this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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so -- did anyone watch the live action rendition? Was it worth the time in retrospect?
I watched all but the last episode before I just couldn't do it anymore. The show had its moments, but it just never quite came together. The acting for the main crew was pretty decent, Jet was phenomenally done. The changes they made for Vicious and Julia are pretty sacrilegious and hard to watch.
Same, except I did watch the last episode. Agreed on Jet (perfection), and Julia/Vicious (what the everloving fuck). Spike and Faye were fine. Even with the missteps, I was still willing to see where they were taking it, if given time for a few course corrections. But they hit that cancel button pretty much immediately.
I think it was just a poor choice for a live action adaptation in the end. It's a character driven show that thrives on nuance and atmosphere and a lot of that just doesn't translate. I would have been willing to see what they grew into, but I lost a lot of faith in the writing with how badly vicious and Julia were butchered. It was just so bad watching them turn Vicious into a bumbling, incompetent clown and Julia an abused housewife. Maybe if Watanabe was involved in the same way that Oda was for the One Piece adaptation it may have had a chance.
I think it could have worked if the people involved showed actual care for the show. Unfortunately, it seems most adaptations these days are written and directed by people that not only don't care about the original, but actually harbor resentment toward the original and want the adaptation to fail.
Time and again we see adaptation after adaptation seriously deviate from the original and are met with critical and financial ruin. It really makes you wonder why they insist on repeating the same choices that keep leading to failure.
I agree that I don't think the writing team were truly fans of the show or at the very least were receiving pressure and editing from those that were not. That was my overall impression as well.
I think it's important to keep in mind though that typically an adaptation isn't meant for people that are already a fan of the show. They are usually created with the intent of attracting new fans that may have been put off by the previous medium.
I'd argue that if the show was written with the same level of love for the show that fans of the original have, then it will be successful both in keeping the original fans, and attracting the new people as well.
It is understandable that some changes are necessary when moving from anime to live action, everyone understands this. Anime lacks the detail of live action and therefore is exaggerated in order to convey feelings or thoughts of characters, where live action may only need a subtle gesture or body language to convey the same thing. But that doesn't mean characters or major plot elements need to be altered in any way.
A video game example of this is Elden Ring. FROMSOFTWARE did not make a game to appeal to the mass market. They made a game that fans of their previous works would love, that due to its difficult nature should have been opposite of what the mass market wants. And yet the game was successful at captivating both audiences and sold a huge amount of copies having passed 20 million copies as of February 2023. Compare this with anything that gets altered to "appeal to a wider audience." That phrase is literally a death sentence. Neither fans of the original or new people end up liking it. Yet people keep choosing that path, and keep wondering why everyone says their work is garbage.