Victim of Culture

Getting adaptations of nostalgia completely wrong

There’s a growing problem in media and that is of the nostalgia adaptation.  It’s the process of taking a property which mostly resides in the golden plateau of nostalgia and trying to adapt it to a new medium for today’s audience.  Or, in other words, it’s taking something from your childhood and trying to resell it to you in new packaging.

We saw it at work this past weekend in the new film Land of the Lost, and in coming weeks it will appear in the form of the G.I. Joe movie.  What both of these properties have in common is that they’re beloved shows from a generation’s childhood that have mostly attainted their stature through nostalgia.  They have also been adapted from television to film.

What do I mean when I say their stature comes from nostalgia?  That in other words these properties are remembered more fondly than their actual quality suggests.  Watch old G.I. Joe cartoons as an adult and you’ll wonder what you ever saw in the show, other than the fact that you were eight.  This, of course, presents a unique issue when adapting to a new medium such as film.  How do you transfer nostalgia for a property whose audience long ago outgrew it?

With G.I. Joe the producers have decided to drop the uniquely themed character outfits and dress everyone in black jumpsuits.  It’s similar to the tact taken with the X-Men film franchise.  Because, really,  wouldn’t Duke, Scarlett, General Hawk, Beachhead, Shipwreck, and others look silly transferred straight from the cartoon to the real world?  Yes, they would.  But in taking away their unique looks, you also take away a large part of the nostalgia factor.  Then you’re simply left with generic action heroes battling one another—something we’ve seen a million times in different films.

In other words, what we remember nostalgically doesn’t translate to the new medium, or really at all to our adult sensibilities.  There was a great discussion about this recently from Jeremy Parish over at 1Up.com.  Parish was talking about the release of Final Fantasy VII on PSN and addressed how many fans continue to clamor for a high-definition remake of the classic PlayStation RPG title.  His argument was that such a remake doesn’t make the perfect sense many expect.

To be honest, FFVII was a damn weird game. It featured a number of sequences that were almost like a fever dream. Cloud getting dolled up as a girl, and competing in a bizarre homoerotic muscle competition — possibly being molested while unconscious — in order to max out his feminine appeal. The slapfight between Tifa and Scarlet atop the Junon Canon. (Hmm… I see a pattern of subconcious imagery beginning to emerge, here.) How about Red XIII comically walking on both legs on a rocking boat to the accompaniment of flat, synthesized tuba music? Or the random tactical defense of Fort Condor minigame? Or the bizarre decision to mourn Aerith’s death with a snowboarding race? Or all the run-ins with the TURKS?

None of that stuff would fly in a more realistic-looking game. The drawback to more visual realism is that you expect characters to behave more, well, realistically. FFVII’s squatty Popeye people could get away with all sorts of random behavior, because they were only a step removed from the simple midget sprites of FFVI. Give them realistic proportions and detailed facial expressions and suddenly you’ll find that the idea of a talking robot cat on a giant stuffed moogle is a bit too far beyond the pale to really work. Heck, Square’s really pushing it with FFXIII’s Sazh, and he’s just a guy with a baby bird in a his afro.

Parish raises a very good point.  Translate that nostalgia factor into what people think they want, and suddenly you have something that is not at all what people expect.  The golden glow of the past obscures what the game really was, and instead focuses only on the parts we want to remember.  It might still be a great game, but it isn’t exactly the great game we all remember it as.

G.I. Joe and other adaptations face similar issues.  Play it too close to the original and it would almost come off as farcical.  Consider The Brady Bunch Movie from a few years back.  They simply transferred the show itself forward several decades to the 1990s.  Suddenly it seemed a satire with just the addition of a few knowing nods.  The film worked because of these nods, but do you we really feel crave nostalgia simply to mock it?  Would any Final Fantasy VII fans be pleased with an update that mocked much of the homoeroticism in the original, or would they be aghast?

Personally, I find the whole rush of nostalgic updates to be tiresome.  I found Transformers to be a bore, and nothing about G.I. Joe makes me feel it will be any better.  Obviously the critics and fans alike have already spoken on Land of the Lost, which had a hugely disappointing first weekend at the box office.  Perhaps it’s time we realized that some things are better left in the past with fond memories, and the odder parts lost from our memories entirely.

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