David Sims: “Could The Legend of Zelda Really Work on Television?”

Two weeks ago the people over at Netflix kicked the beehive of Zelda rumors by announcing that they are in the early stage of developing a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda. Many people saw this as something amazing, others were more cautious, a third group began to recite the cartoon while others pointed out that this possible just meant that Netflix is merely working on a pitch for Nintendo. Many people began to theorize on how to make The Legend of Zelda work on TV. Is it possible, or will it end in a flop? David Sims, writer with The Atlantic took a look at how it could be pulled off. Read an analysis of the article after the break!

The article clearly errs on the side of optimism. The author agrees that there have been video game movies of less than excellent quality and the adaptations of Nintendo’s franchises have not been stellar either. But there is hope, and excellent things have been done with storytelling in video games. Note that this is not the same as having a great story: storytelling is the deliverance of the story rather than the story it delivers. The author goes on to state that if the series wants to pull a series off it has to do something new to its formula, something the series is no stranger to: he cites the various forms of Zelda (Sheik, Tetra) and the time thing in Majora’s Mask.

A potential problem is the delivery of the story. It’s far too easy for some kind of monster to show up every week and Link has to venture into its lair to defeat it and get a MacGuffin out of it. This would get boring quite fast, no matter how exciting it might look. Which is a valid point: finding a dungeon, exploring it and defeating its boss is interesting when you’re playing the game, but watching this as a movie over and over again will get old. Even when you looking at movies where the heroes enter multiple dungeons or dungeon-like settings (Indiana Jones comes to mind), this is only a few of them over the course of a single movie and not a new one every week over and over again.

So liberties have to be taken with the structure of the franchise. Even games that deviate from the formula in big or small ways (Majora’s Mask, Four Swords, the Great Sea trilogy) have Link be told to find a series of MacGuffins and track down the various dungeons, go through them, beat the boss and go to the next dungeon. The first idea would be to cut down the number of MacGuffins, with the risk of having the episodes in between getting them feel as filler. Another option would be to not have MacGuffins in the traditional sense and have Link track down people who can help him on his quest, find information to defeat Ganondorf and return peace to the land. Something like this was suggested in the old joke trailer made by IGN back in 2008:

The story looks like Ocarina of Time with just a pinch of A Link to the Past, with some appearances by well-known characters and the establishing of a goal for Link to achieve (find Zelda). And the trailer gives us hope as well: for its modest budget it looks pretty good, and with the massive amounts of money Netflix can invest in their shows with the $1.5 billion dollars they acquired recently things look hopeful. But caution is to be advised, given that not all of Netflix’ recent shows are that good and the Zelda series is rather easy to screw up if you take it in the wrong direction.

What do you think? Is it possible for The Legend of Zelda to work on TV, or will it be one big crash? Will it establish the series as a classic for the ages, or should Netflix keep their pitch to themselves? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

Source: The Atlantic