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HOW PURE IS PURE LOVE? A COMPARATIVE TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF THE KOREAN DRAMA SERIES 49 DAYS AND ITS PHILIPPINE ADAPTATION PURE LOVE

Abstract

Co, C.R. (2015). How Pure is Pure Love? A Comparative Textual Analysis of the Korean Drama Series 49 Days and Its Philippine Adaptation Pure Love, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.

Koreanovela invasion in the Philippines began way back in the early 2000s. However, this phenomenon still continues to pervade the country today not only through merely franchising Korean media content for broadcast but through producing remakes of them as well. This is being done perhaps to bank on the success these dramas achieved before.

This thesis explored the similarities and differences of the remake of Pure Love to the Korean version and their implications. This delved on what exact changes happen to a remake and the motivations that drove to these choices. Pure Love, aired just this July 2014 and starring Alex Gonzaga, is an ABS-CBN adaptation of the original series 49 Days which it also broadcasted in 2011.

Stuart Hall’s works on representation and encoding were employed for this research. Halls’s encoding asserts that the way text or message is created/encoded is influenced by the frameworks of knowledge such as production routines and assumption of audience. Representation as Hall also described, on the other hand, deals on how meaning is produced and exchanged through use of language, signs and/or images to represent the world meaningfully.

From the analysis of the texts, the Filipino adaptation of Pure Love adapted many changes. The title itself changed from 49 Days to Pure Love instead as that 49 days is related on a Korean religious belief on death which is different from the forty days Filipinos have. The overall mood of the story also changed as the adaptation turned out to be light-hearted with jokes for instance being cracked by the main cast, Alex Gonzaga, as compared to the original with a more serious tone. The storyline also leaned more on the romantic love aspect more than the journey of the soul like in 49 Days. Even the ending turned to a comparatively happier one whereas in the Korean version, the main protagonist died. This shows that a Koreanovela adaptation may undergo a lot of changes depending on the network’s practices and what it perceives is necessary to be adjusted to suit the Filipino culture and can catch the interest of a wider audience which Pure Love achieved for it received considerably high ratings.