September 11, 2020

If you think about it, Men in Black is to the 90’s as Ghostbusters was to the 80’s.

Or at least it could/should have been. There are certainly some parallels to be drawn, but I think the pop culture landscape had changed too much for it to have anywhere near the same impact. Besides, Ghostbusters had way better toys.

But enough about that… gotta save some Ghostbusters discussion for October, ya know?

Besides the comparisons to Ghostbusters, you could also compare Men in Black to Spider-Man. Both are comic properties owned by Marvel (Men in Black was by Malibu comics [published by Aircel in Canada], which was later bought by Marvel) and were licensed to Sony to be made into movies. And just like Spider-Man, the movie rights to Men in Black will revert to Disney should Sony ever let the license slip.

By the way, if you haven’t read the original comics, you absolutely should. You can read them online here (make sure you have an ad blocker for that one).

If you haven’t yet deduced from my somewhat pointless rambling so far, I didn’t read this. However, I did skim a bit while making the ebook and looking for errors. Of course I sought out online reviews for info, but they were mostly unhelpful… Though it does appear that the junior novelization (by J.J. Gardner) is used to teach English as a second language. There was also one reviewer that mistakenly thought the movie was based on the book and praised Will Smith’s spot-on performance.

The general consensus among the reviews is that this book’s writing is pretty unremarkable. Some reviews state that it’s just like the movie, while others say it’s different in places. So which is it? Well, based purely on my skimming, it appears to be both. There are a lot of alternate versions of scenes present in the movie and some of the jokes are different. It’s also pretty clear that they were changed for the better in the movie.

One example I can give is the scene where the newly suited agent J has his fingerprints painfully erased. In Steve Perry’s adaptation, they are just painfully rewritten. Zed issues a warning that should J leave fingerprints at a scene, they’ll have to give him a new set. It’s not hard to see why this was changed and it was definitely for the better.

While it may be disappointing to hear that this adaptation isn’t all that great, there are other MiB books out there that are hopefully better. There’s the aforementioned junior novelization by J.J. Gardner, MiB II’s novelization by Esther M. Freisner and junior novel by Retro Reading Time MVP Michael Teitelbaum, and the very exciting prospect of two original novels by Dean Wesley Smith. The two original novels, titled The Grazer Conspiracy and The Green Saliva Blues, came out before MiB II, so they give you your only look at agents J and L (Linda Fiorentino’s character from the first film) actually working together on a case. I have all but the J.J. Gardner book in my possession, so you can look forward to those coming out at some point.

Well, that’s enough rambling from me. Give this book a download and let me know what you think (reader reviews are always welcome and some day I might actually get one).