Keeping the old stories...

I just wanted to rant a bit on Hollywood’s practice of revamping fictional characters of the past for today’s audiences.

To give a clear picture of where I’m coming from, I grew up on cartoons, shows and video games from the 1980’s to early 90’s. I along with many of my age range cease to let go of those childhood days, and we continue to take joy in going to youtube for episodes of He-Man, downloading them music from Power Rangers and Dragon Ball Z, or paying unrealistic dollars on merchandise from Transformers on Ebay.
Members of this audience remember the significance of these characters and their storylines.

For several years but especially since the mid 2000’s, Hollywood has cashed in on our old beloved stories. Sometimes they are done correctly, sometimes not. The common issue that arises is that the original audience of the story isn’t taken into as much consideration. This is to be expected since there is a whole new audience to entertain. But too many times the original theme, message or story is distorted, and the filmmakers are content to merely keep the external characteristics of the story (such as character appearance, names, taglines, familiar designs) rather than the essence of the story.

One example is the 2000 movie remake of Rocky & Bullwinkle. It acts less like a movie re-telling of the show, and more like a movie that’s ABOUT the show. In the film, the characters leave the T.V. world, and into the real world. This method of remaking a story makes as much sense as deciding to make a movie based on the Lord of the Rings book, but in the film version, the hobbits come out of the book and meet up with Tolkien. The only thing the filmmakers banked on was the use of the characters’ names and images. The movie Dragonball Evolution showed only minor references to the actual storyline of the Dragonball comic. For people unfamiliar with the story, having a spikey-haired protagonist performing unrealistic martial-arts might be enough of a connection. But in truth, there should have been less effort in making the main character look like a cartoon, and more spent in actually following what the story was about.

The audiences of these shows who are now grown are very prominent. Tons of merchandise such as T-shirts and DVD box sets are testimony to the size of this audience. Using poor methods of remaking these old shows excludes several members of this audience. By simply keeping faithful to original storylines and themes, filmmakers can keep the demographics of early to late twenties for these kinds of movies. Impress them enough, and members of this audience will likely even buy expensive collector’s editions of these movie remakes. It’s nothing more than good marketing sense.