Stephen wrote:The trouble is I've got such a definite mental image of Mam'zelle (along with many other Blyton characters), that whoever played her probably wouldn't seem quite right no matter how good they were.
To generalize this, it is, to me, the biggest argument against the success of making film or television versions of books.
Another thing is that, inevitably, film makers either have to leave out bits because of time constraints, or just decide to alter the plot to their own ideas. Sometimes they even leave out characters, merge two characters into one, or invent new characters.
I think the actors not fitting one's mental image of the characters is especially an issue with books you knew as a child, because it seems to be much easier to form vivid mental pictures of anything then. For instance, I have a very definite image of the Famous Five, whose adventures I first read as a boy. To be sure, Eileen Soper's illustrations had a huge shaping influence there. I may not have quite such a vivid impression of the Secret Seven, even though I read those at about the same time, because the characters themselves are not as distinct from each other. (The good illustrations in the then-current editions didn't entirely help either: illustrations, however good, probably can't go further than a certain limit in compensating for characters the author has not depicted so distinctively.)
I don't have such vivid mental images of the characters in the Malory Towers or St. Clare's books, and that's partly because I first read those only as an adult, and the magic that creates vivid pictures had largely faded by then. (It seems to be something that belongs only to childhood.) That wasn't helped, either, by the fact that the illustrations in the editions I've read are pretty nondescript.
So I think the very strength of books - that they are good for encouraging you to develop your own imagery - is also the very weakness of films, which dictate the imagery to you. And even if a film maker could somehow satisfy my own way of seeing characters or places, it would fail someone else's, because we all see things differently.
All these issues are amongst the main reasons I've never really had much interest in film or television versions of Enid Blyton's works. (I never saw any except, once, the first half of a two-episode "Five Get Into Trouble". I seem to recall it stuck to the plot well enough, but the characters and places just didn't look or feel right to me, somehow.)
Regards, Michael.