This week’s Major Spoilers trade paperback review reminded me of the good old days of comic book adaptations, where the books bore little to no resemblance to the media they were adapting. Gold Key/Whitman comics were the masters of this, giving us a sequel to ‘The Black Hole’ involving weird cannibal robots and strangely misshapen versions of the characters we knew, ending with some nonsense about an alien race called Virlights. It was a glorious train wreck, as enjoyable in its way as the movie it bore no resemblance to. Having just read several issues of the Starship Enterprise propelled by rockets through bizarre adventures that Roddenberry would NOT have signed off on, I still found myself entertained, albeit not in a ‘Star Trek’ way, leading to today’s derivative query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) also loved the cartoon Archies, who bore only the most superficial resemblances to the comic book Riverdale gang, asking: Which bad adaptations do you nonetheless find enjoyable on their own levels?
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Early Marvel Star Wars is considered bad by many people but I find them charming.
I was actually quite happy when the old Expanded Universe started to incorporate ideas and species from the old Marvel works. I keep hoping we might end up seeing races like S’kytri, Stenax and even Lepi (they aren’t all green) in either Rebels or one of the stand-alone films since Marvel is using some of their old stuff in the new books. I wanted to see Zeltrons as well, but they were recently made canon via one of the Kanan novels.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide live-action adaptations. The BBC mini-series is pretty decent, but the Hollywood movie is a bit off. Still, I find it a fun movie to watch. Neither are quite as good as the books for me, but I can’t hate them for trying.