Adapting content into different media has been and always will be a practice that is actually helping the Transmedia cause across the globe. If you look into the popular culture there is a litany of examples about adapted media. To list a few there is the Harry Potter series from Novels to the Movie, The Detective Conan Series from Japan from Manga to Anime to TV live-action to Movies and Adaptation of old stories like the eastern legend of the Monkey King – Journey to the West.
Adapting one content to different media had always followed the controversy and differing arguments for and against it. People who opt against adapting content and keeping the source material as it is want to protect an already excellent source content to be disgraced by a bad adaptation. More so than good adaptations that diligently copies the source material to the other media without any changes, most adaptations end up with a new spin on it by its director or producer. There are creative conflicts between the author of the source content and his fans against the director or creator of the adapted version in another media. There had been horrendous examples that cement why acclaimed content ought not to be adapted. For instance the Dragon ball Movie or the Avatar: Aang the Last Airbender. Both the series were adapted with good reason as the original content had a huge fan base and was very popular and some fans would have liked to experience the content in different media. It was a huge opportunity for business-wise to gain more revenue through the original content instead of letting it die. However, the way the adaptation was done just was not right. It usually ends up with a huge backlash from the fans and the author of the original content. And every single fan who watched the adaptation would go back hoping would there be a way to forget ever experiencing the adaptation of their loved content.
There had been adaptations that played safe by copying the source exactly as it is and being rigidly diligent towards the source. For instance, Nodame Cantabile: a Japanese manga about interesting characters trying to make it in the competitive world of classical music, had been adapted from Japanese manga (comic) to Anime TV series to a live-action TV series to having its own movies. For me personally, I watched the Anime first then read the manga and watched the Live-Action TV series and the movies. But though it was fun seeing a really good casting and almost a similar experience watching both in the end it was good but it was not anything different.
On the other hand, adapting original content to other media could actually give the content a new fan base and a breath of freshness – reviving old content into media is something that could keep old content alive in a new media landscape. The acclaimed fantasy TV show from HBO The game of thrones is a great example. A series novel by George R. R. Martin had a huge fan base even before the TV series was more like a niche. However, after the adaptation, the story of the original content reached way more people than before. This could be because, in this digital age, there are more people who watch TV than people who read books. But due to the effect of Transmedia people who originally read the book watched the TV series and people who originally watched the TV series read the book. Thus the total fan base of the original content increased exponentially promoting the series from being a niche to the mainstream.
Still most adaptations try to be faithful to the source but there are adaptations which succeeded in creating different versions of the original and still gained more popularity and more fans for doing just that. A Japanese manga by Hiromu Arakawa called Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most acclaimed manga’s that was released from Japan. Usually due to different limitations due to the pace of release of the mangas which are yet not completed and having an Anime or live-action TV series adapting it concurrently make it difficult to have adaptations run on paid regular time-slots in broadcasting. Thus, the producers of the adaptations might have to come to a conclusion to wind up the adaptation before the original content is completed. Thus to make the best use of such a situation some producers opt to work closely with the original author and some writers to write an exclusive ending for those adaptations. And for Fullmetal Alchemist, this strategy surprisingly worked well. And the acclaim they got for the adaptation was so well received that after the original content was completed they decided to adapt it again in another Anime with the same title but completely faithful to the original content. And fans loved this adaptation as well.
In my search to understand my own feelings about adaptations I have got to admit after seeing the ‘abomination of an adaptation that was produced just to make money’, I felt adapting an already brilliant source content is ‘creative blasphemy’. However, after realizing that by adapting source content into different media and the right people handling the adaptation, it allows for something interesting and beautiful to be portrayed in a different way so that fans like myself can have a different experience reliving the original emotions we felt when we first read or watched or listened or consumed the original content. In addition to that as a purely business perspective adaptation is one of the best ways to increase revenue from the content by increasing the fan base.
In conclusion, I feel that if the content is treated well in the right hands an adaptation would be something that makes something great even greater and make that great thing reach more people than ever before. Thus, in the digital era, we live in Transmedia storytelling and Adaptations is something that will continue to happen. I just hope the people adapting source content do it for the right reason which is not to make money but to put a creative spin on a creative original source and to revive something that was old but is still gold. With this, I plea that my list of original content like the David Gemmell will be adapted into a movie or TV series someday and I finish this post saying to look forward to the upcoming adaptation of ‘Monster’ (which was a manga created by Naoki Urasawa) as a HBO series by director Guillermo Del Toro in the near future.
