Violet, Klaus and Sunny are the three children of the Portrell family, intelligent, each with their own strengths, well-behaved, very cultured, teenage sister, little brother needless to say, even the little baby Ofe is also a "sharp" tooth, contributing her own strength at critical moments. In short, they are definitely not related to "bears", but their fate is uncertain, and in the words of the original author, their lives are full of "dramatic irony".
Since its release at the end of the last century, Baudelaire's Thirteen Dramatic Ironic Stories have stood out from the crowd of children's literature with their unique worldview and unique narrative. It's a dark Alice Adventure, equally insane, with its word-writing, and the key to solving puzzles is sometimes hidden in grammar or word spelling errors. So much so that a little nerd must be set up to jump out and argue with the people around him from time to time in order to presume the plot development.
But works of this length are not naturally suitable for film and television adaptations. At the end of 2004, The Film "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" directed by Brad Sebening was released, and the one-hundred-minute film retained only a few of the original stories, transitioning directly from the first "Tragic Beginning", including "The Terrible Reptile House" and "The Ghostly Big Window".
While retaining the original Gothic style, the form of expression of the story has been greatly adjusted, omitting the attachment to the meaning of a word in the original work, and at the same time weakening the role of the author Raymond Snitch himself, except for the introduction of the story and the necessary filling of the excessive part of the plot in the form of narration, there is almost no drama.
The A Series of Unfortunate Event is different.
The length of the web drama provides plenty of space for showing the original style. Netflix doesn't just promise one season, and after the first season tells the first four stories of the original thirteen, there are still good scenes to look forward to. Freed from the time limit, the script can do much more than the movie: Raymond Snitch's role is several times more intense than the film's, and he is everywhere, interpreting the current situation of the Baudelaire orphans, explaining the background of the characters, and occasionally predicting the prospects of the story.
Of course, his biggest role in the play is to persuade the audience not to continue watching it – which is also the embodiment of the iconic feature of the "dramatic irony" in the unfortunate adventure series.
In fact, the title of the original book only describes a series of unfortunate adventures, but does not add a subject or attribute in front of it, and the subject "Raymond Snitch's" added to the title of the film is obviously misleading to the audience. Although the web drama did not draw a snake in this place, it was deeply influenced by the movie version. From the set to the casting, you can see the shadow of the movie version. The two daughters of the Baudelaire family look very similar to the film version, and Neil Padric Harris, who plays the villain Duke Olaf, also continues Kim Carey's acting style in the film.
Tim Burton is not necessarily the most profound understanding of the Victorian Gothic style, but his work does profoundly affect the audience's perception of the style, and it can be said that as long as this keyword is triggered, it is difficult to trace Tim Burton's shadow. As a typical Victorian Gothic novel, the film and television adaptation of Baudelaire's Great Adventure is difficult to escape this fate. The drama version is a step back from the film, it is only an expansion on the basis of pioneers, and does not try to make any substantive breakthroughs.
Politically correctly speaking, the biggest "progress" of web drama is that it has greatly increased the proportion of actors of color, making the whole drama less white.
Daniel Handler, the author of the novel under the pseudonym Raymond Snitch, can be said to be the culmination of the "small loss" of the Gothic worldview, "mourning" madness. The tone of the narrative, the storyline, the interpretation of the characters and the prediction of the future are all stained with a strong sense of despondency, and they jump out at every turn to persuade the reader not to continue reading, transplanting the surname of the poet Baudelaire who wrote "The Flower of Evil" to the protagonist, and the brontë sisters' villas and manors have been reincarnated in the children's world, not to mention the cliffs and cliffs, the undercurrents of the sea and the weather that never shines.
Although Raymond Snitch tells the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, the real highlight is the Duke of Olaf and his mafia cross-dress show. The Baudelaire orphans were confronted with all sorts of strange men, the most bizarre of which was perhaps not the Duke who had made a fortune, but the adult men and women who acted as guardians, whose surprising stupidity was the truly unfortunate of the orphans—most of the time, the three children had to embark on adventures because of the guardian's lack of wisdom.
Of course, the biggest problem with the film and television adaptation of "Baudelaire's Great Danger" lies in the uncertainty of the audience, for innocent children, even if the little protagonist can always be murdered, the story as a whole is too gloomy and gray; for parents, it is a fairy tale after all, and no matter how much philosophy it contains, it can only be a children's drama; for children who are half old, it cannot meet their psychological needs to urgently explore the adult world. And this kind of story of the father and mother who unfortunately lost their lives in order to hide the black history, the story of the three children entrusted to the Non-Human, even the Gothic style family can not be enjoyed by the whole family.
The pickiness of the audience limits its influence to a certain extent, and this kind of drama that likes to be grammatically provocative is probably only for film and television lovers who like gothic art.