moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2019-08-02 03:22 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2019-08-02 03:22 pm
Entry tags:
Idle Thoughts on a Friday
I have a probably-wrong hypothesis that Catwoman (2004)* and Inspector Gadget (1999) were originally scripts about a superheroine, probably named something like “Bast,” with mystical cat-given superpowers, and a robot police car and its human sidekick, respectively; and that studio execs worried these premises were just close enough to DC’s Catwoman and the old Inspector Gadget show that they decided they’d better buy the rights to those properties and claim the movies were adaptations**. Sort of a case of sticking fake logos and serial numbers on the characters instead of filing them off. Gadget even ends with the car saying over the credits “this movie was going to be called “The Incredible Crime-Fighting Talking Car”.”
The difference is I rather enjoyed Catwoman, which is a better film than reported—I suspect the main reason fans rage against it is disappointment that it’s not the comic-book version of the character. I did not enjoy what I’ve seen of Inspector Gadget.
*However, according to Wikipedia the true story is that a Catwoman spinoff had been in the works since Michelle Pfeiffer played the role in the ‘90s, it just got stranded in development hell so long the rules of the comic-book-adaptation genre had been codified in the meantime and Catwoman didn’t follow them.
**There’s historical precedent – High Noon (1952) is always credited as an adaptation of a magazine story called ‘The Tin Star,’ but the scriptwriter always maintained he’d had no conscious memory of the earlier work (which iirc resembles the movie only insofar as it involves a principled Western sheriff making a lone stand) and that a producer who recalled having read something vaguely like his script a few years earlier just tracked down and bought the rights to be safe.
The difference is I rather enjoyed Catwoman, which is a better film than reported—I suspect the main reason fans rage against it is disappointment that it’s not the comic-book version of the character. I did not enjoy what I’ve seen of Inspector Gadget.
*However, according to Wikipedia the true story is that a Catwoman spinoff had been in the works since Michelle Pfeiffer played the role in the ‘90s, it just got stranded in development hell so long the rules of the comic-book-adaptation genre had been codified in the meantime and Catwoman didn’t follow them.
**There’s historical precedent – High Noon (1952) is always credited as an adaptation of a magazine story called ‘The Tin Star,’ but the scriptwriter always maintained he’d had no conscious memory of the earlier work (which iirc resembles the movie only insofar as it involves a principled Western sheriff making a lone stand) and that a producer who recalled having read something vaguely like his script a few years earlier just tracked down and bought the rights to be safe.