Re:Adapted

After the worldwide popularity of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, a film version was inevitable. But the sequel? That's another story entirely. Today we'll get into what the casting of Gerard Butler and the collaboration of Joel Schumacher meant for the movie, and how Lloyd Webber entered into a Freudian battle with his past self to create "Love Never Dies."

Special thanks to Joy DeLyria with help on this episode!

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In the 1980s and 90s, horror was big money, so perhaps it was inevitable that multiple adaptations would crop up to take advantage of the trend. But the Dwight Little and Dario Argento Phantoms, played by Robert Englund and Julian Sands respectively, took the character in two new, and very different, directions. Today we'll explore the horror versions of our beloved Phantom, as sex and death become the focus.

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Despite the fact the Lloyd Webber musical's popularity would dominate Phantom fandom for the rest of time, other strains of the story were still percolating. Today we're looking at two directions the story was taken in on opposite sides of the world: into family melodrama by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston, and into a romantic revolutionary tale in China by Ma-Xu Weibang in Song at Midnight.

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The Lloyd Webber musical was so big, we needed two episodes to cover it! Here we dissect a few reasons why it affected people so deeply, and look at some of the consequences of that popularity: more works based on the story, an active fandom rising with the coming of the internet, and what I see as a complete shift in our relationship with the title character.

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In 1986, a musical hit London. Two years later, Broadway also succumbed. And the Phantom would never be the same. In this and the next episode, we talk about the inspiration for the megamusical version of Phantom, and also begin to unpack the effect this had on audiences as well as subsequent versions. Namely, the transition from horror to romance.

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In 1974, Brian de Palma hadn't yet made Carrie, Scarface, or the Untouchables. But he did make a version of Phantom of the Opera that merged fiction and current events alike into something a lot of people didn't quite know what to do with.

So I'm going to get pretentious and talk about zeitgeist, post-modernism, and pastiche.

Warning: Today's film (and to a lesser degree, the episode) contains elements of violence,...

In 1943 and 1962, almost twenty years apart, two films named The Phantom of the Opera came out that not only shared several plot and character elements, but changed the story of Phantom forever. We'll talk about how the struggle to reach a wide audience, and to maintain sympathy for the Phantom, resulted in a muddling of the relationships within the story. We'll also talk about the many changes that can happen in a Hollywoo...

After last episode's summary of the novel, we've got our first adaptation--1925's Universal film starring Lon Chaney. We'll look at what elements made it to the screen, and how those elements changed due to the medium, the time, and the collaborative nature of filmmaking.

Plus, I take some potshots at a director who's been dead for decades.

As always, find transcripts and sources at www.readaptedpodca...

We begin our exploration of The Phantom of the Opera with an overview of the original novel, written by Gaston Leroux in 1909. Over the next ten episodes, we'll look at what the different versions of Phantom have changed and what that says about the story... and us. We'll also look at how villainy and empathy morph over the course of the Phantom's journey, and how we got from a walking corpse to Gerard Butler. But first...