Name of the Game: Poetic Licence

Guess what?

There is no such thing as an original story.

Which means that when someone is adapting something, not only are they taking an idea that someone(or several someones) had, and then they make it their own.

This is called:

Every time I go see a play or a film that is an adaptation of another work, there are people--critics, friends of mine, etc.--who call it terrible because "it ruined the book". Yes. There are movies and plays that do ruin the book(*cough* Percy Jackson *cough*); however, there are also writers who take something and make it their own--and do a great job of it.

Example? The Count Of Monte Christo. That is a one thousand something page book--so how to make it a good movie? BBC tried, and kind of failed; they tried in the 1950s, and kinda failed; but in 2002 Jay Wolpert(of POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl fame) took that story and turned it into a rather brilliant two and a half hour movie.

Yes, it wasn't one hundred percent accurate, but it did stay true to the core of the story. AND it cut the eons of prison pages down to a minimum(because, really, do you want to spend that much time in a prison--unless it's Shawshank Redemption--but I digress.)

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings did make a valiant effort to remain true to the original Tolkien work. I mean, why else would the films all be two to three hours each? And yes, for the most part, they were very true. Except for the additional characters, and scenes--and cutting about seventy pages out of The Fellowship so we could get to Aragorn faster. But it was ten times better than the cartoons--which, yes, were made in the 70s and had to be animation because there was no CGI, but still, they cut a third of each of the books and "Two Towers" wasn't even made!!!! Maybe they had a reason for that; maybe not. Whatever.

And ok, maybe he did go a little overboard with the Hobbit trilogy, but he did get all the good stuff in, and he did also make an amazing effort to keep the core of the story(except, I'm sorry, Tauriel was a little--ok a lot--much and I really didn't care about Gandalf stuff. Like at all. But whatever, it's Peter Jackson's adaptation; I can make myself live with that.)

As an experiment, I did a quick look up of various adaptions to see if any of the them--any of them--have come close to being totally faithful to the original work. I found one.

Winnie the Pooh.

And you know what? Even that one had something in it that the book didn't have.



The character Gopher is not in the books.  He really isn't!! Gopher's not in the book! He even says that! Watch:

And you know, I went back and checked. Twice. As I kid, I thought the line "I'm not in the book" was just one of those catchphrase type of things, and then when I watched it as an adult(thank you Netflix) and you know what?He isn't there.

Not in any of the original Winnie the Pooh Stories.

At all.

But he is in the movies, the old television series, the Christmas Specials, etc, etc, etc.

I guess this was Disney's way of making the story his own.

 Because really, that's what poetic licence is all about.

You make the thing your own.

Which is kinda the whole point, I guess.