|| The Journey || Filling up the tank (The Journey explained)
This is a series that is going to be slightly off the beaten path, mostly in the terms that this blog here is my space for gaming reviews and ideas. However, the contents of this series, this Journey, is going to be an area of my live that gets just as much love as gaming does. All my life I have had a passion for reading, and one author who has always stood out as my favorite for the longest time has been the one and only King of horror...Stephen King.
However, I have slowly realized the last few years just how expansive his works have been adapted into movies and TV shows, and it's been an area that I haven't explored, nor have I tried to, until recently. The past few years alone have shown an upheaval not in just his projects being adapted for the big and small screens, they have been some of my favorite works of his. The one that really caught my attention and opened my eyes to this expansion of his universe, was in 2017 when Netflix adapted Gerald's Game one of my all-time favorite King books.
But, if you're a Stephen King fan there's one thing that we all can agree on. The details matter from page to screen, and sometimes when these details get tweaked or go missing all together...well it's not pretty. It's these details that can make or break how well a project has been adapted, and it's what got me wanting to cover this journey of mine.
I've read all of the books, some of them many years ago, with others being read more recently. However a lot of the details, the important ones, still remain. So what I wanted to do was chronicle each step of this Journey and share my thoughts and feelings. I wanted to share what I thought of each film and TV project letting the media speak for itself, but also speak on it as how I felt it handled adapting it's original source material. Because again, there's one thing us King fans know and it's that some of these have been rejected by the man himself.
So going forward this is how this Journey will break down.
Advancing By Era : Instead of working entirely through the films and then entirely through the TV shows, we'll be going by era. So we'll start in the 1970's with the movies, then the 70's with TV shows, before going on to the 80's. Each decade will begin with a focus on the movies in their entirety before switching to the TV shows.
Only Covering American Adaptations : Some of Stephen King's work have been adapted in other countries. Not just translated but entirely built in other regions of the world. For example, 1998 saw a Hindi TV series adaptation of It called Woh. These are being skipped because in most cases they are adaptations of adaptations, as well as language-barrier reasons which would / could cause me to miss out on key things such as emotions being portrayed and things of that nature.
Nothing Derivative : A lot of these movies and shows spawned sequels of their own. Why? Because it's horror, and horror fans always want more. They want the monster to come back to life, or they want newer and more vicious bad guys. These further sequels therefore aren't really borne of the original SK material and end up being a bit watered down. Look at the Children of the Corn franchise that now has TEN installments in it. King himself has even sworn off these movies, demanding at one point that his name be removed from them.
Nothing Original Either : While I'll be watching everything that I can find that is SK related, this Journey is just going to have us talking about things based on his work. So we won't cover things like Kingdom Hospital, Storm of the Century, or Castle Rock to name a few. However we just might find our way back to these things at some point.
Double Coverage : The last note before we step off on this journey. I'll be trying to cover all of these things both on the blog AND on the YouTube channel. The blog series will most likely be the more fleshed out of the two, but I think it would be cool to expand this into both text and video mediums. If my feelings change, one or the other will be dropped but no matter what we are definitely in this for the long haul.
So with all that being said, who's ready for this satisfying, horrific journey that is spread out before us? Our first post should be live soon and it's going to bring us to where everything began in this spider-web of madness. We'll be starting with Carrie where we will discuss the original 1976 film, and of course the novel itself released in 1974. Don't worry, the 2002 TV series as well as the 2013 version of the movie will come later.
See you guys soon!
However, I have slowly realized the last few years just how expansive his works have been adapted into movies and TV shows, and it's been an area that I haven't explored, nor have I tried to, until recently. The past few years alone have shown an upheaval not in just his projects being adapted for the big and small screens, they have been some of my favorite works of his. The one that really caught my attention and opened my eyes to this expansion of his universe, was in 2017 when Netflix adapted Gerald's Game one of my all-time favorite King books.
But, if you're a Stephen King fan there's one thing that we all can agree on. The details matter from page to screen, and sometimes when these details get tweaked or go missing all together...well it's not pretty. It's these details that can make or break how well a project has been adapted, and it's what got me wanting to cover this journey of mine.
I've read all of the books, some of them many years ago, with others being read more recently. However a lot of the details, the important ones, still remain. So what I wanted to do was chronicle each step of this Journey and share my thoughts and feelings. I wanted to share what I thought of each film and TV project letting the media speak for itself, but also speak on it as how I felt it handled adapting it's original source material. Because again, there's one thing us King fans know and it's that some of these have been rejected by the man himself.
So going forward this is how this Journey will break down.
Advancing By Era : Instead of working entirely through the films and then entirely through the TV shows, we'll be going by era. So we'll start in the 1970's with the movies, then the 70's with TV shows, before going on to the 80's. Each decade will begin with a focus on the movies in their entirety before switching to the TV shows.
Only Covering American Adaptations : Some of Stephen King's work have been adapted in other countries. Not just translated but entirely built in other regions of the world. For example, 1998 saw a Hindi TV series adaptation of It called Woh. These are being skipped because in most cases they are adaptations of adaptations, as well as language-barrier reasons which would / could cause me to miss out on key things such as emotions being portrayed and things of that nature.
Nothing Derivative : A lot of these movies and shows spawned sequels of their own. Why? Because it's horror, and horror fans always want more. They want the monster to come back to life, or they want newer and more vicious bad guys. These further sequels therefore aren't really borne of the original SK material and end up being a bit watered down. Look at the Children of the Corn franchise that now has TEN installments in it. King himself has even sworn off these movies, demanding at one point that his name be removed from them.
Nothing Original Either : While I'll be watching everything that I can find that is SK related, this Journey is just going to have us talking about things based on his work. So we won't cover things like Kingdom Hospital, Storm of the Century, or Castle Rock to name a few. However we just might find our way back to these things at some point.
Double Coverage : The last note before we step off on this journey. I'll be trying to cover all of these things both on the blog AND on the YouTube channel. The blog series will most likely be the more fleshed out of the two, but I think it would be cool to expand this into both text and video mediums. If my feelings change, one or the other will be dropped but no matter what we are definitely in this for the long haul.
So with all that being said, who's ready for this satisfying, horrific journey that is spread out before us? Our first post should be live soon and it's going to bring us to where everything began in this spider-web of madness. We'll be starting with Carrie where we will discuss the original 1976 film, and of course the novel itself released in 1974. Don't worry, the 2002 TV series as well as the 2013 version of the movie will come later.
See you guys soon!
