Adaptation: Street Fighter II

The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.

That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.

And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.

In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.

Super Street Fighter II:
The New Challengers (SNES)
Capcom (1993)

Moving on slightly from Mario but still at the heart of SNES gaming, Street Fighter II is the very paradigm of Bushnell's Law; ridiculously easy to learn, ridiculously difficult to master. The beat-em-up genre has been around as long as games have had the capability to represent fists of course, and the explosion of home computing in the 1980s raised the bar with side-scrolling, co-operative, multi-sprite brawling titles, and of course ushered in the End Of Level Boss. But as a sequel to their 1987 1-on-1 combat title, Capcom's Street Fighter II quickly developed a life of its own, in both arcades and living rooms around the world. The port to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the first, and is generally accepted as the purest, home-version of the game, and the title went on to have multiple re-releases with various tweaks and additions. For this comparison I've chosen to play 1993's Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, the reasons being that 1) characters debuting in this release of the game are included in the movie adaptation I'll be watching (plus in the bonus-round), and 2) again, it's the version I've got upstairs with my SNES.

So. It's a classic, obviously. The secret to Capcom's success with SFII wasn't so much the array of characters, each with differing speeds, fighting styles and special moves, but rather that the player can choose to control any of them to begin with (as opposed to the 'character unlocking' method). What's more, when the player is beaten by an opponent, they can choose a different avatar to have another try (or just keep on with the same one and extra determination/optimism). While the first version of the game held the four 'bosses' off-limits, meaning only the original eight characters were playable, everything from second, Champion Edition, release onwards puts them on the selection screen. Additionally, The New Challengers throws an extra four into the mix, bringing the total to sixteen. Beating the game using all the players at your disposal is easily possible. Beating the game using only your favourite requires dedication. I imagine it's also theoretically possible to work through the entire game as every individual character, in completely separate sessions. And while I'd love to have that amount of spare time on my hands, even I have to admit I'd use it for something else. But as I said, Bushnell's Law and all that.

So, shortly after SFII's domestic release (meaning kids could play in the comfort of their own homes and didn't have to keep weighing down machines with 10p coins), the game entered that secondary level whereby it became part of popular culture. While it didn't quite have the broad demographic appeal of Mario, the fanbase was no less committed. And although the merchandising opportunities are slightly narrower for a property which involves each of its principals knocking the living shit out of every other one, the range of dynamic internal character design lent itself to numerous toys*¹, comics and anime movies, all of which have continued to be produced over the years, alongside sequel and spin-off entries on various consoles.

But at the heart of it all was one breakout game, held on a single 16mb cartridge. It's not the first beat-em-up (not even the first in its series), and it stands in a very crowded arena, but Capcom's Street Fighter II is one of the few that can be genuinely described as culturally iconic.

It's been 24 years and I can't always do a Hadouken.

Street Fighter
Steven E. de Souza (1994)

First things first, I should point out now that I haven't actually seen this film before*². And not that I was doubting anyone's previous judgement for a single second, but yeah it's bad. Indescribably bad. But bear with me dear reader, I'll try…

Despite the lack of narrative development in the famed 1-on-1 fighting title, the problem writer/director Steve de Souza faces here is not necessarily 'how do you adapt a game with no story?'. As of the New Challengers release, SFII actually has sixteen stories, some of which overlap, but are generally self-contained. The only points at which these characters meet in-game is, as noted above, when they're out in a street somewhere knocking the living shit out of each other. And that's not going to make for a great mainstream, family-friendly screenplay. Anyhow, Steve decided that the best way forward would be to write a new independent, thoroughly incoherent narrative, desperately shoehorning all your favourites together for no reason, many unrecognisably until they're either excessively introduced by the script or some other character name-checks them pointedly.

This really is all kinds of shite. Wobbly sets, costumes which look like they were designed for Flash Gordon but rejected and some of the worst ADR I've ever seen (and then heard around a second and a half later). From Raul Julia over-channeling his best Darth Vader*³, homages to schlocky Hong Kong action cinema, James Bond and 70s exploitation movies, the film would happily forget it's supposed to be adapting Street Fighter. That is, it would if it didn't have another yet character to reference, introduce or squander with alarming regularity.

The movie sets up a ticking-countdown-timer-ending before the fifth minute is out, then another one begins at 40 mins, then another one at around 80 mins. Incredible. Although I actually had to stop myself taking detailed notes after 22 minutes when a truck drives four feet away from Chun Li and she goes into a ground roll for no reason…

It seems clear that some of the cast thought they were taking part in something which would be better. I certainly won't blame them for trying, unfortunately everyone else has their tongue so firmly in-cheek that dialogue becomes impossible. Heading up the roster is Belgian Jean-Claude Van Damme as the American Guile, atrocious even by his own standards*⁴ and quite frankly so incompatible with the character that he'd have been more convincing as Balrog.

Australian Kylie Mingoue stars as the British Cammy, Chinese-American Byron Mann as the Japanese Ryu, American Andrew Bryniarski as the Russian Zangief*⁵, Native American Jay Tavare as the Spanish Vega, Native American Wes Studi as the Thai Sagat, and the Japanese sumo-wrestler Edmund Honda is now the Samoan-American Peter Tuiasosopo (although they've scripted his ethnicity into the film, that one's not just left out in the wild like the rest). Hey, at least Ken is still a white dude though, right? Shame Damian Chapa doesn't have the trademark blonde hair like his character, but that seems pretty fucking far down the list of issues to be honest. By the time Blanka emerges looking like Tina Turner playing The Mask, I'd all but given up.

How is this Street Fighter?

For an adaptation of a game which is 100% combat, there is surprisingly little fighting in the first hour (and even after that it's appallingly choreographed). But there's certainly no doubt that if you wanted to watch your sixteen favourite characters stripped of context, established backstory and jostling for position over 90 minutes of cinematic gibberish, this is definitely where you'd look...

How do you adapt a game with no story?
Well, how about you don't..?

Street Fighter II:
The Animated Movie
Gisaburô Sugii (1994)

What's amazing about this is that the animated movie was released four months before the live action one. Which is to say that there was a period between August and December 1994 when Steve de Souza could, I'm pretty sure, watch the publicly-released anime adaptation of the world's most popular fighting game, whilst also being one of the few people on the planet to know what was in store with his own… version. I admire the man for not having Universal pull the plug and claim that the dog ate the master copy, at any rate.

There is more attitude, anger and adrenaline in the first five, dialogue-free, minutes of this film then the entirety of its live-action counterpart. Kenichi Imai's screenplay centres around M. Bison's terrorist organisation and with Ryu and Ken at the heart of the story once again, but this time hops around the globe to meet its characters, rather than contriving to have them all coincidentally be in Raul Julia's lounge together. What's more, individual characters' backstories from the game are maintained, proving that it can actually be done coherently.

The artwork is classic Japanese anime, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of the clunky charm of a 3D scene rendered in hand-drawn 2D. It's a style which lends itself perfectly to a story which originated in the same cultural arena, and the fight-scenes are dynamic without having to go into clinical detail (exactly like the game in that respect). Which brings us onto the most important aspect - there's a lot of fighting in this. And okay, the characters are scrapping often for no reason other than 'having a street fight', but that already makes the animated movie thematically closer to the game than the live-action will ever be.

The English-language dialogue is hardly Dickens, in either its writing or delivery, but it still manages to piss all over de Souza's work. The western release also has a slightly over-engineered grunge/industrial soundtrack, with John D'Andrea and Cory Lerios scoring the incidental music and songs dropped in from the likes of Korn and Alice In Chains.

Although Sugii's movie came well after the arcade and home-releases of Street Fighter II, everything in it adds depth to the characters and increases replay value of the Nintendo classic.

Best bit: Henchman and chief scientist Senoh unveils Shadowlaw's new covert surveillance system to his master:

M. Bison: Is it ready?
Senoh: Yesss… a masterpiece of computer technology; it's splendid. We've created the ultimate high-performance monitor cyborg. It's state of the art. The images it receives are immediately beamed via satellite to the super computer…
M. Bison: (narrowing eyes) Goood…

…showing that all you needed to impress a global crime-lord in 1994 was basic internet connectivity. 2017 would likely blow his tiny mind…

It's better than good, it's definitive.



Hahahahahahaha...



If you wish to see the live-action movie, it's filed between Morbid Curiosity and Fucking Told You So...



In the game, there's not.
In the anime, there's not.
In the movie there actually might be, lost in a horrendous sound-mix, but I'm not going to go back and check...



Level 1: The original game's voice-cast appears to be a mystery. Seriously, not even Capcom are talking about it. However… the live-action movie has James McTeigue as the second-assistant director; he was first assistant director on Attack of the Clones*⁶. The anime movie (well, the English-dubbed one) features the voice of Zeb Orrelios.



*¹ Although let's be honest, the 1993 G.I. Joe tie-in line is pretty dreadful. That said, I suppose the figures make an ideal artistic accompaniment to the 1994 live-action flick. And I deliberately haven't mentioned the single they released up there in the main review. But since you're lovely enough to read the footnotes, don't click on this link. I'm not saying it's worse than the same era's Mario Rap, but I also definitely am. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² As buzzed as I was at the time about the mere prospect of a Street Fighter movie, younger readers should understand that even in the days before the advent of the domestic internet connections, the trailers and advance publicity for the Street Fighter movie began to paint an all-too-accurate picture of what was ultimately in store. A studio didn't have Rotten Tomatoes to blame for their movie tanking, back then. The feature was the subject of mockery and derision by the time it actually opened on UK screens, and the decision by my local cinema to not show it outweighed any curiosity I still harboured. Similarly, by the time the movie hit VHS shelves, I was not inclined to investigate. I have seen various clips over the intervening years, but this is the first time I have actually watched the film in its entirety. Because obviously, having pulled over 900 movies apart on this blog, I am now in a position to be incredibly forgiving to its perceived flaws... ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Although credit where it's due, M.Bison wearing a smoking jacket and mixing cocktails is fucking gold. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Coincidentally to *2, the same decision was made by that same cinema to not show Van Damme's Timecop either, despite running trailers and having a full-on display stand in the foyer. It should surprise no-one to learn that when I finally caught that movie on video, I wished the time-travelling technology existed, if only so I could go back and warn myself not to bother…
^{[ BACK ]}

*⁵ Whose Russian-accent keeps dipping into the 'Allo 'Allo representation of Italian… ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁶ I mean I love AotC, but seriously - imagine having that and the Street Fighter live-action movie on your CV… ^{[ BACK ]}



DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Adaptation: Super Mario Bros.

The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.

That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.

And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.

In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.

Super Mario World (SNES)
Takashi Tezuka (1990)

As Adaptation speed-runs through the first level of its button-mashing quadrant, there are three reasons why I've specifically chosen to play Super Mario World. 1) This is the game I lost a couple of Summers to in the early 90s (as referenced up there in the introduction), 2) This is the game which introduces Yoshi the dragon, who also appears in the film-version (and so provides the closest chronological influence for the film), and 3) This is the game I've got upstairs with my SNES*¹. Hey, path of least resistance and all that...


It's certainly true that the moustachioed plumber was a thing before this particular installment of the franchise, of course. Mario has become to gaming what Darth Vader is to cinema; an iconic figure of the artform, a mainstream touchstone symbolising the progression and durability of the hobby, familiar even to people who've never so much as picked up a game-controller, let alone thrown one down in a fit of pique. The game harks from that golden era where domestically-affordable computing power had raised graphics and gameplay mechanics above the NES and Gameboy limitations, but before the 3D conversion-influx that the N64 inevitably brought.

But Super Mario World. Man, what a game. 96 levels, 24 of which are hidden, and the option of playing through them all linearly or taking secret short-cuts to skip the ones which are stumping you. Much like the London Underground, there's often more than one way of completing your journey (and much like the Underground, the hardened fanatic will take the extra time to visit each station anyway - that's where the fun lies*²). While this isn't exactly sand-box gaming, the ability to hop back through the world-map for power-ups and activate retrospective key-reveals makes the replay value absolutely massive.

Relatively short levels mean a high-level of 'unputdownable' gameplay, as you think 'Okay, I'll just complete this level before going to bed/work/court'. This is the hook of course, as it's rarely that simple. The skills learning-curve is steady, making Super Mario World ideal for younger (and older) players who might find the controller less intuitive. But like all good games, there comes a point where you have to sit up and start really concentrating, or be doomed to fall down the same pit for hours on end.

I've briefly tried other iterations of Mario after this, but the 2D platformer is my preferred format, and the SNES is my preferred presentation.
A fantastic game, as timeless as its hero*³...

Super Mario Bros.
Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton (1993)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about 1993's Super Mario Bros movie is that at a point between post-production and release, someone watched the whole thing back and still gave it the green light. Bob Hoskins stars as Mario Mario, an American-Italian plumber working out of Brooklyn with his younger brother Luigi Mario (played by John Leguizamo*⁴). Luigi falls in love with an archeologist named Daisy (Samantha Mathis), and the brothers find themselves on a mission to rescue her when she accidentally falls through a dimensional portal at a dig-site and is captured by the evil King Koopa (Dennis Hopper).

The problem is that other than the character names and a couple of shoehorned references to red/green overalls, the film bears almost no relation to the very property it's shamelessly exploiting as its sole marketing focus. Cinematically notorious as a worst-case-scenario of the game-to-movie genre, it's actually no worse than many other family-oriented adventure flicks of the era. Although they were dreadful as well. And of course the whole world didn't see most of those, since they weren't misguided tie-ins to a globally successful game franchise.

The script is leaden and simplistic (not that it's the worse offender), utilising some manner of 'de-evolution machine' in its story as if the concept of natural-selection had even been in the same room as this screenplay. The way the premise and princess-kidnap-plot are wangled from the pixellated fantasy origins and into 'the real-world' is a bit like when theatre producers go 'yeah, we'll set Hamlet… in space!!', and then leave the original 16th-century dialogue in place so that the whole thing doesn't work. Despite the full-length 99-minute runtime not a lot actually happens here, and what does happen makes little-to-no sense even with industrial amounts of exposition. Oh, and Dennis Hopper's dinosaur-based villain is a actually just middle-age man scowling with excessive amounts of product in his bleach-blonde hair*⁵. When he's padding around the soundstage representing a filthy, dystopian city, it feels for all the world like Michael Bay got pissed and decided to re-adapt Blade Runner for kids.

Co-directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton have a legally-binding credit in the film's opening sequence (laid over the movie itself rather than an inserted-card), yet are somehow not mentioned one single time in the closing reel. Almost as if the traditional attribution had been removed on purpose so that the audience wouldn't be able to scribble down the names of those responsible. The first words to appear in that end-scroll are a nod to Roxette for the closing music. Imagine being so mortified with your own work that you'd dump Roxette in the shit over it. Well, quite.

On a technical level, the sound-mix on my 'remastered' DVD is atrocious with background noise rushing to fill any auditory gaps and then flopping over the dialogue. I can't imagine how bad it must have been in the vanilla-print (not that I'll be hunting it down to find out). This perhaps wouldn't matter so much if the disc actually had a basic subtitle-track but it doesn't and now I can't believe I'm complaining about this like it would have made the damned thing any more bearable*⁶.

At any point in this film you can stop and ask "right, what's going on again?", and be sure that there isn't an answer.

Super Mario Bros isn't even "delightful hate-watch" bad, it's just crap. The whole endeavour is based on what-iffery. The title-sequence opens with an entire monologue of it. "What if the dinosaurs weren't all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension? And, hey! What if they found a way back?".

Apparently at no point during the creation of this movie did a producer lean forward and say "…yeah, what if we all don't bother though?"

The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
DiC Animation (1989)

First things first, I watched the cartoon-segments of this. The 'Super Show' consisted of a live-action Mario Bros sitcom acting as a framing device for animated shorts of the plumbers (and The Legend of Zelda in some episodes). Anything which isn't cartoons is awful. All I'm saying is that 'The Super Show' was the scheduling-name for the combination of everything, but when a Best-of DVD was published, someone decided that 'Best-of' didn't go so far as including any of the live-action segments. But hey, by all means see for yourself. Anyway, I watched a couple of hours' worth of the Mario animations. They're uncomplicated but quite a lot of fun, especially for fans of 1980s animation.

Starring Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and little Toad, each episode is self-contained and takes a theme as the basis for the week's story (Jack & The Beanstalk, Aladdin etc). The first chapter on the Best-Of DVD is Star Koopa, which opens with Mario and gang on a spaceship being pursued by Darth Koopa. Cue the Koopa-troopers in white armour, the transparent equivalent of Carbonite and some non-copyright-infringing (and stun-only) lightsabers. If anything, what would normally be a heavy-handed pastiche works more as an actual homage, due to the visual and tonal similarities to Nelvana Animation's Holiday Special and Droids cartoons. This particular episode is the sort of thing I'd usually hate, but the overall charm of the series pulls it off.

Even with the disposable writing-format restricting any kind of development, and its always-changing, context-free location settings, the Super Mario Bros cartoon still makes infinitely more sense than anything in the 1993 movie...

Yes, yes, yes and yes.



No*⁷.



…maybe just enjoy the game?



In the game, no (there's no sampled dialogue), in the movie there's not that I heard (although I was just short of screaming inside my head for an hour and half) and I didn't hear one in the cartoon eps that I watched.



Level 1: The game's character-writer Shigeru Miyamoto was a crewmember on Nintendo's 1996 Shadows of the Empire N64 game, whereas the film-version stars one of TPM's Gungan Guards and the cartoon features the voices of Thall Joben and Vlix from Droids.
That's pretty good-going, all things considered.



*¹ An actual SNES, as opposed to the recently-released SNES-mini. No snobbery against the new version (I'm all for it, in fact), but there's not a lot of point in me buying one when I still have a functioning, vintage SNES and all the games I want to play on it anyway. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² FYI, I'm not a train geek, I just love that train geeks exist. In all fairness, I suspect I'm not a train geek because Star Wars got its foot in the door first and I've only got so much disposable cash. As a wise man once observed, 'collectors are like freemasons, but without the handshake...'. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Yeah I know technically it's heroes and Luigi is available as a player as soon as someone picks up the other controller, but it's not called Super Luigi World, now is it? We all know that Mario's brother is the hanger-on in this partnership. While Mario's doing the skilled work of re-plumbing a toilet-main, Luigi's mopping up the sewage with that slack-jawed expression on his face. No, don't look at me like that, no-one likes Luigi. He's basically Scrappy-Doo in overalls... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Okay, Bob Hoskins may not be entirely Italian-looking, but John Leguizamo is fucking Colombian. What does this suggest about the casting director? Does the film's artistic license extend to the point where the brothers aren't actually from the same continent, never mind the same mother? And let's not go into the dynamics of a family where there's a 22-year age gap between brothers... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁵ And okay, the fresh-faced John Leguizamo was only 29 with this movie was released, but Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper were actual, established actors by that point. Granted, neither has a perfect decision-making record even outside of Mario Bros (Leguizamo also guilty on that front), but I mean really guys, what the actual fuck? ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁶ The best part? I've actually seen this film before. In 1993. In the cinema. No, really. I don't remember actively hating it, although a nagging disappointment certainly factored into my reactions. But now, enough time seems to have passed that I'd forgotten how bad it could be. Anyway, I am next due to watch Super Mario Bros in 2041. Can't wait. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁷ NO. ^{[ BACK ]}



DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.