Abstract
This article identifies the television to film phenomenon by cataloguing contemporary films adapted from popular television shows of the 1960s and 1970s. This trend is located within the context of Generation X and considered within the framework of nostalgia and Linda Hutcheon’s (2006) conception of adaptation. The history of re-visiting existing texts in screen culture is explored, and the distinction between remakes and adaptation is determined. The specificity of the television format is discussed, as are aspects of audience engagement with television in terms of identity and identification. Acknowledging television as the collective experience that binds Generation X, the broader trend for nostalgic engagement with the past is shown to be an impetus for the trend in contemporary films and further shown to provide an opportunity for active audience reflexivity. Get Smart (2008) and The Avengers (1998) are discussed in terms of such reflexivity; and issues of gender are highlighted to demonstrate the role of filmic adaptations in contemporary negotiations of past and present ideals. In doing so, this article confirms the socio-cultural significance of the television to film phenomenon beyond industrial considerations, and posits the critical appeal of mining the box.
Highlights
While popular culture is pervasive, television has traditionally held a particular place in the lives of its audience
Budget-conscious studios capitalised on retained story rights, saved on scriptwriting and banked on proven audience appeal
1 These film adaptations were based on: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Summary
While popular culture is pervasive, television has traditionally held a particular place in the lives of its audience. Budget-conscious studios capitalised on retained story rights, saved on scriptwriting and banked on proven audience appeal In this environment, remakes – a term conventionally reserved for films remade as films (see Leitch, 1990) – tended to retain strong similarities with their predecessors. While continuing to examine films based on literary works, Brian McFarlane identifies a range of influences on film adaptation beyond literary sources in Novel to Film (1996), including the condition of the film industry and the social and cultural climate at the time of production, and acknowledges the risk of marginalising these contexts when focusing only on the literary source (as had been the practice in f idelity criticism). More theorists within the field began to break ranks, including James Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2000), Thomas Leitch (2003) and Kamilla Elliott (2003), all of whom Simone Murray identifies as dissatisfied with the limitations of fidelity criticism and its narrow field of view, and active in calling for new approaches
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