BW Media Spotlight

If you’ve followed Chapter By Chapter, the article series on Mondays where I review a book one chapter at a time, you may have seen the rare occasions when I’ve reviewed novelizations. I’ve done Fantastic Voyage, Total Recall, the first Transformers: War For Cybertron game (allegedly), and novelizations of the big 90s comic event where they killed Superman and broke Batman (doing that one currently as of this writing). You can find movie review shows comparing the movie to the original book but nobody looks at the novel adaptation to compare it to the original novel, which to me is disappointing. Just as there are changes between book and movie, so to are there differences between the movie and book thanks at least one of many reasons:’

• The author has the latest available, but not final, draft of the script and doesn’ t know what’s on the cutting room floor because the novelization had to hit the book store the same time as the movie hit theaters, especially before the era of home video.
• The author has to pad out the movie to fill a proper sized book just as the movie adaptations have to cut things to fill the run time.
• The author wants to add his or her own elements to the story to feel like they’re contributing. Fantastic Voyage was a huge victim of that as Isaac Asimov wanted to adjust the science and put the two sides of the project at odds with each other.
• I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point a movie adaptation so crossed into the “in name only” category that the author did a novelization trying to fix the director’s mistakes.

That’s why novelizations are so interesting to me, and why someday I wouldn’t mind doing a series comparing the novelization to the original movie or TV episode. Since family emergencies are more important than putting an article together (disappointing after last week’s slowdown but family comes first), I’m using one of my fillers for this video by YouTube personality Phelous going over the novelization of a movie he loves so much he has it in multiple home video formats, including very obscure ones from around the world. So of course he has the novelization of the original Ghostbusters. Enjoy his review of the differences between the book and the original movie. Some swearing and sexual discussion occurs. If you saw the movie, that’s not a surprise.

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