Leaving well enough alone

We live in an age of multimedia cross-marketing saturation bombing. It's almost to the point where we don't have consumers, we have targets. Think about that the next time you hear the term "target audience". As if some record producer or artist agent or webcomic writer who spews forth his half crazed opinions on his blog is perched upon the water tower overlooking the vast mass consciousness of the developing mono-culture picking and choosing the recipients of their .50 caliber meme which will be fired through the media of their choice.

And it's not like we're sitting up in our water towers, sucking down anything caffeinated or mind altering that we can get our hands on, and only having to use one weapon of thought attack at our disposal. Oh no children, we've got the whole toy store at our disposal. Movies, books, television, radio, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, Blue-Ray, broadband, satellites skimming over the Ionosphere for the sole purpose of getting our ideas into your heads, or make your fillings sing "hey nani nani". Whichever comes first.

And some people just can't get enough. The movie isn't enough. They need the soundtrack downloaded onto their Ipod, the same one that has the movie's trailer which they downloaded when it somehow, as if by magic, got leaked onto the web. Wait, there's a book adaption? Got to get that to! It doesn't matter that the movie in question is an adaption of a novel to begin with. Now you have to wait for months for the DVD, but not that piece of shit that's coming out a couple of months later, NO YOU FOOLISH BASTARD, it's got to be the special edition 5 disc hi-def box set with the little book and commemorative paperweight!

There's an animated WONDER WOMAN movie coming soon, to which I say "Yay". I'll be buying it. However, in a little online discussion doom was reigned upon us with the statement, "That doesn't solve the problem of there not being a live action Wonder Woman movie."

Fuck the economy and tell the entire Middle East to sod off! Get Obama on the phone! We need a damn Wonder Woman live action movie, because damn it all we're entitled to have our every whim catered to.

This is a problem? THIS? No, CATWOMAN was a problem. This is just a matter of no one can pull off the role. And don't bother leaving comments about Lucy Lawless. That ship sailed about ten years ago. Let her do the animated voice like she did in NEW FRONTIER.

WATCHMEN is getting set to be butchered on the screen. I caught some people clamoring about doing a KINGDOM COME movie. Here's where we hit the problem.

Some works lose their magic in translation. NEW FRONTIER was great, but so much got cut out when the work got animated that it felt like they just when from Darwin Cooke's outline. There's even more stuff going on in WATCHMEN and KINGDOM COME that there's no way you can get a decent translation of the work compiled into a two to three hour movie. There's also not enough there to warrant a series of films. And think about one of the main strengths of KINGDOM COME: the art. Alex Ross ain't gonna be painting those animation cells.

Some works can translate well. SIN CITY and 300 proved that. The difference is that there's room to work with them. They had to add a lot to 300 to flesh it out for the movie. SIN CITY faithfully adapted multiple limited series into one movie. The thing is, while I love SIN CITY, we are not talking about a terribly dense work. It's fairly light, a popcorn read. That's not an insult, I love popcorn reading.

Also intellectual properties like BATMAN and SPIDER-MAN are easily adapted because there a lot of source material for the producers to cull from. They can make it work. Adapting a series like WATCHMEN, or the numerous other Alan Moore properties of which he won't even allow his name to be attached to the adaptations, and the producers are hand cuffed. The creators only produced a set amount of source material and it often isn't much. It's way too easy to go off the reservation and piss off the audience you were hoping to cater to.

Tricksy things, those target audiences. Blast them right and they'll worship you with devotion, praise and money. However if your aim is off, you've got a pissed off beast which you've disturbed and it's never easy to calm them down.

As humans it's in our nature to adapt. Ideas must adapt meet the rigors of the world. Art does not adapt. The world adapts to art. People adapt to art. Great glowing ideas that change the minds, hearts and souls of all who come in contact with them, which drive their creators to near madness in the best of conditions, in their quest to formulate and express them. And for every single one of these wonderful ideas, there's a hundred people looking to change it so that they can make a buck off it.