Creator Preferred Adaptation

Let's face it: Most of the time, a work is at its best in its original form. However, sometimes there are exceptions to this, and be it by Adaptation Distillation, Woolseyism or Superlative Dubbing, the new version of a story comes out so much better than the old that even the original creator admits the superiority of the new one.

Contrast Disowned Adaptation.

Examples of Creator Preferred Adaptation include:

Anime and Manga

• Some anime directors prefer the dubs of their work over the original audio:
  • It's been said that Hideaki Anno prefers some of the performances in the English dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion to the Japanese version, though Anno tends to be nebulous about such things.
  • Hayao Miyazaki reportedly prefers the French dub of Porco Rosso (with Jean Reno in the title role) to the original.
  • You're Under Arrest: When working on the TV series, the director even played Pamela Weidner's performance as Yoriko from the OVA for Etsuko Kozakura, and reportedly told her to "do that!".
  • Akinori Nagaoka and Mami Watanabe, the respective director and writer of the Record of Lodoss War OVA, said they prefer the English dub over the original Japanese.
• The staff at 4Kids! Entertainment apparently love Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series, although Japan does not.
• Yasuhiro Nightow has nothing but praise for the animated version of Trigun. After the anime ended, he started having anime-only characters cameo in the manga, and cribbed the anime's climax to use in his story several years later.
• Masashi Kishimoto, the creator of Naruto, considers the best adaptation to be... Cyber Connect 2's Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm series! He often says himself that it's more exciting than the manga, as detailed in this 2013 SaiyanIsland interview.
• Yukito Kishiro loved the 2019 live-action adaptation of Gunnm, to the point where he officially took part in its worldwide promotion. Keep in mind that he'd previously disowned the 1994 OVAs...

Film

• Chuck Palahniuk prefers the ending of the film version of Fight Club to his own.
• In the book Fahrenheit 451, Clarisse is abruptly revealed to have been killed by a speeding car. The film changed this so that she lived and escaped with the exiles. Ray Bradbury preferred her survival, and included it in the stage adaptation and semi-official video game sequel.
• The author of The Prestige had this reaction to seeing the movie: "'Well, holy shit.' I was thinking, 'God, I like that,' and 'Oh, I wish I'd thought of that.'"
• Stephen King, in an interview on the DVD of The Mist, says that he liked the movie's ending better than that of the original story, and wishes he'd thought of it himself.
  • Ditto for Brian De Palma's original 1976 adaptation of Carrie. He's not too big on the sequel or the two remakes, though.
  • He also prefers the Lighter and Softer ending of the film adaptation of Cujo to the Downer Ending of the book, which he views as something of an embarrassment in hindsight, having written it when he was at a very dark point in his life due to cocaine addiction (such that he can barely remember writing half of it).
• Mark Millar has said that the Kick-Ass movie is superior to the comic book.
• Gary Wolf preferred the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to the novel he wrote, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, upon which it was based. He loved it so much that, when he wrote a sequel to the film, he retconned the first story as a dream.
• J. K. Rowling has said that there are some things in the Harry Potter movies which she wished she had made up when she wrote the books. The only such thing she has named specifically is the talking shrunken head from the third film. Ironically, the fandom tends to regard the shrunken head as The Scrappy.
• David Morrell preferred the ending of the First Blood film as Rambo doesn't die... thus allowing for sequels that ended up making him millions.
• Andy Weir once expressed regret that The Martian didn't open with the accident that left Mark Watney stranded on Mars, instead of leaving it to a flashback mid-way through. The 2015 film corrected this.
• When Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, he intended to mix not just a park going horribly wrong, but also the child-like wonder of dinosaurs come to live. The publishers wouldn't allow it as they thought the novel wouldn't sell with that angle, and told him to focus on the horror aspect. Come Steven Spielberg's film adaptation, and Crichton was able to help him tell the story with the tone he wanted in the first place.

Literature

• Umberto Eco thinks that William Weaver's English translations of his novels are better than the originals.

Music

• Trent Reznor, upon hearing Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt", stated "that song isn't mine anymore."
• After Jimi Hendrix released his cover of "All Along the Watchtower", Bob Dylan publicly stated that he was going to start playing the Hendrix version instead of his own in the future.
• Tears for Fears love Gary Jules and Michael Andrews' stripped down cover of "Mad World" (which renewed the popularity of the original), and it was one of the reasons they got back into the music industry. They have commented that the original new wave mood of the song was of its time and not necessarily fitting to the lyrics. Since the cover came out, they play a sort of hybrid version of theirs and the Jules/Andrews version when playing it live.
• David Bowie said that astronaut Chris Hadfield's cover of "Space Oddity", recorded and filmed on the International Space Station itself, was the most poignant version of the song he'd ever heard.

Video Games

• The creators of Kingdom Hearts apparently liked the dub voice actors so much that whenever special edition re-releases of the games come out of Japan, they use the English vocal track exclusively.
• Even though it's a Massively Multiplayer Crossover, the writers behind Super Robot Wars generally churns out favorable results from Humongous Mecha series that wind up not being well received in their original animated form (various Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion being a few prime examples). Subverted with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny in Super Robot Wars Z, where director Mitsuo Fukuda, in a series of Twitter posts, didn't appreciate how developer Banpresto rearranged the story. In a variation, Kenichi Suzumura, the voice actor for Shinn Asuka in SEED Destiny, stated that he preferred how the events of Z handled the story.

Western Animation

• Judd Winick, who wrote the original comic version of Batman: Under the Red Hood, prefers the animated version he also wrote. The primary reasons are due to Adaptation Distillation and patching up some of the comic's loose ends.