On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 6:33 AM, Wesley McGee <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 11:56 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I am less irritated by the re-pumping of old TV shows than I used to be. A >> cops and robbers show set in Hawaii makes good sense. I guess CBS could have >> pretended they were not ripping off Five-0, but in many ways that would >> really be irritating. A few years ago I thought they were going to give us >> CSI: Hawaii; I am happier with a Five-O reboot. >> >> Wat does make me scratch my head is when they choose to re-make shows that >> were not very good in the first place. With all due respect to affectionate >> fans of the original, Knight Rider, A-Team, and Wonder Woman were all really >> rotten shows the first time around. >> > > I'm not sure I get this at all. You remake a bad show/movie exactly because > the original was bad (or unknown) and you hope you can do it better. Why > remake a good or great film or TV show, if you don't think you can improve > on it? Was it a better idea for "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" to become a Adam > Sandler movie? And their hearts were in the right place, "Guess Who's Coming > to Dinner?" was not improved with substituting Ashton Kutcher for Sidney > Poitier and Bernie Mac for Spencer Tracy. If you remake something good and > can't improve on it, it sort of devalues the original, but worse, it harms > the new take on it in ways worse than if it was a standalone bad > film/program. Remaking a good show or film is perhaps much, much harder > because it will always be compared to the original, and unless you ace it, > it will be viewed negatively. > > Now, I think Wonder Woman is a bad example here because the plan was not > remaking a show but adapting a character. I'm sure a lot of people your age > see Lynda Carter as the canonical Wonder Woman, but there are a growing > number of people who first saw WW from her comic, from the Justice League > cartoon, or from the last of the 'Superfriends' series "The Super Powers > Show" or the later 80s Superman cartoon. (Any more and I'm liable to drift > far off topic). > > Now, what may lead people to decide on whether to do a remake or to just > lift an idea is how specific the elements they want to use are. Show about > magical girl and how she and mortals interact is at a high enough derivative > function to describe "Bewitched", "I Dream of Jeannie", "Wonder Woman", > "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", "Sailor Moon" and who knows how many other > programs. Make it specific enough like "Witch marries mortal, over > disapproval of her family. She and mortal conspire to keep her powers secret > from other mortals" and it is probably close enough to Bewitched to make > them consider just going ahead and using the name. (Yeah, of course > development starts from the opposite direction. We own "Bewitched". Make a > new TV show out of it!) > My claim here is that your point about the pointlessness of remaking successful originals applies more often to films than television shows; the latter depending more on a basic premise, not the recycling of stories and even scripts (was it the remake of Psycho that was basically replicated word for word and shot for shot?). If I want to make a TV show about a crack, secrete espionage unit that relies more on guile and manipulation than shooting, I might as well call it Mission:Impossible than think up a new name and market it as "kind of like M:I in the 21st century" (assuming I already own the rights to the show). Note I am not arguing that this kind of recycling is the best or highest form of programming, just that I am less irritated by it than I used to be, and that I prefer them being honest about the copying and imitation, rather than pretending they are doing something unique. And if they are going to copy, I would rather then copy a good show than a bad one. It makes more sense to me to try to redo a show like Rockford Files, or Twilight Zone, than a ridiculously bad show. Just to be clear, I do not think that Lynda Carter was the canonical Wonder Woman; I think Wonder Woman was a really bad television show not worthy of being copied (or defended against copying). If the point of the recently discussed series was to capitalize on some new popularity of the character among younger people who have really enjoyed the comic books (and not to capitalize on kitsch nostalgia from the 70s) then I agree it is not a good example of what I am talking about. Though it seemed most of what I read about that show here was angst that the new show would deviate from costume or other details from the original show. And to tidy up another point, while I agree that the remake of GWCTD was unsuccessful, the twist they put on it made sense, and its problem was more execution than conceptualization. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
