A Look Back at Some of my Old Blog Posts

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.