Pragmatic Adaptation / Western Animation

• Nearly every adaptation of Wolverine in a Marvel TV series tends to focus more on building his characterization (notably X-Men: Evolution) than on his violent berserker rages, because of Media Watchdogs and their attitude towards violence in children's TV.
• Wolverine and the X-Men (2009) takes elements of the vast, contradictory mythology surrounding the Phoenix Force that look like they might work well together, and constructs a new story out of them. Likewise, it combines a number of the various Bad Futures of the comics into one.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a violent and gory (if satirical) black and white independent Comic Book with an ongoing storyline. (Shredder dies messily in the very first issue; later his surviving minions feed what is left of him to a colony of worms that take his form and his intelligence. Worm-Shredder destroys the Turtles' and April's home, and nearly kills Leonardo. After a year of healing, Leo heads back to New York, chops off Worm-Shredder's head, and burns him.) In the early process of licensing and adaptation, the Turtles developed a litany of catch phrases, color coded costumes, a Garfield-like food fetish, and an army of ineffective recurring villains; Raphael changed from a sociopathic Jerkass to "cool but rude", Baxter Stockman was changed from a homicidal black man to a feeble white guy, Splinter's whole backstory was rewritten to avoid the question of death; they abandoned character and plot development for syndication-friendly standalone episodes... and yet it all kind of worked. The 2003 series is a much closer adaptation of the comics (even bearing some traits of Adaptation Distillation); any carry-over from earlier adaptations (such as Michaelangelo's use of lingo from the earlier show) is generally Lampshade-hung. There's still much conflict over which cartoon was actually better — ratings and profit wise, they did the same.
  • In the comics, Splinter is the mutated pet rat of a ninja murdered by Shredder. In the (first) cartoon, Splinter is a human ninja (and rival to Shredder) mutated into a rat. This change feels less like a bowdlerization (even though it is) and more like an Adaptation Distillation. It simplifies Splinter's back story, gives the turtles a more direct tie to ninjas (trained by an actual ninja as opposed to the pet rat of a ninja), and gives scenes between Splinter and Shredder a personal edge. The show even did a good, touching episode where Splinter briefly regained his human form. Even in the 2010s, Hamato Yoshi and Splinter still tend to be combined into one character, particularly in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, albeit taking a closer look at how his mutation affected him.
• The second animated adaptation of Herge's Tintin comic book series often streamlines the original narrative to make the story of each comic book fit into two half-hour episodes by cutting out subplots that don't affect the main plot overall, but otherwise faithfully follows Herge's original plotlines.
• Winx Club:
  • Frank Maggiore commented on a change made to an episode; in the dub, Sky went from being killed (it's never explicitly said, but Flora mentions his lack of pulse at one point) to being put into a deep sleep (by having the Trix, who "killed" Sky, explicitly mention this a few times). It seemed to him that it made a lot more sense when Bloom revived Sky; this changed a never-before-seen magical Back from the Dead ability to a Sleeping Beauty-style awakening that seemed more 'probable', especially since that these new powers were played as "healing powers" in either version. The kicker? The change was made by 4Kids Entertainment. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
  • The girls (except Flora) cut school and go to Earth, where Aisha/Layla, Stella and Musa are stopped by a police officer and asked why they're not in school. In the original, Aisha gives the excuse that they have permission from their parents to be out of school and offers to give the cop the phone numbers, but the cop declines and lets them go. In 4Kids, Layla speaks a different language, making the cop think they're not from Gardenia and so he lets them go. The 4Kids version is more believable because, by law, the cop should've taken in all three girls and called their parents (not that he could call them, but you get it) since skipping school (aka truancy) is illegal.
• Watership Down's Animated Adaptation left out a number of rabbits from the book, including Bluebell, the comedian, and Strawberry, from the snare farm. Speedwell, Buckthorn, Hawkbit and Acorn aren't much missed, though.
• The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police was a Saturday-Morning Cartoon adaptation of Sam & Max, a series whose distinct sense of humor tiptoes the line between outwardly cartoony and silly but also dry, somewhat morbid, and reliant on fast-paced, nuanced dialogue. The cartoon focuses more on the former side of their humor, toning down the Heroic Comedic Sociopath aspects of the titular characters and featuring some light bowdlerization (including removal of swearing and changing their use of realistic guns to Family-Friendly Firearms), but aside from that, it features much of the same eccentricity and deadpan humor found in the comics and games, with a smidge of its grit instead preserved as Parental Bonuses.
• The DC Animated Universe has a lot of this. Most of the time when a characters and their origin were changed, it helped to enhance the essence of the original comics. In several cases, changes in the DCAU were so well-received that they were actually integrated into the main DC universe. (Harley Quinn and Mr. Freeze's backstories are probably the two most well-known cases.) One episode of Justice League was an adaptation of the Alan Moore story, For the Man Who Has Everything. They took out some of the darker aspects which gave it its own unique effect while sticking to the overall idea. Notably, this is the only adaptation of his work that Moore actually likes.
• Young Justice (2010) does this with many characters, usually with positive effects. Artemis Crock for instance went from being a Caucasian supervillain to a biracial superhero, with the big twist being that her older sister (she never had one in the comics) is the Vietnamese assassin Cheshire. The decision to reimagine Zatanna as a teenager also went over well with fans. As a neat way of explaining her size-changing abilities, Bumblebee was made into a student of The Atom, despite the two having literally no connection in the comic books. Icon was also made into a member of the JLA in order to justify his sidekick Rocket's (temporary) inclusion in The Team.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man made a number of slight visual changes to Spider-Man's supporting cast, notably making several white characters into minorities for the sake of diversity and giving slightly modernized designs to some of Spidey's villains.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes often condenses or alters origins for various characters in order to cut down on the time required to introduce them. For example, Hawkeye and Black Widow are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents rather than reformed Iron Man villains, and The Falcon is a member of Code Red rather than Captain America's sidekick.
• The Batman gave some of the villains drastically changed designs, backstories and/or personalities to give them more importance in the story, such as Hugo Strange and Clayface.
• The Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) cartoon had the decision to change Proto Man from Mega Man's Aloof Big Brother Mysterious Ally to his Worthy Opponent on Wily's side. Given that Dark Man, Proto's impersonator from the fifth game, shows up in the series, it's more likely this was a conscious decision in order to give Mega Man an appropriate rival (Bass from the seventh game didn't exist yet).
• The W.I.T.C.H. cartoon made some major changes to the characters with the first season, turning Yan Lin into The Mentor (and alive) and making Caleb an Adaptational Badass. When Greg Weisman stepped in for season 2, he took the changes even further, giving more screentime to old one-note villains, expanding roles of other characters and even going so far as to make many of the more Jerkass characters of the comic a lot more relating to the viewer.
• PJ Masks: While still a long way from being grounded in reality, the show eliminated some of the more outlandish aspects of the original book series, like the PJ Masks befriending a huge werewolf, the moon having a face, and the young heroes going up against villains like an evil version of The Sandman, a living snow statue, various monsters, and the Egyptian deity Apophis.
• The 1990s X-Men: The Animated Series cartoon makes a number of tweaks and alterations for the sake of pragmatism, often going into full-fledged Adaptation Distillation. Particularly notable examples include working Bishop into the Days of Future Past adaptation as the time-traveler, changing the assassin Bishop is after from Onslaught into Mystique disguised as Gambit, removing the unnecessary distinction between the Phalanx and the Technarchy for the Phalanx Covenant adaptation, and shortening the Legacy Virus storyline immensely.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series, much like its X-Men: The Animated Series counterpart, also made many pragmatic tweaks and went for full-on Adaptation Distillation. The most notable example is that the symbiote was presented as an aggressive, domineering alien entity that wished to take over and subsume a host, controlling them instead of simply being a passive partner like in the original comics.
• The Animated Adaptation of Graeme Base's Animalia was a very loose adaptation of the alphabet book of the same name: in the book, each page contained an animal and objects starting with one of the letters of the alphabet. This was done away with in the adaptation to form a more coherent narrative and to make it easy to translate into other languages, as so many of the names are bound to get lost in translation.

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