SciFi/Fantasy TV shows made after first being a movie?
- Thread starter Dream
- Start date
Well, yes, they did make the pilot movie "The Gathering" before green-lighting the show. That's the point of having a pilot, see if it works, if it does, do the show.
I think it only counts if the first movie wasn't an intended pilot for a television show.
Agreed. Hundreds of TV shows have had movie-length pilots, so that would render the question meaningless. The thread's supposed to be about things that started out purely as movies, particularly feature films, before becoming TV series.
How about one that started as a play? Prescription: Murder was a play by Richard Levinson and William Link, focusing on a doctor who murdered his wife and tried to cover it up. The supporting character of the investigating detective, Lt. Columbo, stole the show when Peter Falk played him in the TV-movie adaptation of the play. So the network commissioned another movie -- almost a "second pilot" like Star Trek had, but not quite since the first one wasn't meant as a pilot -- to see if Columbo would work against a different murderer. And he did, so the rest is history. Of course, all the episodes of his series were movie-length, but it was still a series.
Lexx had a couple of TV movies made before becomming a regular series too.
Tarzan, of course, originated in books. Those books (1912-1965) have been adapted to film (starting 1918), stage (from 1921), comics (from 1929), and radio (from 1932, the same year the Weissmuller series began) before coming to television in 1966.
And more importantly, the OP was focused more on TV shows that sprang directly from a specific movie, not just material that was turned into both at different times. I don't think any of the Tarzan series were adapted directly from a preceding movie. If you allow Tarzan, you have to allow all sorts of things that don't quite meet the criteria for the thread: Zorro, Superman, Hercules, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, and who knows what else. It’s a slippery slope.
Although if you did allow literary adaptations, The War of the Worlds might qualify. The 1980s series did call back directly to the George Pal movie, didn’t it?
On the opposite front, I used to think that the Pufnstuf and Adam West Batman movies were the pilot movies for their respective shows. It was quite a while before I found out differently. I suppose in this age of prequels that sort of thing isn’t so unusual anymore.
Although if you did allow literary adaptations, The War of the Worlds might qualify. The 1980s series did call back directly to the George Pal movie, didn’t it?
On the opposite front, I used to think that the Pufnstuf and Adam West Batman movies were the pilot movies for their respective shows. It was quite a while before I found out differently. I suppose in this age of prequels that sort of thing isn’t so unusual anymore.
Yes. The series was presented as a direct sequel to the Pal movie. It did some annoying retcons like claiming that everyone had forgotten about this cataclysmic global invasion (explained away as a mix of mass denial and some kind of alien mental influence that made people forget) and changing the aliens by making them larger (so stuntmen could fit in the suits) and giving them the ability to enter and possess human bodies (though I can see why that was necessary from a budgetary and plotting standpoint). But in a lot of other ways, it was a direct and faithful sequel. It reused the war machines from the movie on a few occasions (though it could rarely afford the FX), it made its main character the adopted son of the movie's leads, and it brought back Ann Robinson in a recurring role as Sylvia Van Buren (though it made her a raving lunatic and handled her very badly overall). Oddly, they established that Clayton Forrester had died before the series, even though Gene Barry was still alive and well.
They also did a Halloween episode in 1988 -- the 50th anniversary of the Orson Welles broadcast -- and claimed that Welles and the government had made the broadcast to cover up a real invasion of Grover's Mill, NJ by an advance scouting party of the invasion fleet that arrived 15 years later.
Although WotW was a pretty lousy show overall, I always liked the way it tied into the movie. Usually, as I said before, TV adaptations of movies change some details or events from the films in order to make the stories work in series form -- for instance, Starman pushed the events of the film back from the '80s to the '70s so that the protagonist could have a teenage son in the series' present day, and Men in Black: The Series ignored K's retirement. But while WotW did retcon a few facts about the aliens and took the aftermath of the invasion in a weird direction, it very much treated itself as a continuation of the exact same reality as the film. Yes, they did retcon the aliens to be from the planet Mor-tax 40 light-years away in Taurus, but outside of the prologue, the '53 film never overtly confirmed that the aliens were from Mars.
The '66 Batman movie was indeed supposed to be the pilot for the show; the idea was to use the film's higher budget to build the sets and vehicles and a stock-footage library, then use those on the series. But ABC pushed the series' premiere forward, so the movie had to be postponed until after the first season. (Which is why we never saw the Batcopter and Batboat in season 1.)
It's always good to know I'm not as dumb as I really am.
Seems like a lot of shows try to get away with that. The brains of the British citizens in the Whoverse must be complete mush by this point.
Similar threads
