B^F: The Novelization Of The Feature Film

Somehow I landed on the TV Tropes page for novelizations and that led me down a rabbit hole to discover there are a lot more book adaptations of my core memories out there. More than just “Short Circuit“. As I read, I kept exclaiming “there’s a novelization of that?!” when I discovered there were books for *batteries not included, Santa Claus: The Movie, Howard the Duck, Ghostbusters, and more.

One in particular was Back to the Future, which had not only a novelization, but a novelization to the novelization. Specifically, Ryan North (author of those Dinosaur Comics and How to Take Over the World) converted a series of his Tumblr posts analyzing each page into a book.

I like novelizations because it’s fun to see how show more “wrong” these things get when translated into a different medium, like Friday the 13th and Independence Day. You can’t communicate visual spectacle or long pauses of dread into a book. You can also sometimes get deleted scenes and changed material because they’re usually based on early script drafts.

Apparently, Back to the Future is a cut above the rest. It’s not just terribly written, but everything that made the movie great gets crapped on. Tight scenes get overwritten and overblown and lose everything that made the movie charming. Marty becomes sarcastic and snarky. Doc becomes eccentric and dull. When he finds out about the 1.21 gigawatts, he doesn’t sit in a chair, he goes to paint! It’s not something that was ever foreshadowed and it never comes again.

Gipe’s writing style is easy to make fun of because he writes like an old man, using archaic terms like “lout”, Marty being into “sound reproduction”, and “coldcock”. Not only did I get a refreshing blast of a classic movie, I got to see the MST3K treatment as well. Highly recommended. show less

[Vacío/Empty]