They probably saw how amazing that episode of Highlander was and gave up. "We can never top it so why try?!" they likely wailed.
There are apparently 33 Father Dowling titles, including at least two anthologies (one of them posthumous), and two titles that are apparently aliases for a single book. The first ten books were published prior to the television series. Apparently some of them are still in print, and those that aren't can probably be obtained through Alibris.
But of course, Father Brown was written (and presumably set) in the first third of the 20th Century, while Father Dowling was written (and set) in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. And while an obit for McInerny acknowledges inspiration from Father Brown, they are hardly the only cleric-detectives in fiction. Amazon (but not B&N) carries an anthology titled Thou Shalt Not Kill: Father Brown, Father Dowling and Other Ecclesiastical Sleuths, which contains one Father Dowling short story, one Father Brown short story, and eight more short stories on that same theme, by other authors.
Hell, I wouldn’t want to teach in the age of smartphones, so I’m glad I got out when I did.
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There's also the Granchester books and TV series.
Sounds like a novel to pitch.
Nothing hits harder in the original than that “Aw, man, there’s nothing in his hand!” moment.
It says on Wikipedia that it's an adaptation, but Andre Norton, who wrote the novel, was upset they changed so much and made them take her name off it. I think I watched some of the movie on TV after I found out about the book, and I did see based on the novel in the credits. The TV series, which is taken from the movie, and not the book, does still include the based on the novel, The Beast Master by Andre Norton in the credits.
Apparently the filmmakers were trying to capitalize on the '80s fantasy boom sparked by Dungeons & Dragons, and were aiming for the same audience as Conan the Barbarian, which was in production at the time (and riding Conan's loincloth-tails helped them get funding for the film). They may have thought that had more audience appeal than a science fiction premise -- or simply that a medieval sword-and-sorcery film was more feasible for the film's relatively modest budget (only $9 million) than a science fiction story with aliens and space travel.
Harrumph. The only "Beastmaster" I'm familiar with is the KAOS agent, played by Oscar Beregi, from "I'm Only Human," a season 1 episode of Get Smart.
There are these as well:
The Cadfael Chronicles - Wikipedia
along with the series.
You run into the same thing with fantasy knock-offs of Tolkien as well.
It's really about moving forward the material and making it incrementally better. What I don't like is reading/watching stuff that's worse, especially when a lot of original material exists. Why pay for something new when I can read the original in public domain for free?
For Sherlock Holmes that folks are discussing, I do like Enola Holmes, both the books as well as the films. The books are really well done.
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The multi-author anthology I cited appears to include one of these, unless the author wrote other cleric-detective stories under the same pseudonym.
I can see that, but it still seems strange to me to go so far off from the source material.
The book, or technically an omnibus of the first two books in the 5 book series.
The movie
There were also two sequels, but I've never seen them because I believe they're supposed to be really bad.
We used to have ferrets, so the presence of Kodo and Podo the ferrets is what first brought it to my family's attention.
The TV series
The series is also it's own totally unique take on the concept.
They did eventually bring Marc Singer on as a mentor figure for Dar, but other than that it's unrelated to the movie and the book.
Oh, there are a fair number of adaptations out there that have only a loose conceptual similarity to their source materials, like, say, the How to Train Your Dragon movies or the FlashForward TV series. Heck, a lot of classic movies like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde are largely new stories just using the general ideas of their sources. As I said, the goal of the adaptation is not the serve the source, but to use as much or as little of the source as needed to serve the adaptation. Sometimes the source is just the seed of an idea that the writer takes in a whole new direction.
That's fair, and there are plenty of great movies that are almost unrecognizable as an adaptation. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call them great, but both the Beastmaster movie and TV show are pretty good. If anybody her is a fantasy fan and hasn't seen them, I'd recommend checking them out.
I've learned to judge adaptations overall quality and accuracy as totally separate categories, and the first on is way, way more important to me.
I've learned to judge adaptations overall quality and accuracy as totally separate categories, and the first on is way, way more important to me.
I don't remember being too fond of the Beastmaster movie (and its sexism holds up poorly today), but I found the TV show fairly good, at least in the first couple of seasons. It had the same problem as Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda of Tribune's executives firing the developer/showrunner early on (after one season in Beastmaster's case), but the quality didn't drop as much under the new showrunner, perhaps because the bar wasn't originally set as high to begin with.
I'm guessing they're not about a KAOS agent (never given a name in dialogue; only in the credits) who brainwashes dogs to kill their humans.
I don't know about this. If you can't stand the idea of someone repainting your house neon green, don't sell it in the first place. (I only say this as general proposition; I don't know anything about the specific legal backstory of the Lawnmower Man. Presumably an author of King's stature had the bargaining power to include certain covenants in the contract regarding certain elements of the book being preserved, and presumably these were breached?). Don't take the money and then complain that the filmmakers weren't faithful to your vision. That's not their job, and indeed they'll get fired if they are faithful to your vision instead of making a financially successful film.
What I *do* remember about the Lawnmower Man (movie) is that it really leaned into what was then only just barely seeping into general American consciousness as the "the information superhighway" and "cyberspace." I bet it would be interesting viewing today for this reason alone.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Just because you sell someone the rights to your novel doesn't mean they tell you in advance what they plan to do, since they may not have figured that out yet. Writers often start out with one plan and end up changing it drastically as they go. And selling the rights also doesn't entitle the author to be consulted at every stage. Like I keep saying, the job of an adaptation is not to serve the original work, but to use the original work to serve itself. The creators of an adaptation aren't working for the author; they're working for themselves (or for their own employers) and have the right to do the work their own way without having someone looking over their shoulder. What they create is their version of the story.
The house-painting analogy doesn't work, because the "house" -- the original work -- is unaltered. It still exists in its original form. The adaptation is a new, different work that's based on it. It's more like someone designing and building a new house that's inspired by the original house's design but takes it in a new direction. No matter how much it changes the design along the way, the original house is still intact and unaffected.
Sure, the creators of an adaptation can choose to involve the author directly if that's what they and the author want -- look at shows like The Expanse where the novelists are producers on the show and have even scripted episodes -- but it's not a requirement, not if the author is busy doing other things. I mean, implicitly, if you sell the rights to adapt your work to someone else, that means you're okay with not doing it yourself. I've always felt that if anyone ever bought the rights to adapt one of my original novels, I'd try to accept that it was their version of my story and whatever they chose to do with it would not be my responsibility, beyond the extent to which they chose to consult me.
Nobody remembers that when Al Gore popularized the term "information superhighway," he didn't intend it as a metaphor for the existing Internet, but rather as a proposal for a federal project to turn the internet into a more comprehensive, expansive public utility, like the federal highway program that created the interstate system, instead of the existing scattered network of privately owned online services. That project never went forward, but people co-opted the "superhighway" metaphor for the very thing it was intended to replace and improve upon.
The difference being that a reader can know what things authors do in their stories because they can see that these things have been done by reading them, without the author having to do anything more. Whereas an author only knows what readers do because the readers have told them so, in addition to doing the action of which they speak.
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