Well, the Sci Fi Channel’s new Flash Gordon series premiered over the weekend. I didn’t see it myself — I don’t have cable, because I’m too cheap to pay a monthly fee for another hundred channels of The Same Old Crap™ just so I can catch the occasional novelty — but from what I’m finding on the web this morning, I gather it wasn’t good. One fellow is even calling for a “jihad against the Sci Fi Channel” before it can “reimagine” any other older properties. (Someone should’ve thought of that following the crappy Dune miniseries a few years ago — arg! It still burns!)

I’m reserving final judgment on the show until I manage to see it for myself, but based on what I’ve been reading, I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll approve of it any more than anyone I linked above. I can’t say I’m surprised, given the Sci Fi Channel’s spotty record and poor reputation among its target audience, but I am disappointed. While I tend to oppose remakes in general, I think Flash Gordon is a hero that can (and perhaps should) be revived and reinterpreted for each new generation, just as Batman and Superman have been revisited many times; as the premiere has inched closer, I’ve honestly been looking forward to a 21st Century take on what’s been called “the original space adventure.”

(I’m sure some of my loyal readers are probably crying “hypocrite!” right now because I rail all the time about remakes but I’m okay with a new Flash Gordon. Basically, he rationalized, it’s because not all remakes are created equal. It’s pretty much a given that most people aren’t familiar with the decades-old, original source material for Flash, the Man of Steel, or the Caped Crusader; rather, it’s the idea of these characters that is well-known. Which means you can justify trying to create a new interpretation of these characters every so often, because it’s not a particular movie or radio show or serial being revisited, it’s the idea. I think you can even make the argument that such interpretations don’t even deserve the title “remake,” at least not in the sense it’s usually employed. They’re more like fresh productions of time-honored stage plays. No one complains, for instance, that somebody is staging A Streetcar Named Desire with a new cast. They may say that Brando is the definitive — or at least their preferred — Stanley, but few people actually say a new production is a bad idea altogether, because it’s not the Brando movie that’s being revisited, it’s the original Arthur Miller play. Same thing here: Flash Gordon is a comic-book character, even though few people remember that nowadays, and a new movie or TV series can be based on that comic rather than the earlier movie — or other media — adaptations.

Remakes of landmark movies and TV series are more problematic, because the imagery and actors associated with them tend to have such a strong presence in the public mind. The icons in these cases aren’t so much the characters, like Flash Gordon or Batman, but the specific faces that have portrayed those characters. For example, I personally think this new Star Trek movie everyone is buzzing about, which will feature new actors playing young versions of Kirk, Spock, et. al., is a terrible idea, because Kirk has William Shatner’s face, and Spock has Leonard Nimoy’s voice, and that’s all there is to it. But that’s a rant for another time. The bottom line is, some remakes are easier for me to swallow than others, and if that makes me a hypocrite, then so be it, I suppose.)

In my opinion, the basic premise of Flash Gordon — three companions tossed together by circumstance who set out on an impossible mission to save the world and get lost on an alien planet, fighting monsters and enemies of all descriptions, with an implacably evil despot at the heart of all their troubles — is timeless. I’ve enjoyed Flash in all his various forms over the years, starting with the 1930s serials (which ran on one of my local TV stations when I was a kid) and continuing through the 1980 movie (yes, it’s a bad movie, but it’s entertainingly bad and has the virtue of looking and sounding like nothing else made before or since), the ’80s-vintage cartoon, a number of paperback novels I’ve run across over the years, and, most recently, the original newspaper comic strips by Alex Raymond. Each new version has had its strengths and weaknesses, obviously, and I have my favorites among them — the serial and the 1980 film have stayed with me over the years, the other variants, not so much — but I’m not so attached to any one version that I would reject out of hand a new attempt at bringing Raymond’s hero to life.

Ideally, I’d love to see a version that was as faithful to Raymond as possible, in terms of story and especially the look of his art. That means it would be a period piece set in the 1930s, with the same swashbuckling tone as Raiders of the Lost Ark — i.e., it takes itself seriously but is not brooding, with enough humor and joie de vivre to say to the audience, “hey, this is fun, isn’t it,” but not so many yucks as to suggest that this thing is a big campy joke. Basically, I’d like to see the old serials — which were surprisingly faithful, given the limitations of the time — done with a decent budget and believable special effects.

I realize, of course, that my personal vision of a new Flash Gordon is probably unrealistic and wouldn’t be of much interest to a wide audience. Nevertheless, I think a Flash project could be made that would pay tribute to all its predecessors, remain faithful to its roots, bring something new to an old tale, and remain fun and exciting. But from the sounds of it, that’s not what the Sci Fi Channel has produced.

No doubt I’ll have more to say after I get a look at the new show…