43. Jane Eyre, Part 1

In this, part one of our first two-part episode of Adapt or Perish, we discuss Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre!

For these two episodes, we read Jane Eyre and watched eight screen adaptations. In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Charlotte Brontë’s original novel, first published in 1847. Read it on Amazon or iBooks.
• The 1943 movie, directed by Robert Stevenson, written by Stevenson, John Houseman, and Aldous Huxley, and starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Watch it on iTunes or Amazon.
• The 1970 TV movie, directed by Delbert Mann, and starring Susannah York and George C. Scott. Watch it on YouTube.
• The 1973 BBC miniseries, directed by Joan Craft, written by Robin Chapman, and starring Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston.
• The 1983 BBC miniseries, directed by Julian Amyes, written by Alexander Baron, and starring Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton. Watch it on Amazon.
• In part two, we’ll be covering Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 movie, Robert Young’s 1997 TV movie, Susanna White’s 2006 miniseries, and Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 movie.

Footnotes:

• The Brontë family
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, discussed here on Adapt or Perish
• George C. Scott and They Might Be Giants
• Susannah York’s reaction shot

42. Freaky Friday

In this very special Mother’s Day episode of Adapt or Perish, we discuss Mary Rodgers’ mother-daughter body-swap classic, Freaky Friday!

For this episode, we read and watched:

• Mary Rodgers’ original 1972 novel.
• The 1976 movie, directed by Gary Nelson, written by Rodgers, and starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.
• The 1995 TV movie, directed by Melanie Mayron, and starring Gaby Hoffman and Shelley Long.
• The 2003 movie, directed by Mark Waters, written by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, and starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Footnotes:

• Body swap appearances in media
• Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by Thomas Anstey Guthrie
• The Freaky Friday musical, 2016, adapted into a TV movie for the Disney Channel in 2018
• Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers & Hammerstein) and Adam Guettel
• Once Upon a Mattress
• Taylor Negron
• Heather Hach and the Legally Blonde musical
• Rosalind Chao

41. The Ten Commandments

In this episode of Adapt or Perish, we discuss the book of Exodus—the story of The Ten Commandments!

For this episode, we read and watched:

• The Book of Exodus. From the actual Bible.
• The Ten Commandments, 1923, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Theodore Roberts.
• The Ten Commandments, 1956, also directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner.
• The Prince of Egypt, 1998, directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells, and starring Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
• The Ten Commandments, the 2006 miniseries, directed by Robert Dornhelm, starring Dougray Scott, Naveen Andrews, and Omar Sharif.
• The Ten Commandments, 2007, directed by John Stronach and Bill Boyce, and starring Christian Slater, Alfred Molina, and Ben Kingsley.
• Exodus: Gods and Kings, 2014, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, and Ben Kingsley.

Footnotes:

• “Go Down Moses”
• “Dayenu”
• The Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible
• Anne Baxter and All About Eve
• Age of Empires
• Roma and lead actor Yalitza Aparicio
• Stephen Schwartz, Godspell, and Wicked
• Brenda Chapman