Making adaptations

It has always been a good thing for my spare time that World of Warcraft won’t install on my laptop. (Actually, I did make it install one time, but only got one video frame every 4 seconds or so, so off it went again.) Unfortunately, Monday night a friend’s casual reference reminded me that the laptop’s specs were well up to another piece of software, and last night, I put Starcraft on it. Maybe now I can finish the darn Terran campaign and play the other two-thirds of the game.

Blizzard does not own me. But I think it’s trying to acquire controlling interest.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Alan Moore and the Wachowskis have manufactured this little tiff they are having just to make sure V for Vendetta retains a brighter blip on the geek radar. As someone recently pointed out, any author who has sold thousands of copies of professional fanfic (I refer to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when bitching about other creative folks modifying their characters and storylines.

You know, a book is not a movie is not a comic is not a TV show. They all have different rules and must make adaptations if they are to flourish in a changed environment. “Spamalot” is hardly a scene-for-scene copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. If SciFi ever makes that rumored miniseries of “Ringworld”, they’ll have to change quite a bit to keep a good novel from being very dull television. (Knowing SciFi, they probably won’t – they’ll follow the advice of some uber-fan who wants a line-by-line copy.) I wish fans were better at judging material on its own merits, instead of what they wanted the material to be. (I also wish more fans understood the difference between “This is poor quality” and “I personally don’t like this much.”)

Speaking of which, some website recently applauded the Enterprise-D as one of the most iconic spaceships in visual science fiction, making the note that “not a lot of thought was put into the original television Enterprise.” I hope the ghost of Matt Jeffries hunts this person down and explains a thing or three to him.