Die halmark chanel! DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Follow

When I was but a lad of 10, I read a book by Jules Verne, entitled "The Mysterious Island". It is one of the best books I have ever read. Action, adventure, escape from adversity, believable characters, and a group of people rebuilding their civilization on an island in the middle of nowhere. what more could you want? So I was flipping though the channels today, and I happen upon a listing for "the mysterious island" on the halmark channel. Kick ***! so I flip there in time for the start, and I begin to watch.

It is now about half way through, and I am angry, more angry at a tv station than I have ever been in my entire life. Now I realize that the book is always better than the movie, and that a book always loses stuff in the translation from paper to screen. i accept this as the price for short attention spans and commercial exploitiation. But what i have witnessed tonigh is a desecration. Jules verne is spinning in his grave right now.

The only part of this show that is true to the book so far was the first 13 pages. In the book, a group of civil war prisioners escape richnmond, VA in a hot air ballloon and crash land on a mysterious island.

In the movie version, instead of finding shelter and being attacked by normal island type creatures, they wander around aimlessly doing nothing until one of them is eaten by a preying mantis the size of a semi truck. Definitly not in the book....

Then there is captian Nemo. yes, he's in this one too. In the book, he shows up near the end, and you discover he has been offering some help to the survivors, helping them help themselves. Sounds cliche, but it is done really well in the book.

In the movie, captian nemo is played by a rather whiny patrick Stewart of Jean Luc Picard fame. He immidiatly takes one of the main characters hostage and tells his friends to sod off. Nemo is now the source of all the rebuilding and survival, and he's really a total ***** about provideing it. Anyeays, they have at this point dropped literally 30 chapters from the book.

Then there are the pirates.

Wait a minute, what pirates you ask? sure, there weren't any in the book, but someone at halmark decided that giant insects were not enough, we need pirates too! In the book, there was one dead pirate that had been marooned there at one point. they find him in the cave they eventually call home, but there is most certanly not a half drunk pirate hoarde looking for treasure and attacking anything that moves to search for some stupid gold disk map thingy.

Halmark, if you ever end up reading this, you blew it. you turned a perfectly good book into a taravisty, a mockery of what it should have been. you all suck. your producers suck. your writers suck and should die. the guy in the mailroom? he sucks. bob in accounting? he sucks too. I hope you all contract ghonnarea and die.

You ok bro?

For the record, Hallmark didn't create that craptastic movie. I saw it on an indie channel twenty years ago.

Yes, I experienced the same gamut of emotions over what they did to the book, only I stopped watching after a half hour. If I'm going to go in for some self abuse, I can think of better ways to go about it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055207/

the one I remember

Nobody's Fool is a great movie that translated well from the book. I'm hoping that Empire Falls does the same. Of course, I only read the book (Nobody's Fool) after seeing the movie, but I still love both.