Adaptations - The Bizarre Case of Supernatural: The Anime Series

   Adaptations plague us these days. I cringe whenever I hear Hollywood is turning a beloved book, cartoon or even toys I love into a movie or series. Available in all kinds, if you want an adaptation of your favorite show or book in another medium, it probably exists. Most popular shows right now come from other sources. True Blood and The Walking Dead came from a book and a comic book series respectively.  Almost everything  is adapted from something else and every industry does it, from making books into movies to turning TV shows into books.

                (Left) Cover for Dead Until Dark, book 1 of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (2009 Ace Books edition) ; (Right) Cover for The Walking Dead #1 (Image Comics, Oct. 2003) 

Adaptations And their Merits, Source Material Aside

There are nearly countless commentators who say that book versions are better than movie versions and movie versions are better than the game versions. There is, it seems, a hierarchy of media supremacy that ranks the oldest media as the "best". It has to do with faithfulness to the source material, it seems. "The book is better". It's a common mantra of criticism that along with "the book has more details", "the book has better character development", and " the movie is not faithful to the book" seem to form a mantra of adaptation commentary. Instead of repeating it, let me instead posit that the value of adaptations should not be measured on how accurately it follows the original, but on how well it uses the native elements unique to its given form of media.