Adaptation Decay

It was a fixture for kids 1992. Every issue of Nintendo Power didn't just bring far-too-optimistic coverage of the games available on Ninten It was a fixture for kids 1992. Every issue of Nintendo Power didn't just bring far-too-optimistic coverage of the games available on Nintendo's hardware, but it also brought another installment of Link's adventures through Hyrule. Nintendo Power worked with...

Swing your arms from side to side, but make sure not to drop your phone while you listen to this Adaptation Decay about 1989's bizarre hybrid live-action/animation Mario show. For this episode, we talk about "The Bird! The Bird!" and "Butch Mario and the Luigi Kid", and all of their celebrity guest absurdities.

This episode takes us back to the Paul W.S. Anderson well for a movie that's much more fun than Resident Evil. The fate of our world hangs in the balance as extradimensional beings battle it out in the tournament of Mortal Kombat. This movie is cheesy, goofy, brainless, and not high art. But man, is it fun to talk about.

We're playing fast and loose with the mission of the show in order to talk about the most unlikely thing: a board game adaptation that is also a very good movie. Tim Curry headlines an ensemble cast that tries to solve murder after murder in a nonstop horny farce. This movie should be remembered for a lot more than its "multiple endings" gimmick.

The year was 1994, and cartoons could still be sexist. Of course we'd lead with that, because we're us, but it's remarkable how quickly this cartoon goes from 0 to "whoa" in that regard. Beyond that, the Mega Man cartoon is a very pretty commercial for some very good toys that espouses some very muddled and retrograde values. Tune in to hear us talk about the first three episodes!

You can't help but feel a little bad for Buckner and Garcia. They wrote a fun  song about an arcade game they liked, and ended up being forever branded as a novelty act and a one-hit wonder. The record label railroaded them into making an album full of video game songs to take advantage of the popularity of their single, "Pac-Man Fever". What they ended up creating was a very strange beast: full o...

Let's flirt with success, as we look at 2006's Silent Hill movie. Obviously Kole is down, since this contains prolonged sequences that perfectly encapsulate the disorientation and horror of wandering around a haunted town. However, this movie falls from its high highs to shit the bed with boring cult nonsense. Tune in to hear exactly what went wrong, even though this is generally one of our most p...

This adaptation came out of nowhere, but apparently it's been coming for a long time. Back in 2007, Konami reached out to Warren Ellis to write a movie script for them, adapting Castlevania to the screen. Ten years later, that movie became a Netflix series. And people seem to love it. If only it was that easy. Because what we have here is a continuation of Summer Throwdown season, where our opinio...

It was supposed to be a massive achievement in filmmaking. The premier video game studio had set its sights on making a CGI movie that would trick you into thinking you were looking at actual people. But that wasn't the right thing to chase. Despite its star studded cast, we found very little to love in this movie that's both a bad story and a bad adaptation. Come listen to how this fell apart, an...

This is the big one... 1993's Super Mario Bros. was the first video game movie, and it certainly set a... tone ... for the quality of things to come. It's almost universally reviled, and it's been talked to death by people a lot smarter than us. However, revisiting this movie directed by monsters has revealed something surprising: While it's a horrible adaptation, it's really fun to watch . The ca...

Recorded to coincide with our coverage of the original Tomb Raider game on Watch Out for Fireballs!, this episode covers perhaps the best adaptation we've seen yet. That's right, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the Angelina Jolie movie from 2001, is worth watching. Of course it's brainless. The action is dumb, and the way it's choreographed and shot reeks of "The Matrix just came out". The accents are al...

It had to happen eventually: we'd have to cover an Uwe Boll movie. It's probable that you've read a lot of breakdowns of Boll's ineptitude, but nothing beats getting a first hand taste. This is one of the worst movies we've ever seen. Alone in the Dark is about as successful as an adaptation as it is as a film... not at all. You have a main character who dresses like Edward Carnby, and some supern...

Did you know that Maniac Mansion was adapted into a television show in 1990? Did you know Eugene Levy was in charge of it? Did you know that Gary and Kole are actually pretty into the show, by and large? All these questions and more may or may not be answered. The commonalities between the Maniac Mansion TV show and its source material are scant and superficial. In that way, it's a very poor adapt...

The Pokémon anime from the '90s is rightfully beloved. It was a colorful and entertaining look at this magical world chock full of monsters just waiting to be your friend. We're not talking about that show. Instead, we're talking about the soulless and bafflingly-paced miniseries that was originally released alongside Pokémon X and Y. Listen to hear us talk about how Origins jettisons the humor an...

The secret was friendship. The secret was always friendship, but we just forgot... over and over again... in this premium show dedicated to bad adaptations of video games. Or bad movie sequels to video games, like the 2005 movie "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children". A good sequel has similar requirements to a good adaptation: It must honor the source material. While Advent Children takes us back t...

Get your asses to Mars in this second episode of our premium show dedicated to bad adaptations of videos games. It's all about the 2005 movie "Doom". We really didn't intend to do another Resident Evil movie, but here we are. Take Doom, remove all of the action, and take away Hell. Add in ridiculous non-science about extra chromosomes encoding the human soul, and you have just another zombie movie...

This inaugural episode of our premium show dedicated to bad adaptations of video games is all about the 2002 Paul W.S. Anderson movie "Resident Evil." Gary and Kole go in-depth on how Resident Evil fails as an action movie AND as a Resident Evil adaptation, hitting it hard for being an incoherent and insulting mess.