I’ve thought a lot over the past few weeks about remakes, or “reimaginings,” as TV and movie producers have pretentiously taken to calling them. They’re nothing new, of course — updating older entertainment properties for a new generation has been a common industry practice since at least the early sound era, when a number of prominent silent films were redone as talkies. These days, however, there seem to be a lot more of them being made than there used to be. A recent TV Guide article listed about a dozen old TV shows that are currently being transformed into feature films. I imagine most of these will probably be of the smug, let’s-make-fun-of-the-entertainment-of-our-youth variety that’s been so popular recently. I hate those treatments, myself. I don’t see any reason to mock things simply because they’re a couple decades removed from the cutting edge. The thought of Jim Carrey as The Six Million Dollar Man, or greasy, potty-mouthed Colin Farrell filling Sonny Crockett’s shoes in a new Miami Vice makes me want to hurt someone. Badly. (By the way, I didn’t make up those projects or attach those names to them. They’re both for real, at least according to the aforementioned article.)
As much as I despise those disrespectful parodies, though, they’re generally easy to dismiss. They tend to have short lives at the box office and are quickly forgotten, while the original properties live on in the memories of those who love them. Sometimes the remakes even help the originals because a DVD release of the old frequently goes along with the marketing of the new. But what happens when the remake is no parody? What if the new version is a serious attempt to update and improve upon a property that was badly flawed, despite its charms? What’s the loyal fanboy to do when it turns out the remake actually is better than the original in many respects, and even seems poised to eclipse the memory of the original in the minds of the general public?
That’s the quandry I’ve been struggling with ever since the premiere of the SciFi Channel‘s new version of Battlestar Galactica.
