Pride and Prejudice Adaptations and Quick Note
Hello everyone. Quick note before we get into the post today. For our podcast, episodes one and two have been posted. You should eventually be able to find it on Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio and several other places where you can listen to podcasts. I didn’t realize a lot of the behind the scenes work that goes into uploading a podcast episodes so I wasn’t quite prepared for all of the hoops that I’ve had to jump through. You will also eventually be able to listen to the podcast on Youtube. However, I need to do a little more research to make that happen since technology doesn’t seem to want to work for me today. In the meantime, here is the transcript for episode two of the podcast. Episode one is an introduction to our favorite books, genres, and series. We felt that since some of our earlier posts had talked about that, we weren’t going to post that transcript. Hopefully by next week a lot more of the kinks will have been ironed out and I can give you some more definite information. Hope you all enjoy.
Arya
Hello, fellow ink drinkers, and welcome back. Today we are actually planning to go over Pride and Prejudice and the comparisons to its different film adaptations. Of course, Pride and Prejudice is a favorite for both Belle and me so we are going to go over several versions of Pride and Prejudice that we have seen and compare them to the original work.
Out of all of the different versions of Pride and Prejudice, Belle’s favorite is the 2005 version. This is because the actors do a great job of capturing who the characters are and the directors do a good job of that as well. For example, the actor who plays Mr. Darcy and the director work really hard to show how awkward that man actually is. However, they got all the characterizations correct. They captured how weird Mr. Collins is. They also captured Mrs. Bennett's want for her daughters to be married and her antics and her craziness; as well as Lady Catherine’s evil side. What could have been changed to be more true to the book would be settings for certain scenes. The biggest example is Mr. Darcy‘s first proposal. In the book, it is done when he visits Lizzie when she is at the home of Mr. Collins and Charlotte and he comes and visits her proposes then. But in the movie, they meet each other in the rain which is now a very famous scene however it’s just very inaccurate to how it is an actual book. Overall, it’s probably about 75 to 80% accurate adaptations but it is a remarkable adaptation.
The next adaption we are covering is the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth. When it comes to this version it is not completely accurate. The major example is the famous taking off the jacket and such and jumping into the lake for fun scene. This probably was included for fan service but there are other things though that are pretty accurate to the book. Mrs. Bennett in that version is hilarious she is top-tier cringe. Jane Austin created cringe with Mrs. Bennett before cringe was a thing. Wickham is 100% scoundrel as he is. Collin Firth did a very good job of being Mr. Darcy. He didn’t have quite as much of the awkwardness as the actor who did played Darcy in the 2005 version. Mr. Collins is still very awkward and creepy in this version. Mr. Collins is just this weird creepy character and Jane Austen really did create a fantastic character with Mr. Collins in and just being that guy that you don’t wanna be around at all. In the 2005 version, he’s kind of more of a bumbling idiot, but in the BBC miniseries, you wish he would go back to Lady Catherine as soon as possible. The actress who played Elizabeth Bennett did a very good job of being the headstrong version of Lizzie. Jane was very sweet and very charming. Mr. Bingley was his normal puppy dog self. Overall the BBC miniseries did a very good job of staying adapted to the book. It got a lot more right than it got wrong which makes it a wonderful adaptation to watch.
The next version is the 1980 BBC miniseries. This adaptation is a cringefest. It wasn’t a bad version for the time, but watching it now (the last time Belle actually tried to watch it was in 2018) was a rough experience. Each character was very cringy. Darcy was just more cringe than he is normally. Mrs. Bennett’s scenes were so bad it was close to unwatchable. Bingley was so overly friendly, it was just so cringy. In a scene when Darcy comes to invite Elizabeth to dine with them at Pemberley he brings his sister and Bingley enters. Darcy and Elizabeth are staring at each other. Georgia was just standing observing Darcy and Elizabeth. Then Bingley interrupts and he is so overly friendly that is just so cringy and awkward. It is accurate to the book in that all the plotline follows correctly. The settings are all correct, however, it’s just the characters that are wrong. If you could take the 2005 actors and combine it with the accuracy of 1980 miniseries you would have the book in film form. This adaptation is more of a fail because of the failure of the characterization.
The last retelling is the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It is a modern retelling so things are a bit different because of modern times versus the Regency area but it stays pretty true to the source material. All the people who played the characters I feel really captured what the characters were. The settings and everything else is a bit different because you know it’s kind of weird for someone who just met another person and not date just propose marriage. In this version, Lizzie Bennett is a grad student and she’s doing the video diaries for fun/class to get her degree in communications. She talks through events that happen. Instead of there being five Bennett girls, it is just Jane, Lizzie, and Lydia. Mary doesn’t exist and Kitty is an actual cat. You do get to see other characters when Lizzie is filming or she’ll grab another character and make them do costume theater with her to reenact scenes that she’s been in. Most of the time, you have to take Lizzie’s word. There are a couple of episodes where Charlotte teams up with Jane to tell you what actually happens. The first meeting between Darcy and Elizabeth is they meet at a wedding, she catches the bouquet and he catches the garter so they have to dance. Even though it’s a retelling and a reimagining it is pretty accurate to the actual word work. It is highly recommended by Belle.
We hope you have enjoyed our take on these versions of Pride and Prejudice. Let us know your thoughts or if there was a version we missed. Next week we will talk about how to get into classic literature. See you next time.
Arya