Biggest surprise when you read the book...

[Precure]

These movies were done to pander to the Hollywood people, so the studio can get a "Best Film" oscar.

[Batcathat]

I just want to know who possibly thought Hunchback was good material for a children's movie.

To be fair, that could be said about a lot of Disney movies, from Snow White and onward. Taking grim (pardon the pun ) stories and turning them child-friendly is pretty much their thing.

[MCerberus]

It should be noted that the Disney version is an adaptation of a comic book, not the original Notre Dam de Paris. I do agree that the cartoon did get Mouse'd pretty badly with a really solid thematic core and a lot of artists genuinely doing amazing work.

It's just... the singing gargoyle was in love with the comic relief animal sidekick and it drug the whole end result down immensely.

[Errorname]

I just want to know who possibly thought Hunchback was good material for a children's movie.

Honestly it kind of is? Like the bad stuff in that movie is mostly comic relief stuff, the actual core plot works very well even if it's not book loyal.

[Ionathus]

15-year-old me, actually reading the books for the first time:

"...Who's this 'Bombadil' clown?"

[Kardwill]

Meanwhile to answer the question; reading through Dracula after I thought I knew everything about it. I'm shocked by basically any adaptation that does not recognize how cool and good a character Mina is now.

Yeah, I read that book 3 years ago, and it was quite a shock. I like to read late 19th century adventure books (Conan Doyle, Burrough), but Dracula is surprisingly modern, both in its writing and in its characters. Especially Mina. I mean, while the boys are running around in circle with stakes, guns and holy wafers, she quietly shatters Dracula's entire conspiray with a typewriter ^^

I was soooo mad when Van Helsing decided (repeatedly) to protect endanger her and put her out of the loop. Because "a woman shouldn't worry her pretty head with such worrying matters"

I mean, what the hell, old fool? She was your best vampire hunter, the backbone of the entire team, she lost her best friend to Dracula, and she was already on the vampire's grocery list. How in hell would keeping her in the dark protect her from the monster? Were you afraid whe might upstage you? (because, let's be honest, she totally did)

And yes, Renfield was a surprise too, in his "horribly creepy, but actually tries to protect people" way.
Or Dracula itself. I thought the "tragic romantic figure" stuff cam from the book, but no. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a complete, brutal monster, through and through. It was actually refreshing to see the original vampire go against that cliché.

[Metastachydium]

I was soooo mad when Van Helsing decided (repeatedly) to protect endanger her and put her out of the loop. Because "a woman shouldn't worry her pretty head with such worrying matters"

I mean, what the hell, old fool? She was your best vampire hunter, the backbone of the entire team, she lost her best friend to Dracula, and she was already on the vampire's grocery list. How in hell would keeping her in the dark protect her from the monster? Were you afraid whe might upstage you?

I don't mind it that much. The best thing about Stoker's Van Helsing is that while he's the group's primary source of insight into how vampires work, he's ultimately not some Genius Sue Vampire Hunter Extraordinary but a quirky old weirdo who's wrong a lot, and merely lucky that he believes in the right conspiracy theories almost as often. He's competent and knowledgeable, but very fallible at the same time.

[Gnoman]

Uh, what? For most of the Bond books, that description's wrong on pretty much every level.

I must admit that my perception here was heavily colored by Moonraker and From Russia With Love, both of which have him discovering the Evil Plot almost after he's already spoiled it.

To be fair, that could be said about a lot of Disney movies, from Snow White and onward. Taking grim (pardon the pun ) stories and turning them child-friendly is pretty much their thing.

Disney's a bit misblamed for this. The storybook I had as a kid, which was a family relic from like 1890, had versions of a lot of fairy tales that were closer to the Disney versions than Grimm. Also, a huge part of the Disney animated canon wasn't originally aimed at children - that focus started getting prominent in the 60s, maybe 70s.

[LaZodiac]

Yeah, I read that book 3 years ago, and it was quite a shock. I like to read late 19th century adventure books (Conan Doyle, Burrough), but Dracula is surprisingly modern, both in its writing and in its characters. Especially Mina. I mean, while the boys are running around in circle with stakes, guns and holy wafers, she quietly shatters Dracula's entire conspiray with a typewriter ^^

I was soooo mad when Van Helsing decided (repeatedly) to protect endanger her and put her out of the loop. Because "a woman shouldn't worry her pretty head with such worrying matters"

I mean, what the hell, old fool? She was your best vampire hunter, the backbone of the entire team, she lost her best friend to Dracula, and she was already on the vampire's grocery list. How in hell would keeping her in the dark protect her from the monster? Were you afraid whe might upstage you? (because, let's be honest, she totally did)

And yes, Renfield was a surprise too, in his "horribly creepy, but actually tries to protect people" way.
Or Dracula itself. I thought the "tragic romantic figure" stuff cam from the book, but no. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a complete, brutal monster, through and through. It was actually refreshing to see the original vampire go against that cliché.

I think my favorite aspect of this is that one time, long ago, I heard someone describe Dracula as a story that "is scary because none of the characters know they're in the novel Dracula". No one knows vampires and the like exists, no one suspects this sort of thing, so they just march headlong into the destruction and it is horrifying.

And then, mid way through the book, Mina Harker takes all the assembled diary entries and letters and news clippings and such... and WRITES THE NOVEL DRACULA, by putting them all together in the order that we the reader have just finished reading up to this point, and hands out copies to everyone, so they have a reading session where they learn that they are in fact in a horror novel called Dracula. It is a testament to the reality of the writing that after being presented with this evidence, they still make the mistake of doubting Mina's fortitude for these matters- no one in a horror story fully understands the scope and scale of what they're dealing with, even when literally presented with the actual functional text of the work they are literally in, and it is an incredible moment.

[Cikomyr2]

Edmond Dantes doesnt go back with Mercedes. He's content in her and her son to abandon his rival so he commits suicide.

Also, Edmond's thirst for revenge ends up having a much larger body count than he intended. He manipulated events to lead to the murder of the policeman, but there was so much collateral damage he regretted his plan in the end, and swore off revenge.

[DaedalusMkV]

To be fair, that could be said about a lot of Disney movies, from Snow White and onward. Taking grim (pardon the pun ) stories and turning them child-friendly is pretty much their thing.

I mean, this is mostly a disconnect between what we consider child-friendly today and what people in the past considered child-friendly. I've read a few collections of folk tales from the 17th and 18th centuries (not originals, sadly, but still accurate copies) and in those days it was basically unheard of for a children's story to end without at least one gruesome murder with a detailed description. Kids liked that sort of thing, and adults tended to like stories with brutal and just punishments being meted out both to villains and to disobedient children.

I've read versions of the Cinderella story where the wicked stepmother is executed by the royal guard and the stepsisters have their eyes gouged out. The original Snow White sees the evil queen tortured to death by the heroine's new husband. Just read Perrault's Bluebeard, which was explicitly written for children and generally very popular with them at the time, and tell me that kids in those days didn't enjoy a bit of graphic violence in their stories.

For me, this award goes to The Little Mermaid. I was familiar with the Disney version at the time, and wound up reading the Andersen story for a literature class in school. To say it bears little resemblance to the Disney version is... An understatement. Apologies to any Danes in the forums, but I'll take the Disney version over the original any day in this particular case.

[Precure]

Most of the perceived darkness is due to changing moral standards. Snow White's stepmother's demise isn't that unusual considering there was literal witch hunts happening during that time period.

[Mordar]

I mean, this is mostly a disconnect between what we consider child-friendly today and what people in the past considered child-friendly. I've read a few collections of folk tales from the 17th and 18th centuries (not originals, sadly, but still accurate copies) and in those days it was basically unheard of for a children's story to end without at least one gruesome murder with a detailed description. Kids liked that sort of thing, and adults tended to like stories with brutal and just punishments being meted out both to villains and to disobedient children.

I've read versions of the Cinderella story where the wicked stepmother is executed by the royal guard and the stepsisters have their eyes gouged out. The original Snow White sees the evil queen tortured to death by the heroine's new husband. Just read Perrault's Bluebeard, which was explicitly written for children and generally very popular with them at the time, and tell me that kids in those days didn't enjoy a bit of graphic violence in their stories.

For me, this award goes to The Little Mermaid. I was familiar with the Disney version at the time, and wound up reading the Andersen story for a literature class in school. To say it bears little resemblance to the Disney version is... An understatement. Apologies to any Danes in the forums, but I'll take the Disney version over the original any day in this particular case.

Most of the perceived darkness is due to changing moral standards. Snow White's stepmother's demise isn't that unusual considering there was literal witch hunts happening during that time period.

I think the purpose is radically different as well. The stories were often parables, so they were meant to educate with a veneer of entertainment, right? Modern stories are meant to extract assets from the consumer and transit those assets to the producer (and a smaller amount to the creator). And maybe entertain, or something.

DaedalusMkV - did you like the book and just love the movie, or hate/tolerate?

- M

[Batcathat]

I think the purpose is radically different as well. The stories were often parables, so they were meant to educate with a veneer of entertainment, right? Modern stories are meant to extract assets from the consumer and transit those assets to the producer (and a smaller amount to the creator). And maybe entertain, or something.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I have to pick the motivation of my entertainer between "wants to teach me a (probably heavy-handed) life lesson" and "wants my money" I think I prefer the latter.

[DaedalusMkV]

I think the purpose is radically different as well. The stories were often parables, so they were meant to educate with a veneer of entertainment, right? Modern stories are meant to extract assets from the consumer and transit those assets to the producer (and a smaller amount to the creator). And maybe entertain, or something.

DaedalusMkV - did you like the book and just love the movie, or hate/tolerate?

- M

Well, it was hardly a thin veneer, and how educational they were meant to be varied heavily depending on the author. Perrault loved his morals so much he made sure to directly publish them at the end of every story so you couldn't possibly miss the message he was trying to give, while the Grimms were very much collecting stories they thought were interesting and publishing them to an audience of adults just as much as children. Some stories might be mostly entertainment with the educational side being primarily derived from it being a good story - 99% of the Arabian Nights collection falls here - while others might be mostly educational parables that entertain as a way to build interest, which is where a lot of theological tales lay.

I genuinely don't think the general structure and purpose of storytelling has changed much in human history. We've had minstrels and bards and skalds telling stories as a job for as long as we've had history, so it's not like a monetary goal is a new thing, and plenty of modern media has a specific message it wants to convey as well. If modern media is more profit-oriented than what we saw in the 17th century, it's only because industrialization changed the way we produce things. What has changed is really just cultural attitudes to the stories themselves - in 1632 nobody considered a beheading something grizzly you spared your children from, so nobody would have objected to one in a children's story.

As for the Little Mermaid specifically, it was one of the big Disney movies of my childhood, along with Aladdin. I had a Flounder stuffy I loved to bits as a kid. So yes, the movie has a special place in my heart. The book is... Probably my least favorite of Andersen's stories, of the five I've read. It's kind of incoherent, torturing yourself to try to appeal to a one-sided crush is portrayed as a profoundly good thing to do and the ending is just painful in every sense (yes, let's end on a giant deus-ex-machina that directly contradicts everything we've already been told because otherwise what we have is heart-wrenchingly depressing). I did not enjoy it.

[gbaji]

I don't know about anyone else, but if I have to pick the motivation of my entertainer between "wants to teach me a (probably heavy-handed) life lesson" and "wants my money" I think I prefer the latter.

Well. I also think there's a bit of difference between "stories told by professional storytellers for money" and "stories told to children before bed". The latter is (at least) a subset of the former.

And yeah, I'll second the observation that modern stories are just as much about teaching heavy handed life lessons today as those of the past were. The lessons have changed a bit though...

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Not a book, but I watched the majority of Hellsing Ultimate: Abridged before watching Hellsing Ultimate. Pretty fascinating to see just how much they were able to change while still keeping the plot points mostly the same. And then it flipped around, with Hellsing Ultimate finishing years before the Abridged (naturally). I liked how they resolved Walter's arc better in the original, and how they did Alucard's better in the abridged.

Spoiler

Show

Walter turning on Millenium once Alucard was defeated, wiping out the last of the real monsters with the dregs of his strength before dying himself, is a great end to his character, better than the "traitor's end" the abridged gave him (no matter how thoroughly he'd earned that). But Alucard having to escape from the personal hell he'd accidentally created for himself, trapped with millions of souls all sharing his power and perception, by giving them all therapy so they could move on into death, and then finally doing the same for himself so he could move on into life, was genius.

Also, his "Am I a bad person?" before instantly blinking out of existence as his new powers forced him to become introspective was hilarious, especially contrasted with the slow and dramatic (even 'melodramatic' wouldn't be unfair here) closing of eyes in the original.

[Dargaron]

Not going quite as far back as a lot of the stuff in this thread, but when I went back and read the novelizations of the first four Bionicle story arcs, I was surprised how much emphasis was put on their initial quest for each of the six Toa to collect their own copy of the six (at the time) Kanohi Masks (basically swappable power-ups like levitation or water breathing) and how for at least the first couple books, the protagonists would actually swap their masks around in order to deal with specific challenges fairly regularly (like everyone switching to levitation if they need to descend into a pit or using the Mask of Speed to get past a revolving door).

As the number of mask powers increased over the course of the series, this kind of thing happened less and less frequently, and mask powers starting being treated basically as something inherent to the character instead of a tool they just happened to be using. By the time you get to the direct-to-dvd movies, the process was basically complete. But I still fondly remember little vignettes like the Bohrok Kal arc (where the main six had lost their elemental powers) where they tried to use other tricks they'd picked up during previous adventures to their advantage.

[Bohandas]

Bram Stoker's book The Lair of the White Worm, had a few surprises compared to the movie. in addition to the fact that Lord Caswall, the prototype for Lord D'Ampton, was a villain, that Lady Marsh and the Wyrm were a single creature and that there was no snake cult I think the most jarring thing about the book was that it was jarringly racist, even though I had come to Stoker's books after having already read all of Lovecraft's books. The characters in the book seem consistently more perturbed by Caswall's black henchman than they are about Caswall governing his subjects through the use of mind control or about Lady Marsh being a shapeshifting murderer.

[Rodin]

I have one that's kind of the reverse - having read the book first before watching the extremely well known movie: The Shining.

Watching the movie after the book left me with mixed feelings I wouldn't have had if I watched the movie first. Jack Torrance's character in the movie is a lot more one-dimensional, and there's quite a few elements missing from the book. Not being able to see inside Danny's head is a big loss, as is the lack of scenes like the hedge creatures. At the same time I can see and admire the filmmaking and craft which went into it.

Dr. Sleep left me the same way. I loved the ending of the book, but it required a lot of setup that the movie didn't have time for. The movie also had to deal with expectations of being a sequel to the movie, so they did a totally new ending that focused on The Overlook which was really cool in its own right. I still find I prefer the book's happier ending, but can once again respect what the director was going for and the overall effect was pulled off well.

[KorvinStarmast]

I've ranted on-site about how much I hate their Hunchback (and I'm not even talking about the sequel here).)

Yeah, it was a disappointment. But it's Disney.

Most adaptations of Dracula are at the very least very strictly inferior to the original if not aggressively bad (most are aggressively bad) and Mina (alongside Renfield, but he kinda deserves it for killing birdies) is one of the characters who's done dirty the most (the idiotic reincarnation romance thing they keep slapping on her is just insult to injury).

You may find Paul Witcover's Dracula: Asylum a decent take. I enjoyed it in part due to how he set the story in the World War I era in England, and I had been studying up on WW I for professional reasons when I read the book.

[DomaDoma]

Usually, I read the book first. But there are exceptions, and the most colorful surprise among them was when the evil dictator in V for Vendetta turned out to be madly and pivotally in love with his own supercomputer.

[Wookieetank]

Dr. Sleep left me the same way. I loved the ending of the book, but it required a lot of setup that the movie didn't have time for. The movie also had to deal with expectations of being a sequel to the movie, so they did a totally new ending that focused on The Overlook which was really cool in its own right. I still find I prefer the book's happier ending, but can once again respect what the director was going for and the overall effect was pulled off well.

Dr. Sleep is a great example of how to do an adaptation right. Loved the book, and the movie was spot on as well. I also prefer the happier ending, but the movie climax was the better of the two I felt. (Must resist urge to go on a re-reading spree...)

Another one that comes to mind is Firestarter. Both the book and the movie (original, haven't seen the newer one) do a fantastic job of capturing the paranoia feel of being on the run from a secret government agency. Don't think I've read or watched anything else that captured that sort of anxious tension as viscerally.

[Cikomyr2]

Oh, oh!

From the 1984 Lynch movie to the pages of the book.

Making rainfall on the entirely of Dune would destroy all spice forever.

Kind of a big plot point.

[GloatingSwine]

• Casino Royale Bond isn't a drunk. He likes his drinks, but I don't think he ever actually gets drunk.

It is the universal opinion of anyone who has ever had a vesper martini that Bond doesn't like drinks, nobody who likes drinks would perpetrate that.

[Cikomyr2]

It is the universal opinion of anyone who has ever had a vesper martini that Bond doesn't like drinks, nobody who likes drinks would perpetrate that.

He likes it watered down so he is less drink?

[Phalanx]

the first thing that comes to mind is The Red Wedding

[GloatingSwine]

He likes it watered down so he is less drink?

The amount of extra water you'd get from shaking vs. stirring doesn't vaguely contend with the fact that the drink is just a mix of spirits with no modifiers and tastes like paint stripper.

It's a drink for people who smoke so much their tastebuds don't work and want their braincells to follow in short order.

[Saph]

The amount of extra water you'd get from shaking vs. stirring doesn't vaguely contend with the fact that the drink is just a mix of spirits with no modifiers and tastes like paint stripper.

I think every time I've tried any kind of vodka martini it's tasted like that, so to be honest you could pretty much list any mixture of spirits, put "martini" in the name, and tell me you enjoy it, and I'd shrug and assume that was just how your taste buds worked.

[DavidSh]

The amount of extra water you'd get from shaking vs. stirring doesn't vaguely contend with the fact that the drink is just a mix of spirits with no modifiers and tastes like paint stripper.

If you're still talking about the "vesper martini", I would contend that the Kina Lillet counts as a modifier. For a regular martini, the vermouth should count. I don't consider such things as "gin over which you have whispered the word vermouth" to be an actual martini.