Classic adaptations continue, Tencent Video's "Amazing Night" resonates again
2024-08-19
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The curtain opened, and in the dim cell, the "prisoner" who was writing a poem on the wall turned around, clasped his fists and said, "My name remains unchanged, my surname remains unchanged, I am 'Timely Rain' Song Jiang", announcing that another comedy work adapted from a classic has appeared on the stage of Tencent Video's "Xiren Wonderful Night". Recently, "Xiren Wonderful Night", jointly produced by Tencent Video and Miwei Media, ushered in the eighth episode. The Xiren team from the field of diverse comedy, focusing on hot topics and resonant emotional themes, presented one interesting work after another to the audience.
From "The Calabash Brothers" and "Eighty-one Difficulties" to "Wansong Academy" and "On Qingcheng Mountain" and this issue of "Summer of Prison Break", the Xiren have paid tribute to classic stories one after another with adaptations, interpreting the spiritual connotations of the classics in contemporary language. In fact, the endogenous force that supports Xiren's continuous adaptation is not only the charm and connotation of the classic stories themselves, but also the resonance and collision between traditional classic narratives and current social emotions. Xiren inspires creation in this connection, allowing a wider range of people to draw strength from the works.
The “Classic Masterpiece Adaptation Universe” is gradually taking shape
On stage, the team of Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi joked that they "just want to adapt a famous book". After "Journey to the West" and "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai", this time the team of Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi set their sights on adapting "Water Margin", and this adaptation obviously added a strong touch to the "adaptation universe" of the team of Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi.
The content of the adapted work "Summer of Prison Break" seems to adopt a common narrative method, telling the story of Song Jiang being arrested and imprisoned, and the Liangshan heroes coming to his rescue. However, unlike the traditional narrative, "Summer of Prison Break" adds a small character named Ergou, and the whole work also adopts the perspective of the small character, allowing him to participate in the narrative of the traditional prison break story, and jointly restore the heroic plot of the Liangshan heroes in the critical moment. Of course, this is also more in line with modern people's understanding of loyalty - when facing the "trolley problem", people prefer to see the ending where both parties are rescued, rather than sacrificing the "righteousness" of one party for the other.
This idea of adapting classic stories with modern thinking is almost consistent in the works of the Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi team. "81 Difficulties" can be regarded as the starting point for the Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi team to adapt "A Pleasant Night". Nowadays, there are many ridicules of the workplace rules in "Journey to the West" on the Internet platform, which just provides an entry point for the adaptation and leads to the philosophical thinking of "Saving the world for a lifetime or saving one person for a lifetime".
"Everyone coaxed Sha Seng in order to enable him, whose merits were only a cicada's wing, to become a Buddha. Feeling this warmth, Sha Seng chose to meet the master and his two apprentices again in the Quicksand River a hundred years later. It broke the beautiful setting of the four masters and apprentices as a team that had been created in Journey to the West for more than 400 years, and reconstructed the main theme through repeated plot reversals." A netizen commented.
The same idea was used in Wansong Academy. The team of Shishang Wunanshi abandoned the tragic ending of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, who turned into a butterfly, and magnified Zhu Yingtai's pursuit of freedom. Through Liang Shanbo's mouth, the audience expressed their blessing to Zhu Yingtai: "May you be like this butterfly, flying in the world, not bound by the secular world."
It can be found that modern interpretations can inject new vitality into classic stories. Through modern interpretations of classic stories, people can combine these stories with contemporary social reality, give them new meanings and connotations, and make them closer to the lives and thoughts of modern people.
Of course, some people may have reservations about adapting classics, but as Ma Dong said in the program, true classics can withstand repeated adaptations, and classics are not static. Reasonable adaptations can give classic stories new elements and perspectives, adding new brilliance to traditional charm, which in turn will provide new ideas for people to interpret classics.
New era comedy makes expression more pure
Looking at the "adaptation universe" of the Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi team, we can find that from "Journey to the West", "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai" to "Water Margin", the classic stories chosen by the Shi Shang Wu Nan Shi team are not comedies in themselves, but the final adaptations not only retain the spiritual connotation of the classic stories themselves, but also present many comedic dialogue techniques and "upgrade" models. To some extent, this is due to the research and deconstruction of comedy by the comedy people.
On the stage of "Wonderful Night of Xiren", the Xiren brought sketch comedy to the public's attention through the presentation of different works. Sketch comedy is a minimalist performance that focuses more on refining a simple scene with strong symbolism and relatively simple characters to meet the audience's fragmented entertainment needs. In the industry's view, in sketch comedy, grasping an absurd and bizarre idea and constantly performing "upgrading" is the greatest fun of sketch comedy.
This form of presentation has already been reflected in the "Annual Comedy Competition", and "Wonderful Night" further deepens this new comedy concept.
"I think the good thing about it is that it's 'new'. Not many people have done this before, and there aren't that many constraints. It just provides a stage. You can edit or write, you can sketch comedy or manzai, crosstalk, or skits. As long as you throw what you write on this stage and make people laugh or feel good about it, you've succeeded. This is new comedy," said actor Song Tianshuo from the Wu Nan Shi team.
The work "The World of Sketches" won praise from the audience at the beginning of its broadcast, which is also due to its understanding and interpretation of new comedy. The current audience has developed complex emotions about the stereotyped sketches - the public misses the pure sketches of the golden age, and hopes to see comedies that break through the framework and abandon routines in the current context. The people of comedy also see the pain points of the audience, so in "The World of Sketches", tribute and innovation can happen at the same time.
Actor Lv Yan said in the program that during the creation and rehearsal process, several actors also had a collision of theoretical systems. These arguments lowered each other's bottom line and finally achieved a wonderful fusion. He Huan used the traditional skit performance method, combined with Lv Yan's continuous "reactions", which gave birth to new and unique laughs.
This is also the unique advantage of adapted works - on the one hand, traditional classic stories have their own unique aura, which allows the audience to understand and immerse themselves in the story scenes more easily, bringing the audience a "tacit" pleasure; on the other hand, adaptations are more likely to break the direction and framework of classic stories, allowing the audience to maintain a sense of novelty and making comedy more pure.
Exploring the positive expression of emotional value in comedy
The reason why classics are used to express modern emotions is that the spiritual core of classic stories is still attractive today, and the reason why traditional comedy frameworks are broken is that audiences are becoming increasingly tired of stereotyped sketches. Both of these are actually based on insights into public and social sentiments.
People often say that each generation has its own aesthetic paradigm and expression preferences. This is actually because each generation has its own living background and social emotions. Therefore, jokes that use narrative logic and language expressions that are familiar to the current audience and tell the real life and circumstances of the current audience are often more effective.
Therefore, the stage of "Wonderful Night" is often full of reflections on the real world. Regarding campus life, "Oh My God! New Teacher" portrays several teenagers who are not very motivated to study but have expertise, focusing on how to recognize and guide adolescent children in the process of school education and student growth; "Echo Valley" portrays two students facing the college entrance examination and separation, and explores topics such as the college entrance examination, friendship, hometown, and human changes and growth through imaginative and sci-fi settings.
In response to workplace life, "Stay Up All Night" designed a battle between the "God of Staying Up Late" and the "God of Sleep", restoring the contradictions and entanglements of ordinary people in the tug-of-war over staying up late; "Career Transformation" uses an identity swap to show the differences in working methods between leaders and employees due to their different positions; "The Biggest Robbery in History" shows that the things that the workers on stage hope will be taken away by the robbers are collected by the creators from netizens on Weibo.
It is this insight into social emotions that makes "A Wonderful Night" an outlet for the audience to express their emotions. "What the audience wants is simple, they want someone to speak out their thoughts and feelings, to be their mouthpiece and provide emotional value. Along with laughter, comedy relieves people's frustration, helplessness and anger that they dare not speak out," a media commented.
"Under the influence of the 'short, flat and fast' characteristics of the Internet era, the audience's aesthetic tastes have been changing, and 'A Wonderful Night' truly covers the laughs of all ages, allowing different audiences to find their own resonance points and feel the emotional value from the laughter." Industry insiders said.
