Into the Woods (2014)

Probably the most thankless job a director can set himself is trying to adapt a beloved stage musical to screen, as the people you most need to win over for your movie to be a success (fans of the stage version) are also the people most likely to tar and feather you in the streets over the slightest deviation from the source material. You may think comic fans get salty about adaptation changes, but they have nothing on musical theatre nerds.

That’s probably why, despite musicals still being a lucrative movie genre, stage musicals adapted to screen are a rare beast and only getting rarer. Of the 50 top grossing movie musicals, only six began life on stage. The rest are either originals like The Greatest Showman, animated musicals or jukebox musicals like Bohemian Rhapsody or (sigh) Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Of course, it wasn’t always thus. The middle decades of the 20th century were a golden age for adaptations for stage musicals as that was the point where theatre and cinema were most alike. Colour photography and improvements in sound tech meant that cinema could finally match the visual and audio splendour of theatre. But, cinema had yet to fully embrace the freedom inherent in the medium and movies of the first half of the century often closely resembled filmed plays with constructed sets and static cameras. As cinema became less and less indebted to its theatrical roots, adapting stage musical to screen became a lot more challenging. To put it simply: movies are not plays and plays are not movies. And trying to turn one into the other can result in some pretty radical changes. And all those challenges are right up on screen in Into the Woods, a movie based on one of the most inherently theatrical musicals of the modern era.

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All hands on deck!

Avast me hearties and heartettes! Outland Publications have launched their Kickstarter for Rising Tides, an anthology of nineteen pirate stories by some of the best genre writers currently working and also me.

My short story The Devil’s Hoof Upon the Tile appears alongside entries from Kate Heartfield, Jason Fischer, Sarah Thérèse Pelletier and many more. Whether you like your buccaneers fantasy themed, horror themed, historically accurate or genre defying (nothing more dangerous than a genre defying pirate) there’s something for everyone.

So if that sounds fun, do head over to Kickstarter and give them whatever doubloons you can spare.

Tomorrowland (2015)

Hey remember that time Disney spent a load of money on a science fiction epic that was visually spectacular but also kinda inert, weirdly off-brand for them, with a load of tonal and pacing issues that ended up costing them a load of money?

I guess by this point it kinda IS on brand?

Anyway, Tomorrowland is the second (and to date last) live action feature directed by animation legend Brad Bird and it keeps alive the proud Disney tradition of sci-fi movies that I respect and want to like but are just fundamentally too dang flawed on the writing level to get anything other than a qualified endorsement.

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Daria (1997-2002)

The nineties were awesome.

Look, I know everybody idolises the first decade they can properly remember but this is different. The nineties really were awesome. The Cold War was over, the War on Terror hadn’t started, we’d fixed acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer (and that whole global warming thing would probably sort itself out) and the only threats to world peace were goobs like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic who would occasionally show up to cause trouble before being punted into the air like Team Rocket.

Meowth is Gaddafi fyi.

Plus, the movies, the TV shows, the music. I love this whole era. So I was overjoyed when I finally got my hands on a boxset of the complete Daria, an animated sitcom that ran from 1997 to 2002. Not merely a nineties show, but probably the most nineties show.

And imagine my disappointment on discovering that, like so much nostalgia, it doesn’t actually hold up all that well.

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Two New Reviews!

Hello hello hello!

Two new reviews have dropped for Don’t Trust Fish!

In a starred review, Kirkus says: “Sharpson offers so-fish-ticated readers a heads up about the true terror of the seas. His delightful text, filled to the brim with jokes that read aloud brilliantly, pairs perfectly with Santat’s art, which shifts between extreme realism and goofy hilarity.”

And Betsy Bird has written an absolute sweetheart of a review at the School Library Journal: “There are some picture books that you read that make you chuckle when you see the cover. There are some picture books where they might get one legitimate laugh out of the adult reader. There are some picture books that are funny to young readers. Now consider a book that makes everybody, and I do mean everybody, laugh from the cover onwards. THAT, my friends, is a picture book worth celebrating! That is a rarity! That… is Don’t Trust Fish.”

“Cowabunga.”

In 1984, two broke young illustrators named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were trying to break into comics. Eastman randomly doodled a turtle in ninja attire and the pair decided that it was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, essentially a madlib of everything that was popular in comics at the time (except for turtles).

They then wrote a silly little issue parodying Frank Miller’s Daredevil run and that, of course, was that.

This one weird joke concept riffing on an incredibly specific moment in comic book history in a black and white indie vanished without a trace, the very definition of a flash in the pan.

Wait, no. *checks notes*

It went on to conquer the goddamn world. To this day, TMNT is quite possibly the most lucrative Western comic book property not published by either DC or Marvel. Third most successful toyline of all time. Seven TV series, seven films, multiple videogames, hundreds and hundreds of comic issues and a metric shit-ton of merch. Which, on the one hand, is crazy.

How did a concept so ridiculous, and so seemingly instantly dated become one of the most successful and enduring pop culture phenomena of the past half century? Well, success has many fathers. Firstly, I think the franchise’s longevity was sealed with this:

A theme tune that catchy only comes around once in a blue moon. Play it over NINE SEASONS and it’s practically brainwashing.

Then there’s the fact that TMNT relies on a template that has proven to be amazingly durable over the last 180 years.

Hothead. Stoic Leader. Smart Guy. Big fun doofus.

The Musketeer Archetypes are like the Four Chords of character writing. They’re bloody everywhere, but they’re there for a reason. They work, dammit. And these character traits (Leads, Does Machines, Cool but Rude, Party Dude) hold true across virtually all interpretations of the characters which gives continuity across the franchise. But, and this is crucial, with that stability and continuity there also comes incredible plasticity. The Turtles fandom is fantastically diverse in terms of its age range and that’s because TMNT can be this:

Or it can be THIS:

Once you get past the initially (very, very, very) silly premise, the Brothers Turtle can grow with their audience. There’s stuff for kids and there’s also stuff for adults. So, class, where have we heard that before? A character that has a rock solid core that’s also surprisingly adaptable and can tell stories for any and all ages?

So before we go any further, I owe you all an apology. I know I said I’d be reviewing Turtles Forever but you need to know three things:

  1. My DVD of Turtles Forever didn’t arrive in time (that’ll teach me to support physical media).
  2. There’s a Turtles movie with Batman in it, how am I NOT going to review that?
  3. It is SHOCKINGLY good.
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