[10]Maybe I just haven’t seen the right productions of the play. Colin (Toby Kebbell), a Geordie, by the way, rather than a Welshman, arrives long before Peter (Hinnerk Schonemann) the German but realizes too late he hasn’t brought any tools to free Joey from the barbed wire. Suddenly Peter appears before him, offering wire cutters. Unlike in the book, where the two become friends almost immediately, there’s a bit of initial tension in the air. But it quickly dissipates as they work together to free the horse without hurting it more.

Colin: You speak good English.
Peter: I speak English well.

Instead of unburdening their souls to each other all at once this is how they talk.

Colin: So how’s things in yonder trench?
Peter: Delightful. We read, we knit sweaters, and we train our rats to perform circus tricks.
Colin: Well, if you ever need any more rats, we can send some of ours over. ‘Cause we’ve more than we need, strictly speaking. Besides they scare off all the pretty girls.
Peter: Our girls aren’t afraid of rats.
Colin: Big strapping German girls, eh? The kind what give robust massages?
Peter: Every Thursday and they bring rum cake on your birthday.

This banter, in which more is unsaid than said, feels a lot more believable than the touchy-feely dialogue Morpurgo gives these characters. I wouldn’t say their conversation in the book couldn’t have happened in real life. But in addition to being funnier, the movie’s feels more like real life to me, making it more touching.

The tension between the two has mostly dropped but it resurfaces briefly and ultimately harmlessly when the time comes to decide with whom Joey goes.

Peter: Since my side supplied the cutters, the horse is mine. This is fair, no?
Colin: In a pig’s eye! He’s English, plain to see.
Peter: Oh, you mean because he’s so filthy?
Colin: Because he’s so smart! And you’re none too clean yourself.

Only after they decide to whom Joey belongs with a coin flip, do they acknowledge that their job is to try to kill each other and that each could be killed at any moment.

Colin: Gone quiet now, hasn’t it?
Peter: Yes, but wait half an hour and we’ll be shooting again.
Colin: I’m a terrible shot, Pete. Don’t believe I’ll ever hit the target.

Compared to this, their dialogue in the book feels heavy handed and, honestly, clunky. The movie trusts the viewers to see the antiwar message for themselves without having the characters ask aloud why they can’t just be friends or why disagreements between nations can’t be resolved as peacefully as this one.[11]In the book’s defense, it was narrated by a horse who wouldn’t be thinking about such things. Maybe under that circumstance, Morpurgo felt having the characters spell it out was the only … Continue reading

While the resolution of the story is pretty much the same in each version[12]Although there is a subplot from the book that was sadly cut from the play but happily reinstated by the film, I enjoy the way the movie handles it the most. Famously, after the first World War, many men were left cynical and disillusioned and what makes the character of Albert so appealing is his childlike innocence. We don’t want him to end the story cynical and disillusioned, but it wouldn’t be credible for him to emerge from the War unchanged. The movie resolves this beautifully in the last speech we hear him give to Joey, when it looks like the horse will be going home with someone else. “Don’t be worried, boy, when I go,” he says. “I won’t worry over you none. Hey, I found you, didn’t I? And you found me. And we’ll both know we made it through.” On the one hand, Albert is being mature as he hasn’t gotten his way but is being calm about it anyway. On the other hand, he’s talking to a horse like it understands him, showing he’s still the same old Albert. It’s a highly satisfying ending. And hopefully that’s a satisfying ending to my blog too.

References

References
↑1 I also did an introductory post for this blog that has mysteriously disappeared. Sometimes the ways of WordPress are beyond me.
↑2 I’ll also be doing a farewell post of sorts.
↑3 Though both were written by James Lapine.
↑4 I’d also probably recommend the 1999 ProShot of Oklahoma! over the 1955 movie. Theatre fans should appreciate that.
↑5 Well, his first owner to be a real character in the story anyway. Technically, he must have been owned by someone else before being auctioned off at the beginning.
↑6 Of course, since the entire book is told from the horse’s perspective, we barely see any of this character arc, but I like the idea.
↑7 The steed has many different owners and names over the course of the story but I’m calling him Joey because that’s the one he gets at the beginning even though it’s weird for me since I have a cousin who goes by Joey.
↑8 It is sort of annoying that the film never explains exactly what happened to her parents though it teases the question. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect.
↑9 Well, it’s the climax in the play and the film. You could argue it’s a bit before the climax in the book.
↑10 Maybe I just haven’t seen the right productions of the play.
↑11 In the book’s defense, it was narrated by a horse who wouldn’t be thinking about such things. Maybe under that circumstance, Morpurgo felt having the characters spell it out was the only way he could convey the message.
↑12 Although there is a subplot from the book that was sadly cut from the play but happily reinstated by the film
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on The Best Version of War Horse

Oliver Twist Without Coincidences?

Posted on September 26, 2025 by stationmaster

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a book I love but I typically don’t love adaptations of it. The shorter ones, such as the musical Oliver! or the 2005 movie, cut the mysterious Monks, one of my favorite villains in the story.[1]For the record, that’s not a universal taste. Some critics dislike the melodramatic Monks and prefer the book’s more naturalistic villains like Bill Sikes. What can I say? To each their … Continue reading And even the adaptations that retain the character, such as the 1948 and 1982 films, don’t really do him justice.[2]I should say the 1948 Oliver Twist is a great movie and a great adaptation in many ways. (It was directed by David Lean, who also did the 1946 Great Expectations.) But the parts with Monks are easily … Continue reading A rare adaptation that really develops Monks though is the 1999 miniseries written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Renny Rye. Like many another Oliver Twist, this one begins with the highly dramatic scene of his heavily pregnant mother (Sophia Myles) making a terrible journey on foot through the rain, giving birth to him in a workhouse and dying.[3]Dickens fans may be interested to know that Myles also played Kate Nickleby in a miniseries adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. I felt she lacked the necessary warmth for the character there but … Continue reading Unlike other Oliver Twists though, this one immediately goes back in time to show us the relationship between her and Oliver’s father (Tim Dutton) and why Monks (Marc Warren) is obsessed with ruining the poor orphan. The fact that it’s unlike other versions doesn’t mean it’s original to this one. While the flashback, which takes up most of the first episode, makes some changes to the book’s backstory for the series’ own dramatic purposes, it’s pretty much the same as what Dickens revealed in the final section of Oliver Twist. In fact, I’m impressed by how many details from the book it includes.

As a result of showing this backstory rather than just telling us about it, Monks’s evil mother (frequent Bleasdale collaborator Lindsay Duncan), an intriguing offstage character in the book, cuts a much more prominent figure in the miniseries. She becomes a great hissable villain.

A downside of showing the backstory right off the bat is that Monks can’t be mysterious when we know all about him. To keep him from becoming boring, the miniseries makes him a much more sympathetic villain. I don’t entirely dislike that idea as I’d contend there was always a hint of tragedy in Monks and his relationships with his parents, but I feel like the series goes a bit too far. Monks’s mother, when trying to manipulate him, tells her son that she knows he really enjoys killing things and is in denial about it. But we never get any indication that she’s telling the truth. Whenever Monks has the opportunity to kill anyone, he comes across as horrified by the prospect.[4]He didn’t want to kill Oliver in the book either but that wasn’t necessarily supposed to make him sympathetic. It might have been better if we really did feel like he has this sadistic side that he’s desperately suppressing. As it is, it’s hard to tell why his father considered him such a disgrace. Was it just because of his Frankenstein-ian appearance?[5]I know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, not the monster but Frankenstein’s-monster-ian doesn’t sound right and, anyway, as Frankenstein’s “child” the monster … Continue reading That would make the father’s motivations less sympathetic than Dickens intended them to be though to be sure, the father was never supposed to be a perfect character.

An interesting side effect of restructuring the story is that it immediately establishes Oliver Twist as a melodrama. In the novel, we begin with the institutional evil of the workhouse and then move on to the criminal evil of Fagin’s gang before being introduced to the melodramatic evil of Monks. You could argue that this is an improvement on the source material and that it’s better to establish a melodramatic tone right off the bat so that readers or viewers aren’t too thrown when it develops later. You could also argue that the book had an interesting structure and that this messes it up. I guess I don’t have a strong opinion either way.

The characters who I feel are the least well adapted are John Dawkins AKA the Artful Dodger (Alex Crowley) and Charley Bates (Roland Manookian) which is odd since the miniseries actually avoids my pet peeve about the Dodger in adaptations and even addresses a problem I have with Charley Bates in the book. It annoys me that adaptations usually make the Artful Dodger a sympathetic figure. Do none of them remember what a jerk he was in the book?[6]I can kind of understand why they feel the need to do this with Fagin, given the antisemitic stereotypes he embodies. (In some cases, this is because they’re combining him with Charley Bates who somewhat randomly redeems himself at the end of the story.) The 1999 miniseries, if anything, goes in the opposite direction, making the character even more of a villain. But it’s hard for me to appreciate this when the actors for both the Dodger and Charley look far too old for their roles. In the book, they’re foils for Oliver and, naturally, they’re around his age. Here a generous interpretation is that they’re meant to be teenagers but look like they’re in their thirties. As I mentioned, in the book, Charley Bates redeemed himself in the end. According to what I’ve read, Dickens didn’t originally intend this but a friend of his really loved the character and begged Dickens to give him a happy ending.[7]It’s possible that the reason adaptations tend to portray the Artful Dodger and his fellow juvenile pickpockets more sympathetically than Dickens did is that they see them as appealing, … Continue reading Reading the book, it’s pretty obvious that the author’s plans for the character changed while he was writing. The miniseries has Charley show signs of conscience much earlier and more dramatically than the book does. Technically, this is an improvement…but I can’t quite say I like it. I’m attached to the Charley Bates from the book and the character in the miniseries just doesn’t feel like him. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of the Artful Dodger though there I can say it’s mostly because of the age thing.

Other than that, my least favorite bit of casting is David Ross as Mr. Bumble. He just isn’t pompous and intimidating enough to be the character. It’s true that Mr. Bumble is supposed to end up being overawed by his eventual wife (Julie Walters) but it shouldn’t be obvious from the start.

I’ve got to give the miniseries points for including Mr. Losberne (David Bark-Jones), one of my favorite good guys from the book who often gets cut by adaptations. However, I then have to take those points away again for the miniseries combining him with Rose (Keira Knightley)’s obligatory love interest, Harry Maylie, one of my least favorite good guys from the book who often gets cut by adaptations. Actually, he ends up not being much like either character. Since, like many another Oliver Twist, this one cuts the character of Mrs. Maylie, most of Losberne’s best lines from the book wouldn’t have worked here. Oh well.

Sorry about the opening credits in this shot.

In general, though, the casting and characterizations for this miniseries are excellent. Andy Serkis (who played Rigaud in the 2008 Little Dorrit), Emily Woof and Robert Lindsay are great as the iconic trio of Bill Sikes, Nancy and Fagin. I especially like the deadpan, for lack of a better description, way Lindsay delivers his character’s groveling, wheedling lines. You get the impression this is a Fagin who is always calculating-until his last scene when he goes mad.

Michael Kitchen is also great as Mr. Brownlow. Because of the way the story has been restructured, he comes across as almost as much a protagonist as Oliver or Nancy. Kitchen and Bleasdale make him quite compelling, and they do this not by adding to the character but by expanding on things at which Dickens only hinted. I’m not sure if it was such a good idea though to give him a history of taking in homeless boys who then took advantage of and stole from him long before he met Oliver. I understand the miniseries is trying to establish that, in the book’s words, Mr. Brownlow “(has) been deceived before in the objects whom (he has) endeavored to benefit” but having his charity repeatedly take that specific form is weird.

As Oliver Twist himself, young Sam Smith perfectly embodies Dickens’s saintly protagonist. I appreciate that unlike many other adaptations, such as the musical, the 1997 movie and the 2007 miniseries, this one keeps Oliver’s distaste for theft, however unrealistic it might be for someone from his background and in his desperate circumstances.

And I love that this miniseries includes the comical manservants, Giles (Sam Kelly) and Brittles (Morgan Jones.) They typically don’t make the cut.

Also included is the pedlar (Alan Pentony) who innocently offers to demonstrate his stain removal product on Sikes’s bloodstained hat. It’s details like that which make the villain’s guilty flight at the climax so memorable.

If there’s a major thing about this adaptation that niggles me, besides the things I’ve already mentioned, it’s the way it tries to “fix” the plot of Oliver Twist by removing the incredible coincidences in it. Not only does the reason Dodger brings Oliver to Fagin become that Monks has already hired him to ruin the boy, but the Dodger and Charley specifically try to frame him for stealing from Mr. Brownlow. I know that many readers find Dickens’s use of coincidences to be a weakness but honestly, I feel like making everything intentional on the parts of Monks and Fagin makes the whole thing seem more ridiculous than if it had been the result of a few convenient coincidences. It’s not like Fagin needed the extra motivation to induct a vulnerable child into his gang of pickpockets. It’s what he does anyway. And the really weird thing is the miniseries actually adds a coincidence to the story by having Charley Bates know Mr. Brownlow from before he ever met Oliver Twist. (Remember what I mentioned about this version of Brownlow having taken a number of homeless boys into his house in the past?) So are coincidences a flaw or not? Make up your mind![8]Why don’t Dickens’s coincidences bother me in the book? I once heard animator Glen Keane say in an interview that his idea of a great story is something really impossible. I’d agree … Continue reading

While I can’t really recommend this Oliver Twist as an introduction to the source material, frankly, that’s true of most adaptations of this particular book.[9]My favorite is actually a radio dramatization from 2012. I enjoy the 1999 miniseries as an homage to the original novel. The changes it makes to the story and characters aren’t necessarily bigger than the changes that adaptations usually make, and they happen to irritate me less. This Oliver Twist does manage to nail the book’s horrifying yet humorous tone. I’ll close by mentioning something I particularly admire. A quirk of the novel is that the problem of Oliver’s safety is pretty much wrapped up two thirds of the way through it. After that, the story becomes more about Nancy and about revealing the mystery of Oliver’s birth. Many adaptations, on the other hand, keep the protagonist in Bill Sikes’s clutches until the very end to avoid the audience losing interest. The 1999 miniseries manage to involve Oliver more in the climax without altering the plot quite so much. Please, adapters, I want some more of that.

References

References
↑1 For the record, that’s not a universal taste. Some critics dislike the melodramatic Monks and prefer the book’s more naturalistic villains like Bill Sikes. What can I say? To each their own.
↑2 I should say the 1948 Oliver Twist is a great movie and a great adaptation in many ways. (It was directed by David Lean, who also did the 1946 Great Expectations.) But the parts with Monks are easily the weakest.
↑3 Dickens fans may be interested to know that Myles also played Kate Nickleby in a miniseries adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. I felt she lacked the necessary warmth for the character there but she’s great in this role which doesn’t necessarily require much warmth.
↑4 He didn’t want to kill Oliver in the book either but that wasn’t necessarily supposed to make him sympathetic.
↑5 I know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, not the monster but Frankenstein’s-monster-ian doesn’t sound right and, anyway, as Frankenstein’s “child” the monster could bear his last name.
↑6 I can kind of understand why they feel the need to do this with Fagin, given the antisemitic stereotypes he embodies.
↑7 It’s possible that the reason adaptations tend to portray the Artful Dodger and his fellow juvenile pickpockets more sympathetically than Dickens did is that they see them as appealing, romanticized street urchins like Gavroche in Les Misérables. If Dickens intended this though, he also intended to thoroughly deconstruct it by the end of the book.
↑8 Why don’t Dickens’s coincidences bother me in the book? I once heard animator Glen Keane say in an interview that his idea of a great story is something really impossible. I’d agree with that.
↑9 My favorite is actually a radio dramatization from 2012.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Oliver Twist Without Coincidences?