19 dreadful TV-to-movie adaptations—and the flaw that doomed them
From Baywatch to The X-Files, these big-screen translations each made one big mistake
Film Features The Lego Ninjago Movie
In the 1996 movie Mission: Impossible, the team concept from the TV show it was based on was quickly jettisoned, with most of the team getting killed off early in the film, leaving Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as a lone protagonist. Later, beloved boss Mr. Phelps turns out to be a traitor, and thus does not leave the movie alive either. Cruise gambled that audiences were up for that kind of leap, and he was right—they wanted to see Cruise as an action hero, and didn’t care if it wasn’t, strictly speaking, show-accurate.
But there have been plenty of other TV-to-movie adaptations that haven’t fared so well. In many cases, they tried similar leaps, but without a star like Tom Cruise to smooth them over, the films fell completely flat. In the 19 cases we’ve come up with, a single fatal flaw should have signaled from the beginning that the adaptation was doomed. We present them to you here, listed in alphabetical order, in the hope that future adaptations might learn from the past, and not condemn us to seeing it repeated again, and again, and again …
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If you ask a lot of kids, the Lego Ninjago Movie is very good. It’s been watched in our house nearly as much as The Lego Movie. Sometimes the target audience of the movie is not made of adult critics and commentators.
I remember going to see Star Trek: Generations in the theater. At the time, seeing Kirk and Picard on screen was quite the spectacle, but now the movie is just… meh.
The first Star Trek movie wasn’t that great, and the second is considered the best of the original series movies. The same can easily be said for the TNG series of movies.
My son, who was huge fan of Ninjago at the time. and I were both disappointed in the movie. I know why they picked the celebrity voices rather than the tv show voice actors, but that still made me sad.
My kids enjoyed it and are Ninjago fans. It’s just another universe. Kids these days get that sorta thing.
The Ninjago movie gets a pass for launching the Ninjago City sets which, IMO, are the best Lego has ever produced.
Boris And Natasha Trailer 1992I had not heard of this, and it’s an idea so bad that I must see it.
I saw it last year. While not a good film, it has a great premise, there are some truly inspired gags and performances, and a murderers’ row of surprise cameos. It’s worth a watch.
Huh! I’ll track down some clips!
You can watch the whole thing on Tubi.
https://tubitv.com/movies/466024/boris-and-natasha-the-movie
It doesn’t quite capture the kitsch of the cartoon, but was immensely more fun than the actual Rocky and Bullwinkle movie.
I saw it decades ago. I believe that there’s a subplot where Natasha becomes a model.
If we’re talking prime Renee Russo then that’s entirely plausible.
Saw it as a kid & thought it was hilarious. Watched it as an adult and still enjoyed it. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a great movie, though.
Great list, but one obvious omission: 1996’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, and its fatal flaw: The movie Mike and the bots were skewering, This Island Earth, is actually quite good.
Honestly, I think they had to use a “good” movie if people were ever going to see it in theaters. The show was popular, but pretty niche. Only so many people are going to sit through something like Pod People.
I will not have a word said against Bewitched. It is one of those films that 18 years later, we still quote from extensively as a family – even though the rest of my family are generally not keen on Will Ferrell (Elf aside).
The “I hate Will Ferrell except for Elf” takes always confuse me, because he’s at his most “stand there with his knees together and red-faced yell bullshit at extras” in that. It’s just maximum Will Ferrell.
I don’t get it either. Maybe it’s just “suitable for kids” Ferrell that they’re OK with.
He was pretty fuckin’ awesome in The Other Guys, save for the Gator stuff, which is where it went too SNL.
He’s fantastic in Stranger Than Fiction, but that’s probably his least Will Ferrell role
I HATED Will Ferrell in the late 90s and early 00s but came around. Now I think he’s great. I really liked Land of the Lost. I like all these nostalgia fests. They’re garbage movies but, hey, nostalgia.
Huh. It’s still a weird decision to go so meta, and the script is credited to both Ephron sisters so it’s not like they didn’t have the ability to do otherwise/better.
The S.W.A.T. movie was pretty good.
Baywatch was almost good. Genital-related humor definitely brought it down.
The wrong Transformers movie is on this list (it should be just about any of the Bay films).I agree on the Star Trek film.
I think Thunderbirds was doomed by not featuring Lady Penelope heavily in the trailer.
Baywatch was good. WTF is wrong with you?
Now I remember why I hated Star Trek Generations.Thanks?
Generations was such an unforced error. The core story was okay, maybe on-par with Insurrection, which was fine but basically a TV episode that they decided to make into a movie instead. The Nexus stuff was neat but it would’ve been neat to explore further and have Picard have to find his way out rather than going “I want to leave and go here.” Like, something along the lines of the Picard episode where he had to escape his own android brain.But Kirk was totally superfluous to that story. Remove the Enterprise-B segment (which was only there to set Kirk’s arrival up) and then have Picard emerge from the Nexus armed with some sort of knowledge that he didn’t previously have so he can defeat Soran and the central story is no different.A Kirk/Picard team-up would have – should have – been a great crossover. But instead they took a middling story and tacked Kirk onto it, doubling down on the error by killing him off in a truly disappointing way.They already did the passing of the torch at the end of Star Trek VI when Kirk said “where no man… where no one has gone before” to echo the change in Picard’s narration in TNG, not to mention that the original crew did the space equivalent of riding off into the sunset at the end of that film.
I was so much more upset with how they destroyed the Enterprise than how they killed off Kirk.
Starfleet doesn’t seem to lose much sleep over losing starships on a regular basis.
At least we know it eventually got rebuilt
basically a TV episode that they decided to make into a movieI have heard this charge leveled against a number of Trek movies and no one has ever been able to explain what they mean. It’s a movie continuation of a TV show. What were you expecting? A cliffhanger? Majel Barrett recapping the previous 7 seasons for you?
A plot that lends itself to cinematic storytelling, like five of the previous six Trek films were, as well as the one that followed.Hell, Wrath of Khan was literally a follow-up to a TV episode and it felt like a movie.
People say this about Insurrection all the time without realizing that the plot of Insurrection is practically identical to the plot of Trek VI.
It means there wasn’t enough story in the movie to warrant its runtime, but it would have been a good 1-hour TV episode (this started with ST:TMP)
I have heard this charge leveled against a number of Trek movies and no one has ever been able to explain what they mean.I think it boils down to stakes. In Generations, failure means that one (1) unseen, unknown preindustrial civilization on Verdian IV gets vaporized. In Insurrection, failure means that a few hundred hippies have to move to a new planet. These are midseason filler episode stakes.In First Contact, the stakes are much more pronounced. The Borg want to change history and destroy humanity. Same with Nemesis (which, for all its faults, is at least serviceably cinematic). With a couple of exceptions, the TOS movies do a pretty decent job of establishing stakes as well.
First Contact > Nemesis > Insurrection > Generations.
The best thing about Insurrection is the Frakes/Sirtis commentary track. It is hilarious and those two should do every Trek commentary track moving forward.
I think the only one that I think counts as that is Insurrection which was actually a script for an episode expanded for a movie. It feels like a TNG episode.
What were you expecting?Wrath of Khan.The TNG movies look and feel like overlong TV episodes. They have the same kind of structure as if intended to have commercial breaks at regular intervals. They are shot as if a TV show. Scenes are framed like a TV show. Movies give you a bigger screen, a grander canvas to work on. They took no advantage of that.
All of this. alternatively have picard somehow enter the nexis when the Amargosa observatory sends out the missle and meet Kirk there. Picard pulls him out gets him on the enterprise and warp 1s it out of there to save the crew. The rest of the movie plays out with kirk staying aboard the enterprise D while Picard dukes it out with Soran on Viridian III. Kirk figures out how to defeat the Klingons after they start attacking since he knows that BOP well. The saucer seperates and kirk takes on the klingons in the battle bridge and goes out in a blaze of glory. (bonus, final line today is a good day for you to die!)
Kirk dying was stupid but if you’re going to do it, go all out and make him look cool!
I hadn’t thought about Kirk taking the conn on the Enterprise D, but I like it. It reminds me of Captain Mancuso taking the conn on Red October when Ramius was incapacitated.
The trailer tricked people into thinking Kirk was in the movie longer and on the D!
Back when all trailers were narrated by “movie trailer guy”. But you’re right, that trailer lies pretty hard about Kirk.
Great way to handle it in retrospect. I’ve always said I didn’t mind Kirk dying, but damn it he needed to die in command of an Enterprise, going out heroically. His whole post series arc was him just not being able to accept retirement and wanting to keep being the hero.
“Should’ve been an episode rather than a movie” is a good descriptor for Insurrection as well. The TNG films really struggled to come up with a good story that didn’t involve the Borg.Also: the Nexus makes no sense. None of it. The entire concept is so riddled with holes, it could just as well be called Swiss Cheese.
I think a big part of it is they didn’t want to make them all about dealing with the Romulans because that would feel like a rehash of the TOS stuff dealing with Klingons. They also didn’t want to deal with anything related to the Dominion (even though Insurrection was during the war) since it was another show’s storyline so they kept it all tangential as possible. They didn’t have a lot of other things from the series to draw from, unfortunately. Most stuff had been tied up since the show had run so long. There weren’t a lot of good villains that they could bring back Wrath of Khan style, also they probably wanted to avoid the comparison.
Which is one of my biggest issues with the films (and Picard season 3 actually).TNG was running out of ideas in its seventh season. Outside of the Borg (which has been played death) there just isn’t much else for the characters to do once ‘All Good Things…’ had come and gone.
Yeah there were a few things that they could have done interesting movies with, but they used them up in the series. The Crystalline Entity could have made for an amazing movie where they explore this truly alien entity and wrestle with the problem of how to handle all of its destruction. The episode with Lore and the freed borg could have been a great movie where they focus a lot more on what borg would be like if they’re not in the collective and a nice counterpart to First Contact. Hell Sela could have been used with her own little Romulan faction a lot better than Shinzon. But honestly they just overall didn’t know what to do for the TNG crew and even I have a hard time imagining anything that really utilizes the stuff from the show.
They could have used Q though, him messing with Picard’s psyche makes at least as much sense as the Nexus stuff
I remember reading somewhere that they were so concerned with “passing the torch” directly between Kirk and Picard in Generations that it effectively forced the creation of the Nexus plot line. Like,
Star Trek knows how to do interesting time travel stories, but couldn’t
think of one for a movie when it would have been most appropriate?!
I think it’s funny that by the time Generations was made to “pass the torch” onto the TNG cast, fully half of the characters had already appeared on the show (Bones, Scotty, Spock, plus half credit for Sarek). Hell, the last TOS movie came out a year after Picard was assimilated by the Borg (a fact that’s easy to forget for those like me who were too young to watch these at release).
How did The Transformers movie make the list, but not the G I Joe Movie? Animated or live action for that matter.
The GI Joe movie gets a pass for two reasons; “COBRA LALALALALALA!” and “I was once a man!”.
I remember long ago seeing an interview where one of the people who made the GI Joe movie mentioned that the name “Cobra-La” was a very obvious in-joke that the writers were using as a place holder until they got the real name down… until a Hasbro Exec heard the name, didn’t get it was a joke, and decided it had to be final.
Nemesis Enforcer and its fight with Sgt. Slaughter was pretty awesome, too.
The animated GI Joe is so good. We might have to fight about this.I mean, look, is it bad? Yes. But is is also great? YES.
Will you pick up blue or red lasers?
Red!
Duke survives.
SPOILER!
True, but only because Prime didn’t. Originally Duke was supposed to be killed off. GI Joe was supposed to come out before Transformers, but got delayed. As a result producers saw the backlash to Prime getting killed, and had Duke survive.
“He’s…gone . . . into a coma . . . !”
The animated movie never made it to theatres, so technically doesn’t qualify for this list.
Land of the Lost – I didn’t see this one, but at this point Ferrell’s schtick already seemed stale. I watched the 90s reboot and thought it was… okay and this movie just seemed like an excuse for Ferrell to do Ferrell things. Pass.The Munsters – this one looked horrible. Eli Roth did a surprisingly solid job with The House With a Clock in Its Walls (not that it was faithful to its source material, but it was a surprisingly competent film outside that directors wheelhouse) and I was hoping that the same would happen with Rob Zombie, giving him guardrails against his worst impulses. I was wrong.Transformers – killing Optimus. Nailed it. X-Files – beyond not wrapping up the show, the question was “what do you want out of an X-Files movie?” and there is no real answer. The mythology by this point was a convoluted mess that made no sense and had no end and monster-of-the-week episodes worked in part because they were small-scale by design. A dragon was not going to eat an entire town in an episode of the X-Files because people outside the town would know about it. An army of trolls wasn’t going to take over Manhattan with only Fox and Mulder able to stop them. So doing a monster-of-the-week movie would have meant a bigger budget and a longer run time to tell pretty much the exact same story.Baywatch – I did not see it, but the trailers really made it seem like some execs saw 21 Jump Street and said “do that” and ended up with Baywatch. 21 JS worked in part because it was meta and they took the conceit of the show with the amount of seriousness it deserved in the 2010s, which is approximately none. They did a good job not shitting all over the original show to show how edgy they were, while also doing something fairly unexpected. And it was funny. Baywatch… seemed like a quick attempt to cash in on that idea (CHiPS too, for that matter).
I saw the X-Files movie in the theater twice, but my clearest memory of it is finding a VHS copy in my wife’s childhood bedroom, alongside Silence of the Lambs and a collection of Nine Inch Nails videos. Ah, the 90s.
Ah, the 90s indeed.Incidentally, A+ choice on spouse there – that’s a keeper based on taste alone.
Many years ago she took my mother-in-law to Marshall’s and came home with a DVD of Silence of the Lambs from the bargain-bin near the register. When I tease her about loving that movie she gets all like, “No, you’re the one who loves that movie.”
Eli Roth did a surprisingly solid job with The House With a Clock in Its Walls (not that it was faithful to its source material, but it was a surprisingly competent film outside that directors wheelhouse)Roth also seemed to have more studio oversight and strong actors to back him up. Jack Black and Cate Blanchett no doubt contributed to the movie being pretty competent. Universal seemed to just throw the Munsters away. If Zombie had had to work with actors besides his wife and usual suspects with a studio who cared about the IP, it might have been a different story.
Great points all around.
They did a good job not shitting all over the original show
Well, it’s not like that would have been any great travesty, it being Baywatch and all.
I thought the TV show sucked and only watched a few episodes. But the Baywatch movie was fine. It amped up the ridiculousness and had some funny moments. Whathisname Zack was way funnier than I would have imagined. Chopra played a good villain within that context. The worst part was the nerdy guy. He sucked. I’ve seen way worse movies.
Am I the only one who loved the 1st X-Files movie? Because I did. Plus it had a killer sound track almost as good as the movie itself.
The soundtrack was pretty good. The movie was… not my favorite, but to each their own. It wasn’t bad, but like a lot of X-Files episodes just had no staying power with the passage of time for me.
Baywatch has always been ridiculous in a CHiPs kind of way, with lifeguards instead of traffic cops solving major crimes. The cheesiness was part of the charm. Trying to make it into a Rock action film with boobies (but not really) was a major misfire.Couldn’t agree more on Land of the Lost, which is why I skipped some legitimately good Ferrell movies assuming it would be more of the same. I didn’t see Step Brothers or Elf until much later because I was just tired of it. Like what’s happening with this Old School poster? Also a great movie that I was initially put off of by his schtick.
A dragon was not going to eat an entire town in an episode of the X-Files because people outside the town would know about it. An army of trolls wasn’t going to take over Manhattan with only Fox and Mulder able to stop them.Honestly, you say this, but it actually kind of makes me curious about how they’d split the difference; how the conspiracy would go about covering up some actual large(r)-scale one-off paranormal shit that what was, basically, some werewolf hiding in an attic in Bumfuck, Middle-of-Nowhere. I mean, maybe not an actual dragon eating a town or something, but something like a Roswell crash in a big(ger) city.
Worse still, Moore and Braga decided to kill Kirk, and not in any particularly glorious way—he falls off a bridge, and for his dying line, cribs George Takei’s signature “Oh my” line.It gets worse. That was their second attempt to kill Kirk. The originally-filmed ending had Soran shooting Kirk in the back. After test audiences went “WTF,” Paramount gave them $10 million to try again.One of the biggest flaws in Generations was that none of the people who made the successful TOS movies (Harve Bennett, Nick Meyer, Nimoy, etc.) were involved. They wanted Nimoy to direct and cameo in the opening, but without providing any input on the production, so he declined. It was all TNG people on the production side, who knew fuck all about how to make a movie. They blew a ton of money on superfluous things— like the whimsical 1800s “promotion” sequence at the beginning and shooting the climax on location in the Valley of Fire (which was visually stunning, but not in a sci-fi way)—but royally cheaped out in other areas (e.g. reusing the climactic Klingon Bird of Prey explosion from the previous movie, upscaling some TV footage of the Enterprise-D, and designing and producing all-new Starfleet uniforms for the TNG crew then discarding them at the start of filming).
Fortunately most of the same team made up for it in First Contact.
On the DVD commentary, Moore and Braga make a full mea culpa that they were way too obsessed with doing things that would be unexpected, not considering that sometimes there’s a good reason stories typically play out a certain way. Kirk getting such a blah death was just one they happened to partly come to their senses on.
It’s such a weird argument, too.
– “Test audiences hated it! They thought Kirk’s death was too sudden and unsatisfying.”
– “Great! That’s what we were going for!”
Ah, the same artistic stance the creators of The Idol take.
My fave was blowing a big portion of the budget on the Stellar Cartography room. It shows up in one scene and has nothing to do with the plot. The conversation that Data and Picard have there could’ve taken place anywhere on the ship and saved them a ton of money in the process.
It doesn’t even look that good , just a small platform and some blue screen.
That promotion was crazy. Can’t even imagine how much money went into this one totally naff sequence, all for a symbolic promotion for a character that is given no new responsibilities.
Rather than simply do a feature-length version of the show, however, which could have been like Jackass with more animalsSo… Wildboyz?
I give Generations a lot of credit for the big swing it took on its themes. It is rare to see a big summer franchise movie tackle issues like aging and mortality as main themes. Sadly, the story was a bit of a mess-the concept of magic space ribbon that makes all your dreams come true is even worse than anything that happened with Kirk. TNG didn’t really need a break to let people miss it-at the time, people were really hungry to see that crew on the big screen. But the creative team were working on a few series at the same time, and they needed more time to find a good story. The commentary on Generations is really interesting; Braga and Moore freely acknowledge and discuss the story weaknesses. I was one of those kids who saw the Transformers movie in the theater. It is difficulty to convey to those who were not there the horror we all felt watching our favorite cartoon characters straight up brutally murdered on screen. Especially coming off a show where there were lots of lasers and no violence. Watching it years later there are some things to like about the movie but man…..it was a terrible idea to put this out there for kids. And the new toys sucked!
With respect, I have to quibble with your second sentence, since literally EVERY TOS movie repeatedly chews on the concepts of “aging and mortality,” and I’d add Obsolescence.
I can see that point of view I guess, but I don’t really agree with it. First of all, 2 and 6 were the only TOS movies that really dealt with those things, and there were specific reasons for it. Wrath because the crew had aged a lot since the days of the series (in contrast, Generations was being written while Season 7 of TNG was being filmed). And Undiscovered Country did it because it was the last one and they were all retiring. Generations was a little different to me. The crew was still very new and big in pop culture (not being reintroduced to a larger audience as TOS was). Being a franchise movie carried different expectations for action and such in 1994 than it did when Wrath released in 82. It would have been easy to do a fast action adventure, and instead they had Patrick Stewart acting his ass off trying to say something about the importance of legacy vs. actual life, and how human beings are defined by their struggle with and ultimate defeat by death. Heavy stuff for a franchise movie (which came out in Fall, not summer as I inaccurately posted above, but still).Again: I see what you are saying. And Generations is by no means a great movie. But I think it deserves some credit for actually trying to say something unlike most big movies. Yes the TOS movies (at least 2 and 6) have age as a theme. But somehow Picard’s and Soren’s anguish and struggle to accept death strikes me as a little more powerful and impactful than the fact that James Kirk needs reading glasses.
And Insurrection.
I also just don’t know that Kirk and Picard together was really all that special. It sounded great! But then when you really dig in, it’s not like there is that much for them to say to one another that’s useful or packed with gravitas or anything. In world, they’re just two captains.Plus, it has always been rumored that Shatner and Stewart don’t especially get along and minimally, have a very different approach to how they work so I wonder how much that may have impacted the final product. I mean, they don’t exactly have the chemistry of Stewart and John de Lancie, for example, and it always kind of felt like Malcolm MacDowell was chosen in part to give Stewart someone to ACT (in all caps lol) opposite.I believe Braga and Moore have also mentioned that they wanted to kill a TNG character and were told no and that’s how they looped back to Kirk.
I agree with most of this, especially Picard and Kirk together ultimately being kind of a dud. I think there were some stories they could have been good together in, but I think the idea of the Nexus was this movie’s big downfall. It was such a stupid, weightless idea, and that really hurt the time Stewart and Shatner shared onscreen. Nothing that happens in the Nexus really matters, so the time spent there was both way too long (because we all knew it would have no consequence to the movie from the start-unless someone really thought our heroes would just stay there forever), and also too short to build the bond between the Captains they were going for. So: The two had little chemistry together, but they had no chance to make it work once the Nexus was going to be the backdrop. I think it probably would have been better for all concerned if the movie had ended up being a pure TNG movie instead of a torch passing movie (although I still get a kick out of the Enterprise B sequence), but they certainly did themselves no favors by having the two Captains get to know each other in pretend space dream land.Your point about the importance of chemistry between actors is such a good one. De Lancie and Stewart were always wonderful together. I thought the plot for Picard Season 2 was just insultingly stupid all the way around, but the sheer force of those two together almost turned it into something passable. Almost.
I still don’t get why the plot of the movie didn’t just involve the old Enterprise traveling to the future, or vice versa, as a quick and easy way to get the old and new crews talking to each other. The Nexus takes *so much* screen time to set up the very simple worlds-collide premise from the poster, and then it’s only Kirk and Picard who ever interact, and then they’re not even on a spaceship. They just kind of team up for a short fistfight with a middle-aged man in a barren desert, rather than some epic space battle that would highlight their differing tactics and philosophies around engagement.
Well now I wish you had just written the movie, seriously. Because I agree with everything you said! A Yesterday’s Enterprise type situation would have been far superior to what we actually got.
Originally, they wanted to kill Riker off in the episode Second Chances and bump Data to first officer, and they were shot down because movie was already on the schedule and that was too big a change.
I was a preteen when I saw the Transformers Movie (along with the Go-Bots movie and Aliens back in 1986) and thought it was awesome! Actual stakes gave it weight.But Ironhide getting shot in the shoulder and dying was some bullshit, man.And on that note, allow me to introduce the genius of Dr Smoov!(Warning, may get verbally NSFW depending on your workplace!)
10000% on both counts (stakes and Ironhide)
No see, Ironhide didn’t die when he was shot in the shoulder. He died when Megatron shot him in the face while he was begging for mercy after being shot in the shoulder. Which was a lot for my nine year old brain to process!“Such heroic nonsense.” 🙂
It probably says something about who I was as a child and who I am as an adult but I *also* saw Transformers in the theater as a kid and I LOVED how many characters were straight up murdered. Including Optimus. Yeah, of course I was sad. But I was also like, “Oh shit, where is this gonna go now?!?” The idea of *consequences* for characters who had not faced them before really got me excited.(Forgive the unlikely “Oh shit”. I probably didn’t actually swear, even in my head. I was a Good Kid.)
I wish I had reacted more like you did. I was a sensitive child who couldn’t stop crying during ET. And they also said “shit” in the movie!
I know a LOT of people love him but I cannot watch Will Ferrell movies at all, not shocked at some of his movies are on this list.
I think the problem is “Will Ferrell movies” rather than the man himself, who was fine in Stranger Than Fiction or The Lego Movie. He’s like Adam Sandler – I can’t stand his comedies either but likewise he was fine in Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems.
I hate Punch Drunk Love for some fairly personal judgmental reasons (I vehemently disagree with the theme, which is not the movie’s fault.) but I think people get tricked by Sandler in that film. He’s not doing anything all that different from his usual “I’m a fucking maniac manchild with anger issues” shtick. It’s just that the context of the movie treats his anger much more reasonably than most of his comedies, which find his anger *cute* or *endearing* as opposed to *toxic* and *horrifying*. PDL doesn’t shy away from how genuinely awful that anger can be. (The fact that it also *barely* gives him consequences for that anger is a little frustrating, but whatever.)For a much better (IMO) example of good acting by Sandler in a dramedy I recommend The Meyerowitz Stories.
You are not alone
The complaint about S.W.A.T. seems silly. I don’t think the audience who was watching it in 2003 was even aware of the 1975 show. I was born in 1980 and I had no idea until reading this article that the current S.W.A.T. show is not the first S.W.A.T. show. I think the movie stands fine on its own, and if it has failures it’s not that they are aware of the previous show that ran for two seasons nearly three decades prior before most of the characters involved were born.As for the X-Files, that was actually the first “episode” of the show that I ever saw, and I enjoyed it so much I started watching the show afterwards. I still love that movie. I obviously can’t speak as someone who had previously been a fan of the show but I don’t see how knowing it wouldn’t wrap up the series would make them less interested. I would have just considered it a longer episode of a series I was watching. The issue, I imagine, is just that the mythology episodes were always less interesting than the MOTW episodes. They were smart to move to a MOTW for the second movie, but sadly it was a weirdly convoluted and slightly boring monster, though I’ve grown fonder of that one in time.
I’m perplexed that anyone watching the show in the 90s believed the mythology was going to “resolve.” It seemed like the point was to make the conspiracy more and more complicated, while gradually removing the original human stakes around Mulder’s family, and the movie fit the same “bigger” mindset that defined the show by Season 4. A few years ago I was staggered to learn that they killed off the main baddies and resolved the alien mytharc in Season 6. And those episodes border on being coherent.
Right, I really can’t imagine anyone was like nah I’m not watching this movie because it won’t resolve the entire series. Like, what? It serves basically as a connector between those two seasons; that’s the point of it. I can see finding some flaws in the movie but to nitpick on this as the reason for failure doesn’t make much logical sense to me.
Pretty sure the movie came after the second time they killed off Mulder’s secret informant, after they’d introduced at least three different kinds of aliens, and after faking Mulder’s death at least a couple of times. Definitely the wheel-spinning phase, but I was in junior high so I didn’t know the difference.
Not everything needs to be explained. Personally, I think it was much more satisfying to have the conspiracy as this big, giant, unknowable thing that Mulder could only ever hope to scratch the surface of. One man, against an interstellar plot reaching back decades. Was it convoluted? Yes. Because it was a conspiracy. Those things ain’t meant to be easy to figure out. It would’ve been a lot worse if Mulder just figured out it was six guys in a room in Mt. Weather or somewhere and he just shot them all at the end.
I wasn’t complaining – the show did a remarkably good job of starting with a weird but personal premise (FBI agent’s sister was abducted by aliens, and he’s obsessed with finding her) and then making it infinitely weirder. That said, the mythos did basically revolve around six guys in a room, until the aliens lit them all on fire.
Oh, I know you weren’t, and I realise now I sound like I was addressing you, sorry.I was more addressing the (modern) complaints of those who insist everything must be explained and mystery only exists to be neatly solved, like Luke here.
In fact, Luke sounds like he based the entry of that same modern criticism, second and third hand, about the X-Files being a hot mess so, therefore, the movie must be a hot mess. No one at the time saw Fight The Future as anything other than a bridge between seasons. That said, the mythos did basically revolve around six guys in a room, until the aliens lit them all on fire.Yeah, but it also gave hints and insinuations that it was still much bigger, much larger, and I’m cool with that (and arsonistic aliens were also a sign of just how big it was, but take from that seems to mostly be “SEE?! What a mess.”)
The X-Files really is a throwback to a different era of entertainment. I started watching around Season 4, and by then the shapeshifting aliens and the black oil were already established – the mythology was pretty convoluted, but the mythology episodes still felt like Events. I pieced together the first few seasons with a paperback episode guide, some VHS tapes from the video store, and a bunch of summer reruns. My cousin was lucky, since she could get information from AOL. Binge-watching the first few seasons on Netflix ten years ago was quite an experience.
The other thing to remember around it getting a movie mid-run was that The X-Files was huge. It was a pop-cultural phenomenon, one of the great TV series of the 90s – up there with Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, The Simpsons, and Friends. It could support a movie in the middle of its run. It was unusual, sure, but definitely not unwelcome. (We…we don’t talk about the movie that did come after its initial run…)Hell, Catatonia wrote a song around it!Like you, I didn’t watch the entire series until much later after its run (on Stan, IIRC, not Netflix), but even as a ten-year-old in the nineties in rural Australia I wasn’t unaware of how big it was. (I do have a memory of mum watching, I think, “Piper Maru” while she was doing the ironing.)It was something I’d always wanted to watch. but the mythology episodes still felt like Events.The thing is that looking at The X-Files through a modern Prestige TV™ lens like today’s critics do is that they try to compare it to a completely serialised, soap-opera-format show like Barry or Game Of Thrones, and the other half of The X-Files gets lost: the Monster-Of-The-Week eps. People focus on the mytharc when judging X-Files as a whole, but MOTWs are where all the classic eps are. “Squeeze”, “The Post-Modern Prometheus” (featuring John O’Hurley’s second-greatest 90s TV role), the infamous “Home” (“We’re not showing that ever again”), “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (with a pitch-perfect Peter Boyle), “War Of The Coprophages”, “The Host”, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”…I will die on that hill that this is perfect format for shows with an over-arching plot. I pieced together the first few seasons with a paperback episode guide, some VHS tapes from the video store, and a bunch of summer reruns.Ah, you got into it, like a proper conspiracy theorist! Did you have a board and some red string?
I’m perplexed that anyone watching the show in the 90s believed the mythology was going to “resolve.”Exactly. I was a huge fan of the show growing up, but never did I ever expect anything to be explicitly revealed. I stopped watching for that reason, also.
Much like the Curse of Oak Island, today. Two seasons in and that was it. Call me when you find something.
I blame the rise of cable. I was born in 1970 and my childhood involved watching 1960s shows like Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeanie, etc. That’s what over the air television broadcast in the afternoons after school and before prime time. Yes, they weren’t great (well, Bewitched was a bit smarter than the rest), but they contributed to a shared culture. Basically everyone saw those shows even if they weren’t around for when they were new. We’ve lost something in this world of the “long tail” where everyone is into niche things that most people haven’t heard of.
That’s true. And related, I used to watch The Monkees after school! I was born later than you but we lived in the country too far out for cable and didn’t get a satellite until I was a teenager. There seemed to be other shared culture shows back then too, like The Cosby Show, the TGIF shows, or even going into Seinfeld and Friends.
Yeah even as late as the 1990s popular network shows were much more highly watched than popular cable or streaming shows today. Something like “Stranger Things” or “Succession” had a only a small fraction of the number of people who watched Seinfeld.
I realize it’s great people can seek out shows that more specifically align with their tastes but I miss the communal aspects of the network television days. Most everyone watched the same shows and it was something to hang a conversation around, like sports teams. Now our friend group has to basically agree we’re going to pick a couple of shows out of the wall of content to watch at roughly the same time (but still with plenty of “don’t tell me, I’m two episodes behind you!” thrown in).
Completely agree with this.
At the same time, they’e pretty accessible/available, though I guess people would have to actually impose them on their kids instead of that just being what’s on (like I hear happens with people who want their kids to see stuff like classic Loony Tunes). Those shows are constantly rotating on and off free/cheap ad streamers like Tubi and the Roku channel. In fact, when I first got a Roku and was poking around the free apps before signing up for the good stuff, I had to watch the premiere “origin” episodes of Jeannie, Bewitched and My Favorite Martian because I’d never seen them shown in those childhood reruns and had wondered about them since I was a kid.
Yeah, but I think there was something “special” about us discovering them on their own like with 1960s sitcoms and the Looney Tunes. It just seems forced and weird to introduce stuff to your kid rather than them realizing that what they’ve watchedby accident was something you watched too.
Born in 1969 my afterschool syndicated entertainment was Brady Bunch, Flintstones, Bewitched, Chips, Dukes of Hazzard, Buck Rogers.
Damn you’re an old fuck.
Yeah those shows (and a few others, like Star Trek) were constantly in syndication throughout the seventies, and usually aired in mid-late afternoon, so pretty much ALL kids watched them, and watched them over and over in most cases. I agree that Bewitched was the best of them – it did seem to have a little more going on than the others, but they all had in common high production values, which made them so rewatchable – to kids especially.Which made the Nora Ephron “Bewitched” movie particularly galling, in it’s determined non-”Bewitched”-edness. It didn’t even have a damn animated opening credit sequence!!!!! Several years later, I read a quote by Nora Ephron, something like “We could have made just a big-screen version of “Bewitched” but I didn’t want to make that, nobody wanted to see that” and my blood boiled all over again haha.My least favorite of those shows was definitely “The Brady Bunch”, I never watched it if I could avoid it – but the movies definitely got it right. We DID want to see the tv show on the big screen!! Cuz it was so freaky.
“Nobody wanted to see that”??? A rare misfire for Ephron, since I expect that’s exactly what anyone who’d watched the show itself would want to see.
I’m marginally younger than you but yeah, that was my experience as well. I was at least aware of SWAT since it would be a schedule-filler on Saturday afternoons among even older shows (westerns, etc.). So whent he movie came out I was like “oh yeah…” but had zero connection to the material. It looked like a by-the-numbers mediocre action/cop flick, which apparently is exactly what it was.
All of S.W.A.T. in any incarnation is just shitty repellent copaganda, anyway.
So, I don’t want to dismiss this comment out of hand because, you know, fuck the police for real! But I’ve only seen the movie and I wouldn’t say it was copaganda. I mean obviously the cops are the heroes, but they also have corrupt cops as well, so at least there’s that? But yes S.W.A.T. teams in reality are just examples of the militarization of police and that is not good. So I think the movie is fun, but I don’t disagree with you, but I do a little bit, but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. I totally see your point.
I’m talking mostly about the original 70s show and the more current incarnation (I think it was just cancelled after this past season). The recent show especially is full of some “Blue Bloods” level of “cops are always good and this recent criticism of police in media is wrong because of this obvious, calculated story we’ve cooked up to address it” cop show bootlicking.
I’ve never watched either one but I believe it.
As for the X-Files, that was actually the first “episode” of the show that I ever saw, and I enjoyed it so much I started watching the show afterwards. I still love that movie.Same! I had watched episodes before but always with the sound down (the better to ogle DD) but I was interested after that and became a full-fledged fan. I think my favorite part is when they’re taking that eerie limousine ride down 14th Street with the Capitol looming behind them. (I grew up in DC so I loved seeing that.) RIP Well-Manicured Man. Oh, and Limo Driver.
Ogling DD was definitely the initial draw!
I was already a fan of the X-Files and loved the film. It was absolutely perfectly timed at the height of the show’s popularity. Like, Idk why OP would think this would have worked better after Chris Carter completely fumbled the bag with his mythology arc blowing up in his face and people lost interest. lol
Yeah, the writer seems to undercut their own argument when they point out that the second movie, which was made after the show ended, bombed.
As bad Generations was, Insurrection was so much worse.
The Baywatch movie is bad for such a simple reason… after starring in successful comedies, Zach Efron and Dwayne Johnson, alongside studio executives, decided those two were the funny ones. That putting the two of them together would be funny. Don’t include a comedian, nothing is funnier than the two straight men bouncing off of eachother…
I remember the Baywatch movie being shockingly violent with showing somebody getting blown up.
It was rated R for “R-R-R-R-BOOOM!”
Aeon Flux the movie was too weird for general audiences but not weird enough for fans of the TV show.
The X Files films were alright! I would also lightly recommend Ali G In Da House, it’s pretty funny. Then again, I am one of the few people who prefer The Dictator to the first Borat film and Grimsby to Brüno.
Revisited Generations just a couple months ago, and a couple things that stood out to me.-Data decides to incorporate his emotion chip without consulting pretty much anyone. At the very least, he should’ve given a heads up to Picard. But it’s like all of a sudden, Data has emotions. He should’ve taken six months leave and spent that time with counselors helping him manage and understand this thing that most humans still struggle with after a lifetime. It literally plays a direct role in Geordi being kidnapped, and then later when he asks Picard to take him out of rotation in order to get things under control, Picard tells him to just shake it off. It is insane.
-Geordi is returned from the Duras sisters and they seemingly have no security measures whatsoever. Hey, remember that time when Geordi’s implants were hijacked by Romulans to brainwash him into assassinating someone? You’d think they would’ve used that as a precedent to make certain nothing happened when he was being held hostage by known enemies of the Federation. And this oversight plays a direct role in the destruction of the Enterprise-D.I know these kind of details are just the way things were back then and rampant in Star Trek (a franchise I absolutely adore). But they’re still uncomfortable shades of: “this entire plot development could’ve been avoided if the people involved were in any way competent.”
I like to imagine at this point Worf is just so tired of suggesting security measures he has completely stopped bothering. Or he just decides to say “fuck it, lets see what happens” because he knows the ship blowing up is the only way he’ll get to a different show and get some character growth.
Ha! I love the idea that Worf is just so done with getting his ass kicked, and having all his ideas shot down, that he decided it was time to let the Enterprise burn.
I imagine Worf and O’Brien at a bar one-upping each other on shit they told command not to ado
On the note of the Duras sisters, why even bother to bring them into the story if you’re just going to treat them as generic henchmen and then kill them?
A big flaw of Generations is that the back story has back story.
The TOS films were relatively self-contained. At worst, you had to watch ONE episode of TOS to figure out who Khan was.
Generations features Picard’s nephew and brother, the Duras Sisters, and Data’s emotion chip. Those are all subject to several ongoing arcs in the original show, and they just presumed the audience would know what they were all about. Even for Star Trek fans, that’s a bit of a big ask.
Data got mind-controlled so many times through TNG’s run that I’m not surprised he ended up doing it to himself.
Yeah, but my point is, it is extremely irresponsible and reckless, and Picard should’ve put a stop to it the moment he found out. Data’s inability to manage his emotions compromises missions, and Picard blows him off. The way the movie handles this development is certifiable.
Considering that there was an entire season cliffhanger the year before this movie where Data’s emotions put the Enterprise in direct peril, it was a pretty weird choice.It was also just…incredibly frustrating to watch the Enterprise go down like a chump against an antique Bird of Prey. They shot back once for fucks sake!Oh, and there’s that tiny little detail where Picard learns the Nexus can send him literally anytime/anywhere and doesn’t choose to go back a few extra days to deal with Soran before he does any damage.
Picard also could’ve gone back to save his family.Absolutely everything about the Nexus as a plot device is such a mess.
It is a very minor point all things considered, but in a TNG episode Picard’s archeology mentor gives him an artifact the mentor recovered and they both geek out about how rare and well preserved it is.At the end of Generations when Picard is going through the ruins of his office with Riker he picks that artifact up & chucks it aside without a facial expression or a comment. He saves *just* his family photo album and leaves the rest of his personal effects to rot on the planet. Even if the artifact isn’t perfect anymore it seems really crass that he just chucks the gift from a beloved friend like that.That is the sort of “its a detail the fans will get, but we didn’t care to make it feel right” that is all over Generations….
How about a follow-up list of TV-to-Movie adaptations done RIGHT?
I’ll start – Let the Right One In
Like half of the Star Trek movies, The Naked Gun, The Simpsons Movie, The Fugitive, Mission Impossible (I’ve never actually seen the MI show or any of the movies but they keep making them so some of them have to be good), the 90s Addams Family Movies, The Brady Bunch Movie, etc.
Mission Impossible made for great ‘60’s TV. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were on it. They were married and later appeared in Space 1999 together.
The Naked Gun movies are an interesting case because of the changes that were made relative to Police Squad! The show was very firmly in that deadpan Airplane style, and Drebin was handled somewhat differently in that in the show his buffoonery was played straight but in the films other characters were aware of it.The films were a lot broader; I’m sure that was by necessity given how quickly the show was canceled and the stated reasons for that happening. But while I definitely liked the films a lot, I preferred the show’s style.
What?! “Nice Beaver!” “Thanks, I just had it stuffed” is straight Shakespeare.
So I actually liked The A-Team, and I think Joe Carnahan should be a bigger name in action movies.
I ALSO liked the A-Team a LOT. I watched the movie with nostalgia in my heart and then went back to watch old episodes. It was an interesting experience as the movie was what I thought the old show used to be and the show… well… wasn’t. To be fair, I watched the show when my age was still in single digits…
Brady Bunch was fun. It’s hard to watch anything Brady related without childhood PTSD but it did a good job. It gave us Gary Cole.
I stand before you an unashamed fan of Power Rangers (2017). It fucking ripped beginning to end. I thought the casting was great, the tweaks to the core 5 characters were much needed and appreciated, the build up to the morphing felt like a real payoff. Sure it had insane product placement (Rita eats a Krispy Kreme) but the fights and the zords were spot on. I just wish more people felt the same way so we could get the payoff to that Tommy stinger from the end.. Also, X-Files: Fight the Future also rules. deal with it.
Agree with the Power Rangers movie – the characters (especially Billy) felt a lot more realistic and relateable as kids than the original TV versions and I loved the visuals. Plus they got Bryan Cranston as Zordon! I know that it was a nod to his time on the show and it’s realistically not his most impressive acting job but it was still a neat touch.
I enjoyed it when I watched it, although I think the best part is when the old-school theme finally kicks in.
I really didn’t like the suit or Zord design, but otherwise agree with your assessment. I was pretty bummed that we never got a sequel after the Tommy tease at the end.
I don’t think it’s a bad movie, and it had potential. I quite liked the cast too. But I agree with the assessment it took itself too seriously. I wish the movie was more “fun” but it was kind of dour. And it took waaaaay too long to get to the action.
I remember when it was first announced as a project, and it seemed like a lot of the early motivation for giving it a “darker” tone came from the hugely positive reception of the unofficial Power/Rangers short film that came out in 2015. It got a lot of press at the time, because it was the rare fanfilm to have been made by actual Hollywood talent working with a decent budget. The short is fine, but I’m glad they ended up going lighter with the actual movie because the dark/gritty tone would wear out its welcome if stretched to feature-length.
Yeah, watching that short probably helped PR2017’s medicine go down, for sure. I don’t like it at all. When someone says “takes the subject matter too seriously”, THIS SHORT is what I think of. As a counterpoint, here’s Mikey Neumann and friends going from “this is gonna be garbage” to “Hashtag Give Things A Chance” in 50 minutes:
“Also, X-Files: Fight the Future also rules. deal with it.”Second that.
I wasn’t the target audience for PR, but the dark muddy visuals, self-seriousness, etc. of the trailer alone made it look like it was following the unappealing path of making hero movies into grimdark slogs.
Alexandra Daddario’s deep blue eyes can forgive anything else that is bad in the movie Baywatch.
Best eyeliner game in the business.
oh yeah! looks at those blue marbles popping out. Phew! Our babies would be so pretty.. ( Alexandra & I of course )
The introduction’s take on the Mission Impossible movie is way off. Fans of the show were FURIOUS that it killed off the team and made Phelps the villain, and if social media had been around back then it absolutely would be talked about the same way that people talk about The Last Jedi. As it was, by the time that kind of thing came along, the movie series had become so much its own thing separate from the show that most people didn’t care anymore.
I remember that pissed off my mom. I knew nothing about the show though, so I enjoyed it.
The original cast was pissed too.
Facts.
I knew nothing about the show but the theme music, so any nostalgia I had for it was immediately satisfied. It was something like a 30-year gap from show to first MI film so from my perspective it was as much an “inspired by” as any sort of feature treatment using a well-known established property. Given the series’ success, obviously a solid move.
I knew nothing about the show but the theme music, so any nostalgia I had for it was immediately satisfied. This all day. While I’m sure there were some old boomers pissed that someone messed with their show, most of us Gen Xers (clearly the target audience) were far too young to know anything about the original show anyway. I was 22 years old (!) when the first movie came out and had never even seen the original show!
The Crocodile Hunter movie is amazing. At no point does the main character, Irwin, become aware of the plot of the film. Basically, the plot is the B-story to Irwin just being himself.
There are scenes where he is talking to the camera like he did on his show. But then they do a crane shot that shows there is no camera crew. Now maybe that is just bad editing and direction but I think it proves that in this film Irwin is hallucinating the camera crew and talking to himself the whole time.
We clearly did not watch the same SWAT movie, because the one I watched with Colin Farrel and Sam Jackson was a great action film with wild premise and loads of wicked fun. If you think it was “dreadful,” man, I guess I can’t tell you how to have fun, but I wonder if you know how…
I don’t know, nor have I ever met, a Transformers fan who doesn’t love the movie – in spite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that Prime dies.It’s a pivotal moment (a “canon event”) for so many kids (and adults) that lands hard every single time. And it’s part of what makes the movie so good. Because if it can happen to him then you realise it can happen to anyone, and you care even more about the characters.Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I was a huuuuuge TF fan in the target demographic and haaaaaaated TF: The Movie.
All my fave characters were slaughtered by the same attacks they’d shrug off every weekday at 4pm.
The few survivors then had to deal with all these ugly, freaky robots and settings that were tonally bonkers from the main show.
I was upset and confused the whole movie, and at the halfway mark, it legitimately, truly clicked in my head that *the studio just wants to sell new toys*. I grew up some thanks to TF: The Movie, but resented the hell outta it.
I love the movie. In retrospect the real problem with killing Optimus IMO wasn’t the death itself, it was the fact that Hot Rod was partially responsible and was then handed the Matrix of Leadership. I watched the show post-movie and I hated Rodimus Prime the whole time. If it wasn’t for the ghost of Starscream and a mild kiddie crush on RC I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the show after that.
ETA: Actually, I just remembered that I was really fascinated by the Headmasters, too. So ghost Starscream, RC, and Headmasters. But fuck Rodimus!
If they’d done Land of the Lost as a hard-R psychedelic horror, it would’ve fucking ruled
I liked Land of the Lost. It was just ‘weird’ enough for me to not have too much of an issue with it’s problems. I guess basically I liked it better set piece to set piece rather than as a whole. It’s worse than the sum of it’s parts, I guess.
Counterpoint: the Ali G movie has this absolute banger of a joke:Ali G: You wanna know ‘ow I make diz country bettah? Iz simple, two words: keep it real!Cabinet M.P.: That’s three words!Ali G: Don’t be a spannah, it ain’t a real word. It’s short for innit, innit?
Generations is an actively bad movie.
Generations was released at a time when I was deeply in love with Movies and every movie I saw was the greatest movie ever, so I loved it initially. Later when Movies and I settled into a more old married couple routine I rewatched it and turns out it’s garbage.
When I first saw it, I was amazed at seeing the upgraded bridge on the big screen. Looking back now this movie is obviously cheap and under baked.
So Lost in Space (1998) was… good enough to miss the cut for this article, or protectively blotted out from your subconscious?
EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Wait, wrong Oldman role.
To be fair, Lost in Space would’ve been much better if THIS Gary Oldman had shown up to play Doctor Smith.
A pill popping Dr. Smith would have been awesome…I feel like it’s almost what you get in the Netflix series.
Nobody wants to mention that movie because too many people watched it to creep on a teen actress.
At least that movie showed me who to stop hanging out with.
This is list is too short.Dragnet, Starsky and Hutch, Chips, 21 Jump Street.For the life of me I don’t understand why the people behind these movies felt the need to adapt dramatic shows into comedies. Bad ones at that.
The only one I can think of that got it right was Addams Family.
Dragnet is great. But that might be nostalgia talking. Add the Green Hornet to your list though
Dukes of Hazard, The Beverly Hillbillies, The live-action Flintstones… Could definitely add some more.
C.H.I.P.s was indeed dreadful. It’s a good question about adapting these and changing the genre to make fun of them. This is a meta thing where the films want to wink at the audience, but I think it only worked with 21 Jumpstreet because it didn’t even need the name recognition to still be a funny story about a couple of buddies going back to school.
I blame The Brady Bunch Movie, whose success other creators took the wrong lessons from. While that film went meta very effectively, it did so while still respecting the source material. So the lesson that was learned seemed to be “let’s just lampshade how stupid and cheesy this show was lol.” That doesn’t work, even if the show in question is stupid and cheesy. You still have to make an actual movie.If I want to watch people shit all over something for two hours I’ll watch MST3K or RiffTrax, because the people doing that are clever.
Great point
If you haven’t seen 22 Jump Street: the meta is turned WAY up (“Yes, we’re just going to do the same shit again!”) and don’t miss the fake trailers for the next 10 movies in the series at the very end.
I wasn’t a child then so that seemed just as fucking stupid as the others.
“For the life of me I don’t understand why the people behind these movies felt the need to adapt dramatic shows into comedies. Bad ones at that.”It’s BECAUSE they’re bad. Do you really want to see an arthouse Dukes of Hazzard or Baywatch? Fuck no. These shows were ridiculous. The movies can’t do anything else BUT be comedies. That’s why I don’t get the criticism of the Dukes of Hazzard, Baywatch, etc. movies. What the hell did you expect? You’re only showing up for the nostalgia anyway. If you wanted to watch a GOOD movie about lifeguards or moonshiners you’d watch Terrence Malick or some shit. I mean, this is fucking Baywatch.
God, thank you for this. I read this list and some of the analyses really missed the mark, specifically The Munsters/Dark Shadows. The Munsters (movie) wasn’t for children, and I found it campy in the best way. Same for Dark Shadows! I think it’s ok for things to be silly, it doesn’t make them bad.
I didn’t mention Dukes or Baywatch. The shows I mentioned were all crime dramas. I don’t know about Baywatch, but Dukes was a comedy to begin with wasn’t it? It was basically modelled after Smokey and The Bandit.
It was along the lines of MacGuyver or whatever “action” show at the time. Not a serious drama nor comedy but had elements of both plus cars jumping over rivers.
“an arthouse Dukes of Hazzard”Arthouse Dukes of Hazzard is basically an anthology of Daryl Dixon plots from The Walking Dead
All three of those are fine to good. Dragnet had early career Tom Hanks when he was a smartass goofball in the Bachelor Party mold, so that alone is fun to watch. Starsky and Hutch had its moments, and Jump Street was a solid comedy all the way through.
Both Jump Street movies are pretty universally considered great and were big hits, but OK
As a TV adaptation, SWAT is a weird one, but by no means a bad film. I remember Collin Farrell’s partner leaving a big impression on me. That guy’s a pretty good actor, I thought.
Nailed it with The Last Airbender. “There’s never been a director more wrong for a project in the history of adaptations.” (Quoting myself when it was first announced)
The animated Transformers movie rules and I will not hear any besirchment…
Rob Zombie earns a lot of the ire he gets as a filmmaker. But I take exception to blaming him for the Munsters. I don’t know how much clearer it could be that Universal could not give less of a shit about that property and budgeted it as such. For all his flaws, Zombie was very upfront about the absurdly tight budget he was given to make that film, which seemed to me very clearly a lame effort to maintain IP rights. It’s also worth saying that Zombie was a prop and set guy on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse so it wasn’t a crazy idea to give him a shot at a TV adaptation. Yeah, he shouldn’t have handled any of the scripting since that has always been a weakness. And yeah, he should stop casting his f’ing wife in every f’ing thing he makes. But this one is way more on Universal than Zombie.
I really enjoyed the movie, and Shari Moon did a decent job. I liked her more in this movie than I did in the Devil’s Rejects series. At least as Lily she had to do more than be sexy/crazy.
Rob Zombie is a terrible filmmaker. That is all.
I think there’s a non-trivial chance Shari Moon Zombie would kill Rob in his sleep if he didn’t cast her in one of his films.
Ew, I don’t need to think about their kinks.
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The fatal flaw of The X-Files is that Chris Carter is a hack and never had a proper plan for the mythology of the show. People like to complain about JJ Abrams and his stupid Mystery Box™ but we X-Files fans already dealt with the same nonsense back in the 90s, and it didn’t get better with the revival.
Now, Fight the Future came out right at the height of the show’s popularity and there was actually still a sense of “ohhhh this will all make perfect sense one day!” with the audience. So this film got us the equivalent of a big-budget two-parter for the big screen and it was all very exciting at the time. There is really nothing wrong with the film. Heck, I still have the novelisation somewhere that I probably read dozens of times back then. And they made a mix tape album that I still have on rotation every now and then.The mythology falling apart later because CC is a big dumb-dumb is not a flaw of the film. In an alternative universe where CC got it together and ended the myth arc in a satisfying manner (instead of, you know, beating the dead horse into a pulp in more and more nonsensical ways) the film would have been a highlight in the show’s history and a perfect example of how to bring your show to the big screen for a special outing.
The sound track was a killer.
I agree about the arc of the show and the film. Film isn’t all that bad. But your criticism of CC is generally mine of “long-form” tv more generally. Too many cooks in the kitchen, for too long a time, inevitably leads to an overdone…well, I guess, “dish” in this metaphor.
Yes and no. I mean, sure, plenty of cooks in the kitchen is the nature of the US-typical writer’s rooms and very few shows are (mostly) written by only one writer, especially not those 22-episode seasons from way back when. Not everyone can be JMS who wrote a whopping 92 out of 110 Babylon 5 episodes. So that’s why you need a showrunner with a strong vision and a clear narrative goal in mind to have the whole writing team on the same page.
I kinda liked Baywatch. It was ridiculously heightened and very hormonal but, it seemed to me, knowingly so.
Star Trek: Generations is sort of a strange selection for the theme of this list. It’s kinda a tv to movie adaptation of Next Generation, but it’s also kinda a continuation to the established Trek film series- it’s not really like the other entries on the list.Anyway, I don’t think the flaw is so much in killing Kirk but in relegating him to a glorified cameo. What I would’ve really loved is to see Kirk’s reaction to the 24th Century crew and setting, and grappling with his legacy. I suppose they were concerned it would play too much like Scotty’s return in the episode “Relics”, but I think they could’ve figured out some different angles to play that would’ve made it worthy of a film.But a big flaw of all the Next Generation films is shifting that show’s strengths from the more philosophical/exploratory/dramatic bent to an action one. I love that crew, but that is not their wheelhouse.
Land of the Lost may not exactly be considered high cinema, but it is fantastic high cinema. By which I mean my roommate and I watched it for the first time while baked and really very much enjoyed it.
So many of these boil down to, “we can’t bother to do anything with the material, let’s just make fun of it.” Then when it fails they’ll say, “I guess Land Of The Lost just doesn’t work as a movie,” when they didn’t *make* a Land Of The Lost movie, they made a bog-standard Will Ferrell screechfest and put this name on it. As one of the half-a-dozen people who would unironically love a Land Of The Lost movie that’s a *Land Of The Lost Movie,* that one felt particularly insulting.
The X-Files movie was fine, even good.
It expanded the look of The X-Files to be more cinematic, which was then continued in the subsequent TV seasons. It moved the story forward as much as it could considering it was made in the middle of a running TV series. And the way it was written made it accessible to non-fans and yet gave fans moments and reveals to keep their interest in the TV show.
That said, nothing can forgive the pointlessness of that second movie.
I agree with your overall take on the first film. Not a masterpiece, but, for the most part, did what it could well enough.I disagree, to some extent, with your take on the second one. I admit it was weighed down by the discussion of Scully’s faith (and the imperfect vessel that was the priest etc etc). But I enjoyed its low-stakes mystery/thriller (monster-of-the-week) take. I love the classic “mad scientist” character. And the film fleshed out their relationship a bit (thus, keeping it within the world of the X-Files). There is a kernel of a good movie in there somewhere!
From what I remember, the second movie seemed like a filler episode of the TV series that had been drawn out into a two parter. The result was pacing that dragged and a story that didn’t really matter.
I mean, there’s good things to be found in any movie, but this felt like it only existed because of contractual mandate or something.
From what I remember, the X-Files movie was fairly popular. Perhaps not with the more rabid fanbase. But, if I remember correctly, most fans just wanted to see Mulder and Scully finally kiss.I admit the film was a bit much. But there was a kernel of a good movie in there. I would say the same about the second film. Great idea, built on the whole misunderstood “mad scientist” trope. But it got bogged down by a larger story about faith. As if the writers/directors wanted to make something “serious.”
Given it’s status as one of the biggest flops of all time (go up to Kevin Klein and tell him you saw it, he used to pull 10 bucks out of his wallet and give it to you) I am surprised Wild Wild West didn’t make this list. Yes, it is based on a television show. A steampunk scifi western with espionage tints from the late 1960s.
I went in expecting to hate the Munsters, but ended up liking it. It was funny. He did a good job.
The trend I hated was remaking a 60s/70s/80s series as a comedy film when the original was not comedy. Yes, we look back at old shows as campy and silly but they often had a solid concept that could use a bigger budget and someone to take it somewhat seriously. The films of Dark Shadows and Land of the Lost irritated me. Loved both shows as a kid, yes ha ha look at the low budget, the bad acting, mistakes caught live. But both had great premises that deserved way better. maybe someday.
May not match the “single fatal flaw” theme, but when the advertising (such as it was) for the 2011 Green Hornet movie emphasized the features of the car, you could kinda see that 43% critic score, 44% viewer score on Rotten Tomatoes coming…