Monday, October 16, 2023

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Through a Kid's Eyes

1954

 
This is a double extra bonus one.

It doesn't really fit in with the genre of the other bonus fantasy films...

However, Jules Verne wrote a sort-of sequel to the novel that inspired this film called Mysterious Island.  

And that novel was adapted into a film by Ray Harryhausen.
Therefore, if we ever do get around to watching Mysterious Island, we'll have a nice link.

This film was important because it showed Anabelle continuing my family's long standing tradition of ranting about movie adaptations ignoring source material we are attached to.

Her Father's shouts and picking apart  missteps with comic book adaptations are, frankly, legendary, and there are family members who still have strained joints from trying to keep me in my seat for some of the really egregious ones

Her Grandmother' epic, venom and vitriol filled rant about how Stanley Kubrick ruined Steven King's The Shining is still going strong forty-three years later. 

Anabelle has long been a fan of the classics, reading Moby Dick and The Jungle for her own enjoyment in high school. She regularly reads Shakespeare for fun.

Aside- This is why I cannot, in good conscience, complain when her comic book pile builds up without being read.

Over the summer Anabelle read Jules Verne's 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea. She got really into it and enjoyed the story, characters and events. 

Therefore, with the Harryhausen box set, and our return to Star Trek completed, she decided to pull that one up on Disney Plus (even though we have the disc...*hisses at change*) and watch it her last night before returning to college.

She's been lured in by an excellent cast before and seen the source material ignored, as anyone who has asked her about The Circle can attest.

However, she was ill prepared for the utter disregard of novelizations that Hollywood of the Fifties and Sixties was prone to.

She was in a non-stop tizzy over just about everything. Nemo's nationality changing meant they had to add in a whole new back story, ignore several key locations, and reorder the events.
Killing him at the end did not help matters, even with full knowledge of the sequel.
"He looks pretty dead to me!"

The Professor is the main character in the book, which those who only saw the film may not have guessed. 

Kirk Douglas played an unrecognizable version of his character, whose main features, commented on by all the other characters in the novel, were that he was Canadian and he complained a lot.

Anabelle had a thoroughly yell filled, venting time during the entire movie.

Naturally, I was extremely helpful to her throughout the run time as I near constantly enquired:

Are you suuuuuuuuure, you're not forgetting Esme?
Maybe you were just reading too fast and skipped her parts.

Leading to her screaming in my face:
"THERE WAS NO SEA LION!!!!!!"

And me quietly humming "A Whale of a Tale."

It's a shame the ride closed, it was a more faithful adaptation.


5 comments:

anabelle said...

i will actually never get over the emotional turmoil this movie brought me

esmie said...

*sea lion noise*

Jeff McGinley said...

Sorry kiddo, sometimes we have to endure that for cultural references.


Esme, happy to see you! Did you come to point out which chapter of the book you're in?

longbow said...

The Jungle? Maybe it's been too long since I've read it.

Jeff McGinley said...

She's really always gotten pulled in by many of the the classics.