Embrace, don't chase: Adaptation abounds, part 1

The philosophy of these blogs is "Everything is adaptation". It's impossible to list every type of adaptation because of it. But here are some examples that you may not realize are adaptations. Part 2 covers topics related to writing, as well as resources about professionally adapting stories.

Introduction

To the right are examples of a basic idea: types of food, footwear and a logo for a company. They are all distinctly different from each other but they all share the same source. Each one is an adaptation of that basic idea.

Cooking is a universal adaptation that everyone is familiar with. The simple act of making toast or heating up soup alters the flavor. And when you combine foods, you adapt them to create new flavors. Peanut butter and jelly, chocolate and peanut butter, BBQ sauce and mayonnaise.

Three simple combinations. Now expand that by the number of foods and ingredients available across the world and there are countless recipes that can be created. Want a less spicy or more spicy version, or maybe you like apple butter instead of strawberry jam? Adapt it by changing the ingredients. If you're Dave Lister, maybe you'll create a triple fried egg, chili and chutney sandwich after reading a book on bacteriological warfare.

Are you going to take an existing item and update it to return it to a like-new condition and/or change its features? You can do that through repairing, refurbishing, renovation, remodeling, restoration or re-manufacturing. If it's too damaged to fix, maybe the materials can be turned in for recycling. If it's already in good shape but not needed for a specific reason, maybe you will re-purpose it to do something different with it.

Biology and behavior

Our bodies undergo a wide range of adaptation during our lives. From conception to a baby to a toddler to a teenager to an adult, our bodies grow and add new capabilities, such as being able to have children of our own. Some adaptations are the result accidents or diseases, which require medicines, surgeries or prosthetics. A daily adaptation occurs when we eat and breathe, with food, liquids and air being taken in and converted to a different form, then the remainer is discarded.

When we're learning to play as young children, we first start with a free-form style of creativity where we tell stories using objects like dolls, action figures and toys. Just a couple of years later, it changes into games that have rules. Sports may be added with their own set of rules.

Makeup, perfume/cologne, clothing, jewelry: ways we adapt our appearance for specific reasons, such as putting on a coat when it's cold or rainy outside. Simply combing your hair adapts that part of your appearance.

Our immune system adapts to fight off diseases. Though vaccines, our bodies are introduced to weakened or dead versions of diseases so that the immune system can develop a counter-measure ahead of time, giving us a better chance of surviving full contact with the disease. It's not fun being sick, but surviving the flu happens more frequently instead of usually dying like occurred centuries ago.

Rules, guidelines, curfews, policies, ordinances, laws and declarations: all designed to adapt behavior towards or away from specific actions. Penalties can be included that show the consequences if behavior doesn't change. Street signs and traffic signals adapt how vehicles and pedestrians move.

We adapt how we interact with people. They can be people we know, people we're friends with, people we don't want to be around, people we admire, people we learn from, people we want to emulate, and people we want to make part of our lives with a personal relationship. Childhood sweetheart, crush, boyfriend or girlfriend, lovers and spouses, step-children/step-parents, adoptions, godparents.

How we refer to other people adapts. Words and phrases that were allowed in the past are changed or discontinued as we learn how they affect others. There is still a long ways to go in this area.

Bus stop to nowhere

When people develop Alzheimer's and/or Dementia, they can sometimes get in a state where they have a compulsion to go home. They're certain their husband or wife is waiting for them, their childen are waiting for them, etc, so they leave the care facility where they live. Often, they’ll get lost, frightened and hurt.

The Benrath Senior Center in Germany came up with the idea of building a fake bus stop on the edge of their property. The reason for this is when a patient leaves because they're trying to go home, one of the first things they look for is a bus stop because they know a bus will get them home. So they sit down at the fake bus stop, waiting for a bus that never comes, and it gives them time to calm down, think a little more, and sometimes they forget that they were trying to leave. The employees of the facility can then gently retrieve them and bring them back inside.

Other care facilities around the world have also built fake bus stops, with some of them just being a bench in a hallway that has a few other props like a bus schedule. It's just as effective even when it's indoors.

If you'd like to hear more about how this works, you can listen to the podcast called "The Bus Stop" on the Radiolab website.

Movies, TV and acting

• The animated movie Rio originally had a penguin washing up in that country, but was changed to macaws when the filmmakers learned of the movies Happy Feet and Surf's Up.
• The Producers was a movie, then it was a musical, and then it became a movie based on the musical. Mel Brooks based the character Max Bialystock off of someone he knew who did similar things to raise money.
• Due to the poor health of William Hartnell, the idea of "regeneration" was integrated into Doctor Who to explain the change from one actor to another for the same character. For the 50th anniversary, David Bradley played Hartnell in "An Adventure in Space and Time" that covered the development of the show. Bradley also played the First Doctor in the last episode of 2017 and the Christmas special.
• Fawlty Towers was created due to the unusual behavior of Donald Sinclair that John Cleese observed while staying at Sinclair's hotel as scenes for Monty Python's Flying Circus were filmed nearby.
• The Hunger Games novels were the result of combining the idea of a competition in a reality TV show and footage of the Iraq war. When Philip Seymour Hoffman died during filming of the last movie, his remaining scenes were adapted to be covered by other actors, such as Haymitch reading a letter from Plutarch to Katniss instead of Plutarch talking directly to her.
• As the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 changed, the lyrics to the theme song were adapted to reflect the changes that came with the new members.
• Dee Bradley Baker, a well-known and respected voice actor, pushes on his face and throat at various points to alter his airway, which helps him create animal sounds and sound effects.
• Two people adapted the game "Ticket to Ride" to become "Ticket to Ride: Equestria" with places from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The map and ticket cards can be downloaded for free.
• Improv is an acting style where a person or comedian comes up with a character or scene based on information they don't know about beforehand. It's the heart of shows like Whose Line is it Anyway?, and Neil Flynn ad-libbed many of his lines as the Janitor in Scrubs, which led to one script having "Janitor: Whatever Neil says" in it. Tim Conway would go through the first taping of episodes for The Carol Burnett Show as per the script, and if that was good enough for broadcast, would start ad-libbing "bizarre scenarios" for the second taping. One notable example was his story of seeing Siamese elephants joined at the trunk.

Music

• "Yakko's World" was the result Randy Rogel noticing that "United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama" all rhymed, and set the lyrics for the song to "Jarabe Tapatío", which is also known as the "Mexican Hat Dance" song.
• Songs that are transcribed to be played on a single instrument like a guitar or the "impossible" versions that transcribe all instruments onto a single piano, like the one for "Axel F" by Harold Faltermeyer or "Let It Go" from Frozen.
• Programming the motor in floppy disk drives to play music by activating them in specific patterns, such as the theme to Cowboy Bebop or re-animating the title sequence with characters from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as "Pony Bebop".
• 
  The Home Free Vocal Band, an a cappella group, adds beatboxing to create the sounds of musical instruments for their versions of "Try Everything" and "Can't Stop the Feeling". Though they have covered pop songs, they have adapted to singing primarily country songs, and are now having songs written for them instead of just making cover versions of other people's songs.
• Here's "Can't Stop the Feeling" adapted for a viola.
• "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac was created by taking pieces from other songs the group had worked on. They used a razor blade to manually splice sections of tape together. When developing the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, director James Gunn not only picked this song and other songs early in the process to be used in the movie, but also choreographed scenes to specifically fit each song. The actors wore hidden earpieces so they could hear the song and act to it. You can learn more about how the song was created in this YouTube video.
• Bill Joel stated in an interview on Inside the Actors Studio that the inspiration for the song "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" came from a waiter asking him in a disinterested/bored manner, "Bottle of red? Bottle of white?" To this, Joel happily told the waiter "Thank you" and wrote down those words.

Comic books

Comic books are a big one. The long-running titles are rebooted every so often to bring in ideas that fit the current times. When this is done, a new "origin story" is created. When they're adapted to become a movie or a TV show (animated or live action on both), those get new origin stories. The core idea remains, but the details change for each instance.

• How many times has the planet Krypton blown up?
• How many times has Tony Stark been wounded and had to create a machine to save his own life?
• How many times has a spider bitten Peter Parker and his uncle Ben died? (Which has been adapted into becoming a joke that Ben is getting sick of dying.)

But even the origin stories are adapting into a new form: a title that is passed from person to person. One example is Batman Beyond. Bruce Wayne retired from being Batman. A teenager stumbles onto his secret, takes a jet-powered Batsuit out for a flight, and in the process of trying to get it back, Bruce sees the talent and realizes that he can provide support for a new person that can be a new Batman.

Likewise, over in the Marvel world, there are many new people fulfilling a role: a new Hulk, a new Thor, a new Iron Man, a new Wolverine, a new Hawkeye. All of these are women and the characters were originally men. Deadpool + fan art of Spider-Gwen (Gwen Stacy from an alternate universe where she got bitten by the spider instead of Peter Parker) = Gwenpool.

Marvel and DC have numerous examples of how children take on the role started by their parents. Both of them also go through massive reboots every so often where most of all of their characters and storylines are changed to give them a new starting point. DC went through two massive reboots in a short period of time. "The New 52" started in 2011 and transitioned into "Rebirth" in 2016, where some elements of "The New 52" were abandoned while others were kept.

Look at any of the artwork in comic books and animated movies during the last 70 years. You can see a steady improvement from decade to decade, along with improvements in printing and duplicating them. Take three minutes and see the changes from Snow White to Zootopia, then compare Squirrel Girl from 1991 to 2015. Not just her physical appearance changed, but the quality of the artwork did, too.

Comics are also used to continue stories that originally were on TV. For example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight was the first of several comic book series that were produced by Josh Whedon as a canonical (official) part of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series.

Communication

Fonts and typefaces convey different emotions and meanings while they convey information contained in words, letters, numbers and pictures. From the traditional Times New Roman in books and newspapers to the Blackletter styles seen on diplomas, from the much maligned Comic Sans to Serpentine that was used as the title font for Babylon 5, from Helvetica to the near-clone Arial, a typeface exists to fit each need and mood.

Look carefully at the FedEx logo. By adapting the shape of the letters and the spacing so that they touch or overlap, an arrow is created in the negative space between the last two letters. This logo has won over 40 awards worldwide. I also see a measuring spoon in the lowercase E.

Language is being adapted constantly as we change meanings of words, add and remove words, and adopt words from other languages. For example, "cool" can refer to temperature or an attitude. What you're reading now is an adaptation of the classical Latin alphabet, where symbols are chosen and combined in different patterns to make words. Four different symbols make up the word "help" while three unique symbols and one that's used twice make up "hello". Apostrophes are used for both contractions and as a possessive to show that something belongs to another person. Other writing systems like Kanji, emoticons and emoji use a large number of symbols to express words and ideas.

From cave drawings to spoken languages to written languages, from written letters to Morse code to telegrams to telephones to cell phones to radio to television to movies to email to instant messaging and so much more through the Internet, we adapt how we communicate with others. When someone is deaf or blind, sign language and braille are standardized ways of communicating with them. Stephen Hawking used a speech-generating device to help him communicate audibly. Actors appearing as Klingons in Star Trek may have to take a course in the Klingon language as part of their role, which was developed into a full-fledged language, and more information can be found at The Klingon Language Institute.

With written languages came scribes whose job it was to create documentation and create copies. Printing presses with movable type simplified the process and allowed for more accurate duplication of books at a faster rate. In some cases, having books so freely available was viewed as dangerous because people could verify for themselves what a book said and could lead to the "rebellious and unsociable" activity of women learning to read. (See the social impact of printing presses on Wikipedia for more information.) Now books and libraries are commonplace.

Technology

The smartphone is a device that can perform the functions of many separate objects: calculator, Rolodex/address book, tape recorder, CD player, filing cabinet, clock/watch, camera, photo album, paper map, notepad, telephone and so much more.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA came up with plans for using a 3D printer to create an inexpensive frame that can be attached to a smartphone and hold glass beads of various sizes that increase the magnification for the phone's camera. The initial idea was to allow first responders like firefighters and police to be able to examine a suspicious substance without having to send it to a lab because that's the first step a lab does. They realized other groups could also find it useful, so in the three years after releasing the plans for anyone to use, they've been expanded for iPads and other tablets and anyone from children to doctors all across the world can use them.

I found out about the "mini microscope" through a very simple form of adaptation. I had gone out to eat and wanted to read something while I waited for the meal to arrive. The local newspaper was sold out at the restaurant, so I picked the one from a different city. I don't know if that same article would have been found in the local newspaper that same day or on a future day.

Summary

Each of these is an adaptation under one name or another. Adaptations are all around us. Every invention is an adaptation of one or more ideas into a new form. James Burke created a TV series called Connections that shows exactly that process, followed by a related series and two sequels (all adapations) called The Day the Universe Changed, Connections² and Connections³.

When you're ready, check out Part 2.