“Around the world in 80 days” turns 150 and a series pays tribute to him

Even today they continue to summon the adventures of the millionaire Phileas Fogg, who together with his assistant and butler Jean Passepartout -or Passepartout, in Spanish- embark on the challenge of traveling the world in 80 days, combining all possible forms of transport of the time , from train, sleigh, elephant and sailing boats. Although the image of the hot air balloon is a famous postcard by Verne and is sometimes associated with the novel, the truth is that Fogg did not get on one, he simply thought of it as an option when he had to cross the Atlantic

With more or less freedom in the interpretation of its plot, “Around the World in 80 Days” has at least six film adaptations, another six for television -including cartoons-, but it has also been chosen for theater and even circus versions, as has been seen in our country in a play performed by Fernan Cardama and with address Claudius Hochman.

In tune with the round anniversary of its serial publication, Universal premieres this Sunday a reversion in series format of eight chapters for its first season with a great production behind it that recreates the nineteenth-century aesthetics of the time. As in the book, the main character is the millionaire aristocrat Phileas Fogg (played by David Tennant) but in this version new additions are added that reverse the permanent omission of a gender perspective from the plot. A deviation according to the transformations and conquests that have occurred in almost two centuries of history.

That’s what happens with the addition of Abigail Fix (leonie benesch), a character that does not exist in the book and that Universal defines as a “journalist, born in a golden cradle, and with a vital mission: to show that world of men who ruled the newsrooms of the newspapers in 1872, that women not only can also keep track of what happens in the world, but they are great chroniclers in that task”. The triangle of main characters is completed with Passepartout (Ibrahim Kuma), who plays “a man as mysterious as he is chameleon”, they advance.

In this sense, the screenwriter, director and creator of this version, Ashley Pharoahhas pointed out that the main difference with Verne’s novel is that it is “a reinterpretation of that book rather than a direct adaptation. Our version includes all the themes of the book about travel, adventure and the will to experiment, and we have made them our”.

Probably in this intersection of travel and adventure lies the effectiveness of this book that 150 years after its first appearance continues to open rereadings and also appropriations that make the feat a solidarity struggle, as when in 2016 an Argentine embarked on the journey of go around the world in 80 days to raise awareness and promote research into stem cell treatments.

In addition to “Around the World in 80 Days”the writer born in Nantes on February 8, 1828 bequeathed other novels with the same incentive for the imagination among which stand out “Five Weeks in a Balloon”, “The Children of Captain Grant”, “Two Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Mysterious Island”. His stories were born under the influence of the industrial impulse of the second half of the 19th century and the scientific discoveries and inventions where science and technology dominated the world. And his work was the beginning of a new literary genre: the science fiction novel.

They are stories that mapped known territories and at the same time were ahead of their time, as many of their literary fantasies came true. For example, in 1955, the first atomic submarine crossed the North Pole, and in 2002, Steve Fossett was the first man to go around the world in a balloon without anyone accompanying him.

Even the City of La Plata also has a connection with Verne’s literary dream: in 1879, the Frenchman imagined an “ideal city” in “The Five Hundred Million of the Begum”, from 1879, with tree-lined avenues every six blocks, squares at their intersections and an octagonal layout crossed by diagonals. Three years later, this is how the capital of the province of Buenos Aires was designed.