There's also Insight Editions, which wrote the travel guides, and just published the Kirk Fu manual. I just watched that for the first time a couple months ago, and I thought it was pretty good.
Probably not, since the early volumes were copyrighted by Bantam Books and Desilu, and later volumes by Paramount. They were done as work for hire, and Blish never owned the copyrights.
Here in Canada we don’t have the same work for hire as the US, so the copyrights, even when they are owned by another entity, usually go by the life + 50 years of the author for length of copyright. So CBS may own the copyright, but James Blish’s death in 1975 determines how long that copyright is in effect.
Does Canadian copyright law override the law of the country where the work was written and published? Granted, the first three Blish volumes had simultaneous Canadian printings, but the subsequent volumes just brought US-printed copies across the border. But best case seems like maybe some Canada-only edition might be possible, but they couldn’t be distributed outside Canada. Would that be economically viable? Has any Canadian publisher come out with a Canadian-only edition of Fleming’s James Bond books yet?
Sort of. Nearly immediately after Bond became PD in Canada, a short-story anthology was released, License Expired. I don't know if anyone has reprinted the original novels in new editions, but they'd have to have something pretty spiffy planned to make them more attractive than the licensed editions.
It might be a little more complicated than than that. I remember reading that Fleming had assigned everything to the producers of the movies. But I can’t remember if that was just the movie rights or the whole copyright.
Copyright does indeed work on a country-by-country basis. Most of H. G. Wells's work has long been in the public domain in the United States, for example, where anything published in 1922 or earlier is public domain. But his work only just entered the public domain in 2017 in the UK and EU, where copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. No, Ian Fleming Publications (formerly known as Glidrose) owns the Bond copyrights, and it's owned by the Fleming family.
After posting, I checked out amazon.ca, and it looks like multiple vendors are offering Bond ebooks at cut-rate prices. Like, a few dollars for a complete collection. So, if the law works as you believe, we can perhaps expect the same for the Blish adaptations in a few years.
https://deadline.com/2020/03/viacom...agged-intention-to-sell-publisher-1202893051/ Deadline reports there are 25 companies interested in buying S&S. My gut says the publisher that landed the YA license is probably going to be the one that gets the company whole.
Bertelsmann buying S&S is apparently a regulations nightmare waiting to happen, so maybe Del Rey doing all the Star Trek books is a few years away at best.
I´ve been always wondering that. I like adaptions and new takes on stories but: The thing is: most adaptions I´ve seen of anything stay somehow true to the original...meaning that the original story is at least easily recognisable in some form.. What I´m really always weary of is when it says something is "based on motifs from X by Y"...and not "based on x by y"....ever since I saw the TV-Miniseries "based on motifs from "The Neverending Story".....the best thing about that is the ending theme which I really love. "based on motifs"...seems to translate to "we are cash-milking a successful wellknown work, randomly using some characters and not bothering to actually read/watch the original or do any research". Yes...I fully admit that I may be overreacting here because of my disappoinment.
Sometimes, perhaps, but it is lazy to assume that any blanket generalization applies universally. Sometimes brilliant works of art start out with a given inspiration but end up evolving in a profoundly different place from where they started, because that's where the creative process organically takes them. The only intelligent and fair thing is to judge every work individually. If anything, I see it the other way around -- the lazy approach is merely to make a slavish copy, whereas it takes more imagination to transform the thing that inspired you into something very new and different.
I guess the truth is that you just sometimes have very specific expectations....maybe it would just be best to try and not expect anything. Oh well...still hoping somebody will someday make a full mostly uncut movie series of The Never Ending Story. ;-P
Maybe it depends why you´re watching or reading a story in the first place? Doesn´t it make a differance if you´re reading something that you´ve already read out of nostalgia...or to discover something new in the story? I can re-read the Never Ending Story to feel like a child again for few hours...or I can read it from a Voice Actors point of view...thinking about how I would approach it. Or I can read it looking for nuances that I´ve never noticed before... And sometimes I like a story where I know what´s to be expected...it gives me comfort when I´m feeling bad.
If all you want is nostalgia, the original is still there. Heck, just last night I finished re-reading the entire Sherlock Holmes canon from start to finish. But the point of doing an adaptation, a whole new version of the work, is to do something new with the story. There are countless adaptations of the Holmes canon out there, and what makes them worthwhile is that they all do different things with the stories, sometimes turning them into something almost totally new, rather than just recreating them word for word.
Damn straight. Far from ideal, as it conflated the second and third novels, and the characters of Mombi and Languidaire, and it was a bit darker than it could have been, but really, the only bad parts of it were the nods to MGM's 1939 hatchet-job.
"Hatchet-job?" Dude, even if it it's not to your taste or if you don't like the liberties it took with the story it was adapting -- MGM's The Wizard of Oz is an enduring classic of cinema, beloved by hundreds of millions of people and continuing to influence American and Anglosphere cultures long after the vast majority of films of its era have been forgotten. "Hatchet-jobs" simply do not leave that kind of legacy, ever. Whatever faults The Wizard of Oz has, to describe it as a "hatchet-job" is to say that you have refused to engage with the material on its own terms and evaluate it reasonably.
Yes, and Baum's 1900 novel is (along with its 13 canonical sequels and a great many non-canonical ones) an enduring classic of American children's literature, arguably the first American fairy tale. As anybody who has gotten past the opening chapters of The Emerald City of Oz knows, while Baum (whether deliberately or by oversight) left the question of whether Oz was an in-universe reality or an in-universe dream (even though Dorothy is completely absent from The Land of Oz, it could be taken as a dream in which she was a passive observer, invisible to the characters), from the opening chapters of Emerald City on, he came down decisively on the side of "in-universe reality." (For those who haven't read it, Emerald City begins with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry losing the farm to creditors, and Dorothy conferring with Ozma about moving the entire family to Oz permanently, something Ozma had wanted to do for some time; the rest of the story is, in large part, a fish-out-of-water story of hardscrabble farmers Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, who'd never known anything but scarcity, learning to cope with an environment in which scarcity is all-but-unheard-of.) The liberties taken by Langley, Ryerson, and Woolf go beyond poetic license; by making their version unambiguously a dream-fantasy, they dropped the stakes to zero. If it had languished in obscurity, it would not be a sore point with me, but instead, it eclipsed the popularity of the books, and embedded itself so firmly in popular culture that in Return to Oz, Murch and Dennis probably felt obligated to include nods to it, nods that at best were pointless (e.g., the Nome King having the "ruby slippers" that Dorothy had obtained from the Wicked Witch of the East, instead of his canonical "magic belt"), and at worst, actively detracted from the story (e.g., the whole Kansas subplot involving electroconvulsive therapy to treat Dorothy's "delusions" of Oz). In effect, the 1939 movie became a tail wagging the proverbial dog.