Name: Shawshank Redemption - What's the Difference?
Uploaded: 2019-01-29T02:59:32.000Z
Duration: 7 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption has become one of the most

The tale of Andy Dufresne's time in Shawshank prison is even the highest rated

- But the inspiration for the movie came from Stephen King's short story titled

pages worth of novella appeared in the collection that also featured two

other future movies, Apt Pupil and The Body, which was the basis of Stand By Me.

- But we're not talking about either of those today.

We're talking about Morgan Freeman officially becoming the best narrator of

- So, without further ado and no restraint on spoilers, let's get into it.

Well, kids, there are a ton of similarities between the book and movie.

Both feature a banker named Andy Dufresne falsely imprisoned for

The stoic Andy makes fast friends with prison everyman Red, and after

long years of struggling to maintain his humanity and hope, Andy escapes through

a hole in his cell wall kept hidden by a variety of posters of pin-up girls.

- Right, and he crawls through 500 yards of raw sewage to freedom.

To start with, the two main characters' appearances are different.

Book Andy is described as short and mousy, while movie Andy is tall,

like Tim Robbins is the tallest guy in any given scene in the movie tall.

And the book Red is named Red because he's Irish and

has red hair, which is changed to an offhanded joke in the film.

- But the most obvious significant difference between the book and

While the film is, of course, narrated by the greatest voice ever,

the book is quite literally Red's memoirs.

His written account of the legend of Andy Dufresne.

- The film, however, opens with a traditionally narrative retelling of

Andy's trial and conviction for double murder.

>From there, the film offers no framework to explain the omniscient narration other

than it's a movie, and we're all just kind of used to that sort of thing.

- Many minor differences include the side characters.

For example, the book features several different wardens,

running through a couple different guys before landing on Warden Norton,

- Put your trust in the Lord, the rest belongs to me.

- The toughest screw to ever walk a turn at Shawshank, Byron Hadley, who plays in

the entire film, is gone and retired well before the climax of the book.

some of the supporting cast is superficially different.

But, here's where this episode of What's the Difference gets interesting.

Most of our adaptations have to cut things wholesale from their novel counterparts

leaving behind a more efficient, focused version of the story.

What we see with Shawshank is a movie that adds

to the story to fill out its near two and a half hours run time.

- Easy peasy, Japaneasy - Brooks, for example,

is the long-time inmate who runs the library in both the book and the movie.

But book Brooks is introduced, paroled and

leaves Shawshank crying in the space of a few pages.

The bird, Jake, is not Brooks' in the book, but instead belonged to an inmate

with a relatively short eight years stay in the prison.

- (Sound) - The most significant thing about him is

that Jake, the bird, shows up starved to death shortly after his release,

a metaphor for the learned helplessness of Shawshank's residents.

- The threat of Brooks' institutionalization in the movie is much

Movie Brooks has been at Shawshank longer than anybody,

like this novella counterpart, but the movie dives much deeper into Brooks'

experience as a heartbreaking example of what prison has taken from these men.

The sequence of Brooks on the outside narrated by Brooks' letter

to the guys still in Shawshank is entirely created for the film, it's also yet

another shift away from the exclusively Red voice of the novella.

- That's the basic them of this adaptation,

take characters from the book and expand upon them to flesh out the movie.

Aside from the enormous editions to Brooks' presence in the story,

the movie expands on captain of the guards Byron Hadley and warden Norton

both mediums, the movie upgrades them both to essentially co-antagonists.

- Hadley and Norton are bad dudes in the book for sure, but

in the movie they're ever present and even worse.

The second time we meet Hadley on screen, he beats a man to death,

which doesn't explicitly happen in the book at all.

- If I hear so much as as mouse fart in here the rest of the night,

I swear by god and sunny Jesus, you will all visit the infirmary.

When a young inmate, Tommy Williams, shows up with a story that could get Andy's

name cleared- - Which happens in the book as well.

- But in the book, Norton just transfers Tommy to a different prison and

In the movie, Norton and Hadley straight up murder Tommy and

- Of course, in both book and movie, Norton wants Tommy's story to go away so

that Andy can continue cooking the books for all the shady dealings and

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Shawshank Redemption - What's the Difference?

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