Story Cross Contamination: Can a Television Series Run with a Film Simultaneously?

Is it okay to pay $10 to watch big something you were already watching on the small screen.

A few weeks ago I covered the release of “My Little Pony: The Movie” with the help of a colleague of mine, Manny Ramirez (whom you can still check out over at http://httpsmoviemanmadness.blogspot.com).

If you haven’t checked him out yet, go right on ahead and do so, he does good work including movie reviews and his Cinema Spotlight series, shining a light on up and coming directors recently cast into the Hollywood Limelight via major blockbusters.

When I had initially approached him for our collaboration, one idea that I had put forward was something of a follow up piece responding to each other’s reviews, thereby giving the both of us an opportunity to speak our own thoughts on the film on our own blogs in addition to the shake up having outside opinions brought in.

While I’ll happily guide any curious parties to my own thoughts on Movie Man Madness here, the notion of following up ultimately became something of a redundancy since, despite coming at the movie with different backgrounds of anticipation and levels of fandom involvement, we both came to pretty much the same conclusion.

It’s cute and earnest for kids and fans but ultimately too unambitious with the resources granted it to be any better than an average at best multipart episode of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” that just so happened to be in theaters at a time when it didn’t need to be in theaters.

In any case however, watching the squandered potential of the movie play out along with reading a few observations made by Manny on the nature of these kinds of things did get me to thinking.

Hollywood productions based on television properties seem to rise and fall in development hell all the time but more often than not, they seem to languish within that limbo and outright fail to materialize.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about adaptations meant to reproduce or continue source material in a new format, ala “Star Trek,” “21 Jump Street,” or any given adaptation of television show ranging from “Brady Bunch” to “Miami Vice.” I’m talking specifically about the notion of a film running in tandem with a direct connection to the production of the television show in question.

Is it possible for a television show of any sort to simultaneously release a cannon feature film that feeds back into the narrative of a story running for a completely different medium that is not only successfully diverting for fans but entertainingly intriguing enough to invite newcomers? Furthermore, can whatever said film has to add to the source material in question justify the commissioning of said project to begin with over simply telling the same story within the span of several episodes of the series itself?

The only answer that I can really come up with is, I don’t know.

Without leaning one way or the other, the difficult of establishing a story told across 2 mediums segmented in such a way as to build upon one another without distractingly diminishing each other’s presence via obligation to go beyond the standard viewing experience is something that could certainly be theoretically done but is nevertheless a tricky beast to actually pull off.

The most successful route appears to be those that approach the increase in budget and production resources with a swing for the fences mentality operating under the pretense of being a glorified finale to the show in question that gets to shine a spotlight on it to those that would otherwise not be paying attention while using the beefed up production values to deliver a finale worthy of the show that carried it out to this point. This approach is perhaps best demonstrated in forms such as the film finale to the beloved cult classic “Firefly,” “Serenity” and the bigger budget OVA sequel to anime “Mobile Suit Gundam Wing,” “Endless Waltz.”

Both use boosts in production to recreate their visual aesthetic through an idealized lens freed from the burden of television cost constraints. What keeps these from being worthwhile examples though is how explicitly they’re tied to the finality of their franchises, making it clear that they didn’t need to be concerned with the future of the fiction that they’re playing with.

So maybe the best route is to make something of a high octane but fully segmented side story that has no need to intersect with the main narrative right? It worked for a lot of those “Sailor Moon” OVAs in the 90s and “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” is frequently heralded as one of the best “Batman” movies of all time. Maybe that’s the key.

If you want something good, that might just work. If you’re after something truly impactful in the grand scheme of the overarching storyline, that’s far more debatable.

At the end of the day, the property doesn’t quite open itself up to an audience far beyond someone that would already be watching it on television at best and it would more likely than not be for a story that will never be mentioned or referred to again no matter how good it may have been and if that seems like a bit of a generalization towards the concept, let’s recall the fact that nothing in “Mask of the Phantasm” gets mentioned across DC media after that film beyond a continuity nod in one of the final seasons of “Justice Leage: Unlimited,” an episode that aired roughly 12 years after that movie’s financial release, along with the fact that the long running  Pokémon franchise puts a lot of pomp and circumstance into movies that almost never impact the status quo despite global implications introduced within them.

Hell, the one time that they did try this , “The Transformers: The Movie,” basically served as a backdoor pilot for its show’s own 3^rd seasons, which would have been straight nonsense without that appropriate context.

You can’t even count the “Star Trek” films in this regard, as the character’s receiving focus in a feature film release are never the ones that have to return to helm a weekly seasonal TV program afterward. Looking at this kind of track record, it was fairly obvious that “My Little Pony” was always going to have an uphill battle.

The question nevertheless remains of whether or not its goal of taking the worth of a show to the big screen can actually work while easily shifting back down to the small screen afterward? Maybe, but as of right now, I would posit that we are pretty far off from actually achieving it.