Why doesn’t Power Pack have a show on Disney XD?
Full disclosure going into this. I’ve never really been interested in the Thor series and only find the character interesting when appearing in something that does interest me. This includes the various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies versus appearing in the Avengers movies. I have nothing against them and I’m sure great stories abound. I’m just not interested in them.
I am, however, a proponent of getting an adaptation and the characters in general correct for the sake of the audience. I believe you can please the fanbase without losing a new audience. It takes some effort but it is possible. It has been done in the past, but we have a generation of creators who don’t seem interested in anything beyond the base concept. This is, as I keep reminding folks, not a slam on the quality of the work itself. My usual example, the Battlestar Galactica remake, was a quality show but a terrible adaptation. Is the concept faithful to the original story.
From what I’ve heard Thor: Ragnarok was a fun movie but got so many of the characters wrong from the source material, and it certainly didn’t match the tone. This is not a complaint about director Taika Waititi, who is now set to make the next movie, Thor: Love And Thunder. A lot of people praised the movie for being more fun than the other two in the series, but it came at the cost of adaptation errors. The only one I can confirm is the Grandmaster making quips and being a bit out there. Tonally it was not right, or so goes the complaints I’ve heard. Naturally the fans of the character that has been around and enjoyed since the 1960s were not happy with the tonal shifts. If the first two movies were too dark this one was too light, and Waititi’s only benefit was being a better director than Joel Schumacher when he tried to do the same to Burton’s Batman.
A series of tweets collected by Bounding Into Comics highlights Waiti’s mindset going into this and his reaction to the fans. I’ve seldom see someone try so hard to make things worse since She-Ra & The Princesses Of Power told Teen Titans Go! to hold her root beer (they’re all underage to be drinking) but we’ve seen live-action Hollywood’s reaction to the source material versus their own vision. I’m not here to drop bricks on the director just because I disagree with his perspective. I think the benefit of not being a Marvel Thor fan allows me to have a cooler head about this. However, if fans are going to debate a director’s approach we need to understand where they’re coming from…before telling them they’re wrong.
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In Defense Of Clip Shows
TV Tropes defines a clip show thusly:
The clip show, like in the Robotech episode whose comic adaptation I went over this afternoon, is often a target of scorn as of late. They’re seen as lazy. “We already saw these episodes. Why do we care?” And fair enough, but to understand the clip show as something other than a way to save money (as if somehow properly using their budget to get a full season is a bad thing) we need to understand the other reasons behind them in the past and how they can actually serve a story today, even in our on-demand stream and binge TV and video watching culture.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on August 8, 2019 in Television Spotlight and tagged clip shows, commentary, Power Rangers, Robotech.
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