A good T.V show to feature film jump (1 Viewer)

[tachibana]

What do you guys think makes for a good series to feature length move? Simpsons, Rugrats, South Park, Reno 911, Spongebob, hundreds have went to the big screen.

But what makes one truly great? What do they need? Big villains? Big adventures? Big drama? Major shit hitting fan? What do you guys love in a good feature length that can't be done in 22 or 44?

 

[TonyD]

hey george, just because no one responded didn't mean you had to go away and not post anymore.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

They have to put together a good feature story and script instead of simply relying on name value to put butts in seats.

 

[mattCR]

South Park was a good logical transition of doing something they simply couldn't do on the small screen.

Star Trek has also done this with varying success.

Children's programming has the most straightforward transition.

Then again, I was surprised at how well done "The Simpsons" was.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

It has to have something to justify going out of the house to see it.

I know that sounds like a ridiculously obvious and easy criteria, but in my opinion, that's the starting point that determines whether or not feature adaptations will work. It also depends on the nature of the show, etc. Sometimes that reason is that making a movie gives the producers a larger budget to have a more fully realized vision, or sometimes it's having a longer block of time to tell a story in, or sometimes it's getting around content restrictions on television.

I loved the "South Park" movie, far more than I ever expected to...they really took advantage not only of having a longer period of time to tell a story in but also did a bunch of things that they never would have been allowed to put on the show at the time. (Nowadays I think Comedy Central would probably allow most, if not all, of what was in the film to be shown on TV.) I wasn't even a huge South Park fan when I saw the movie, but it was just a very funny movie, regardless of whether or not you were familiar with the show.

"The Simpsons" movie worked far better than I ever imagined, although it still had the "one giant episode" syndrome I'm generally wary of when it comes to making a movie from a show.

I really like the Star Trek movies... not only did it give the audience a chance to see new Star Trek for the first time in years, but they took advantage of having better special effects and more time to tell a story. I saw Star Trek movies long before I saw Star Trek on TV, which goes to prove that if you make a movie from a TV show and do it well, it can stand on its own.

I liked "Serenity" (the Firefly movie), and while it didn't feel like one big episode, I don't know if it would have been as entertaining to me if I hadn't been a fan of the show first.

But there's got to be a good story to tell, and a good reason to do it. The shows I'm enjoying the most right now (Heroes and 24, for example) are masterful at doing something on television that films can't...telling an ongoing story over the course of multiple hours. While it's certainly possible that they could make a good film out of either of those shows, I think it would lose what I love most about them, that there are so many more layers to the plotting and characters than you could squeeze into a two-hour film.

On the other hand, a show like CSI (which I like) I think would be a bad film because most of the episodes play like stand-alone mini-movies. There's a little character stuff that occasionally spills over from episode to episode, but they're pretty self-contained. On paper that might make it sound like an ideal choice for a film, but I think it would work against it; when we watch that show, we don't expect to see the Greatest Thing Ever, but an hour's worth of entertainment that features a fairly rigid story construction consistent from week to week. The only thing you could do with a movie would be to make everything bigger, and I have to think that that might take away from what makes the show enjoyable. They'd have to have one heck of a case to solve to make it worth a feature, and as good as the show is, I don't think it's meant for that.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this next point, that I have little interest in movies that redo a show that's been off the air for some years, where it's more about capitalizing on a name brand than making good entertainment. These movies often seem to focus on the "origin story" of whatever happened on the show (for some reason the "Beverly Hillbillies" movie comes to mind, didn't that movie's plot basically just cover the same material as the original show's title sequence, just stretched into 90 minutes?), and often seem to have some sort of stunt casting.

Of the shows that I currently watch on a regular basis that weren't adaptations of existing films (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles) or based on characters that have already had movies made about them (Smallville), I'm not sure that there's any that I'd want to see as a movie. (24, House, CSI, The Shield, The Office, Family Guy)

And this last point is sorta a reverse of what the thread started on, but talking about shows that were made into movies and vice versa, I keep thinking of the "Clone Wars" movie that was out of the summer. It disappeared so quickly that I missed it in theaters. Initially I liked the idea of jump-starting the show by making a big pilot for theaters, but what I saw in the trailers didn't wow me into see it opening night, and it seems that would have been my only shot with how fast it was gone. Because the prequel movies relied heavily on CGI backgrounds, ships, and effects, the landscapes and space battles shown in the trailer looked fantastic, just like the actual movies...but then it was weird to see the CGI versions of the characters within that. I didn't expect much out of the show, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised...the stories they've told so far are too small to justify being feature length, but on TV the stories and style of character animation really worked well for me.

 

[Tony J Case]

Please, for the love of god - no more televison shows into movies. For every Star Trek II, there are a hundred Coneheads, Car 54 where are you, Beverly Hillbillies, It's Pat, Scooby Doo, Starsky and Hutch, Bewitched, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Honeymooners, Lost in Space, Wild Wild West, SWAT, My Favorite Martian, Fat Albert, or Rocky and Bullwinkles stinking up the big screen.

 

[mattCR]

I guess I'm the reverse.. I watched the movie before the show; and the movie wet my appetite for the show. Serenity may be one of the best TV to Movie examples I can think of. The movie did things that would have been impossible to do for a show; but it works both ways as a great introduction to the show who've never seen it, and for those that watched the show, a great adventure that is self contained enough to be a great SciFi film.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

Hey, I liked the Coneheads movie.

 

[DaveF]

Coneheads is an unexpectedly good movie. Similar to Adams Family, it expanded a (superb) bit of fluff into a full-blown movie, successfully.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

Coneheads was entertaining. The Addams Family movies were great!

 

[Dheiner]

The Fugitive

 

[Yee-Ming]

Surely The Blues Brothers takes the prize for that? (Ignore the sequel, to this day I haven't seen it...)