So, I read in Variety last week that ABC and Warner Bros. are planning to remake V, the classic ’80s TV mini-series about extra-terrestrial Visitors who aren’t what they appear to be taking over the Earth in an allegorical retelling of the rise of the Nazism.

I’m sure my three loyal readers can guess what I think of that idea.

I was in my early teens when V first aired, and it made a huge impact on me. I found it riveting — I remember being drenched in flop sweat during the climatic battle when the Visitors pummel the rebel camp in the mountains above LA — as well as terrifying in its political implications, i.e., that our supposedly liberty-loving society could so easily tilt into fascism.

The show admittedly suffered from a number of illogical notions. Even as an uncritical kid who was willing to watch damn near anything if it involved spaceships and blasters, I knew it was unlikely that a species who had mastered anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel would bother coming light-years to steal another planet’s water instead of just synthesizing it back home. It’s not that hard, after all, especially if you have vast amounts of available energy, which these guys obviously did (that whole anti-gravity/FTL thing again). But the series’ execution was masterful and seductive enough, and the revelations gradual enough, that you bought into it. The discovery of the Visitors’ true nature was shocking and unexpected, and their evil plans for the human race utterly horrifying. Also, the head alien baddie, the sadistic Diana (pictured above), had certain, ahem, charms that kept the male teenage demographic (that would have been me) plenty interested…

I bought the original mini-series on DVD some time ago and I think it still holds up pretty well, despite the limitations of vintage special effects, television-level budgets, and the occasional bad ’80s hair-do or fashion choice. (For the record, I’m only talking about the original mini-series here; the sequel mini-series, which was called V: The Final Battle, and the short-lived weekly series that followed V:TFB were pretty bad in their day and I can only imagine they’re much worse now.) I find that the drama of the story and its essential themes remain unaffected by the passage of 20 years, so, as is so often the case when I hear of an impending remake, I simply don’t see the need to visit this concept again.

Believe it or not, though, this entry really isn’t intended to be a rant about yet another of my early favorites getting recycled. I long ago internalized the fact that pretty much everything that meant anything to me growing up is destined to be made over into either an ironic parody of the original or a grim-faced “edgy” interpretation for our oh-so-angsty era. However, this news does prompt an idea I think I’ve pondered on this blog before: it seems like our culture has reached some kind of stopping point, for lack of a better term. Here in our self-aware, information-soaked post-modernist world, we don’t seem to be creating much anymore; instead, we’re just cannibalizing what came before.

But wait, you may be saying, remakes are as old as television and movies themselves. And indeed they are. Even older, when you think about it. (I’m pretty sure I’ve read that many of Shakespeare’s best-known plays were simply his masterful takes on stories the audiences already knew.) But the ratio of remakes to original films seems to have increased greatly over the last few years, and its no longer just the obscure or failed properties that get targeted. Now it’s the hits and well-remembered (cult) classics, too.* Don’t believe me? Check out this list of upcoming feature-film remakes, which includes “reimaginings” of such well-known and successful films as Poltergeist, RoboCop, Highlander, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Footloose, Escape from New York, Friday the 13th, Phantasm, All of Me… the list goes on and on. Many of those slated to be remade are “small” films, genre pictures like horror or fantasy, or cult classics that found their following on home video, but they’re certainly well known among people of my generation, and I’d daresay that many if not most of them are just like V: older, yes, dated in some regards but still perfectly serviceable and still beloved by a lot of people.**

I see this same regurgitation of existing material happening in music, too, with the growing popularity of “mash-ups”: two or more old songs mixed together to create a “new” one. These things are often very clever, and they have their fans (The Girlfriend, for example, likes them a lot and admires the skill behind the really good or unexpected mashings; it’s something we’ve had to agree to disagree on), but I have a real problem with them because I can’t hear them as anything but two old songs joined together. In other words, I don’t hear a new, original piece made from components of other pieces; I hear the original pieces, bent and twisted to fit this new form. It’s not the same as writing a new song that happens to borrow a chord from the Stones or whatever, and it’s not even the same as a cover, because you’re not recording your own version of an earlier song, you’re building a song from other people’s performances of their songs, and that troubles me. I have a determinedly analog mindset, I guess, because I see media as something that should be distinct and enduring, not merely raw material that can be chopped up and recombined whenever someone thinks it would be cool to hear “Stairway to Heaven” and “Waltzing Matilda” at the same time. But that perhaps is another topic.

Here’s the thing that just keeps occurring to me every time I think about this stuff (which happens often and, as you can probably tell, not too coherently): beginning in the mid-90s, we started revisiting fashion, music, and film from first the ’70s and now the ’80s. This same sort of thing was happening, to a lesser extent, when I was a kid in the ’80s, when we dabbled with fashions and music from the ’50s and ’60s. But what are going to be revisiting 20 years from now? Is there a fashion, a musical sound, a literary mode, a hit movie, anything that epitomizes our moment in history? I don’t think there is, because so much of what we’re doing right now is a repurposing, a remake, or an outright ripoff of the recent past. We’ve plateau’d, and we’re now just mining the previous few decades not for inspiration but for substance itself. Maybe this is the aftermath of the post-modern age, when everything is freed from context and becomes simply ubiquitous, or perhaps of an information revolution that makes it so damn easy to meld snippets of other people’s work, or of a marketing machine of unprecedented proportions that values the bottom line over true originality. The big question is whether this is a momentary thing that will eventually be broken down by some “new wave” or if this is pretty much how it’s going to be from here on out.

However that all turns out, I think the idea of remaking V really blows. Just in case you couldn’t guess.

* I have a theory for that. I think it’s because Hollywood is run by marketing people now instead of filmmakers, and in the marketing mentality, it’s better to repackage a known “brand” — i.e., something that has a title people have heard of — than to try and drum up brand awareness for something entirely new.

** I think what really rankles me about the remakes is the implication that the original is somehow deficient simply because it is old. Yes, I’m still pissed about the dissing of the original Battlestar Galactica in the heady months after the remake premiered, and yes, I do take this stuff personally. Because these earlier shows mean something to me, and to a lot of other people as well, and it bites having a bunch of young brats trying to tell us our feelings — which we’ve carried for decades — are misplaced because “they just weren’t that good, man.”

Interestingly enough, this situation with V has a number of parallels to what happened with Battlestar. The star of the old Battlestar, Richard Hatch, spent years trying to drum up interest in a “next generation” concept called Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming, even going so far as to sink a significant amount of his own money into making a trailer. At one point, the series’ creator Glen Larson was also trying to get a continuation of the old Battlestar off the ground. Instead of either of these projects, which would’ve been updated, obviously, but would also have paid respect to the original version, we ended up with a complete reboot (which I know a lot of people prefer to the original; I do not, and I’m not interested in refighting this battle, so don’t try to engage me).

In the case of V, that show’s creator, Kenneth Johnson, has also been trying to attract interest for a continuation of his original miniseries (he was not involved in V: the Final Battle or V: The Series), without much luck, sadly. This remake project mentioned in Variety is not Johnson’s; it would be a square-one reboot. Johnson’s got a statement about that up on his website. It is understandably a bit defensive:

When projects that bore Kenny’s original creative stamp and control have been taken on by other people, audiences have seen the results: earlier attempts at reviving V, as well as The Incredible Hulk movies and the recently reimagined Bionic Woman all proved to be serious misfires which unfortunately failed with the critics and with the public.

Although I personally am content with the 20-year-old V, I would be interested in seeing Kenny’s update. I doubt it will ever happen, though. The suits in charge of things just don’t think in those terms of revivals. But I do see that Johnson’s managed to publish his Second Generation novel, at least. I’ll have to check that out…