The Original Blog O' Jean

Also known, at various life stages, as Random Thought Process, RitalinJunkie, and JeanJeanie.Net.

Monday, July 24, 2000

I watched the first half of Anne of Green Gables - The Continuing Story last night on PBS. This is the third installment of what is apparantly meant to be a trilogy.

The first two parts, "Anne of Green Gables" and " Anne of Avonlea," both aired during my early teens. I eagerly watched every episode of both installments (and have watched the video tapes at least a dozen times since). I adored them so much that I read the entire series of books on which they were based, a pretty hefty achievement when my reading efforts were mainly divided between Sweet Valley High and Stephen King novels.

The books, naturally, were even better than the movies, which is saying a lot. These books still rank among my most cherished, and if I ever have a daughter I'll force her to read them. As I read the books, I found that quite a bit of creative license had been taken in the films, but they still remained a faithful adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's original stories.

So, I am somewhat disappointed to see that the third installment of the film series is a complete deviation from the novels. This newest film is set during World War I. When it opens, Anne and Gilbert Blythe are still engaged. They marry about halfway through part one, and then he goes off to war. The rest of the film is about Anne's journey to war-torn Europe as she tries to find him, fearing the worst after all of her letters to him were returned unopened.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good film, and it contains all of the elements that made the first two installments so endearing (and it doesn't hurt that the actor playing Gilbert, Jonathan Crombie, somehow managed to get even cuter over the years, renewing a crush that I thought long past); but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the novels.

In the books, the last novel is set during WWI, but in it Anne and Gilbert have been married for about 20 years and have had about a half-dozen children, the eldest of which are the ones who go to fight the war. So, why the departure?

The producer, Kevin Sullivan, says the reasoning behind this change is that he'd (for some reason) changed the setting of the previous films from the late 1800's to the first decade of the 1900's -- not that I nor anybody else who watched the films noticed -- and that in that case it made more sense for Anne and Gilbert to still be in their 20's during WWI, which gave him the opportunity to tell a fresh story.

Mmhmm. Whatever, Kevin. I have a little trouble buying that explanation. Anyway, it's a good movie, a nice piece of fan fiction; but if you really want to know how Anne's and Gilbert's lives turned out, you'd be better off reading the books.

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