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<\/i> 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<\/i>, or greasy, potty-mouthed Colin Farrell filling Sonny Crockett’s shoes in a new Miami Vice<\/i> 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.)<\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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?<\/p>\n
That’s the quandry I’ve been struggling with ever since the premiere of the SciFi Channel<\/a>‘s new version of Battlestar Galactica<\/i>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The original Battlestar Galactica<\/i>, in case you don’t remember it, ran for a single season in 1978-79. Widely dismissed at the time as a rip-off of Star Wars<\/i>, Battlestar<\/i> was in fact a curious melding of space opera, Western motif, the faddish notion that all the mysteries of human history had extraterrestrial explanations, and the religious beliefs of the show’s Mormon creator, Glen Larson. The premise of the series was relatively complex (and, I might add, quite unlike that of Star Wars<\/i> once you got past the visual similarities between the two). Here’s the set-up: Long ago, tribes of ancient, space-travelling humans settled on twelve planets, known as the Colonies. For the past thousand years, the Colonies had been at war with a race of alien robots known as Cylons; the humans’ primary weapon in this war was a fleet of battlestars, immense aircraft carriers in space that could launch waves of small but powerful Viper fighters. As the series begins, the Cylons finally manage to gain the upper hand, thanks to a human traitor called Baltar, and in the holocaust that follows, the Colonies are obliterated and all the battlestars destroyed save one, the Galactica<\/i>. The survivors of the Colonies take to the stars in whatever broken-down ships they can find and, under the protection of the last battlestar, they set out on an impossible quest to find the legendary Thirteenth Colony, a planet somewhere out there in the endless sea of space known as Earth. No one knows if Earth even exists, or if the humans living there will be advanced enough to offer assistance or if they will be much more primitive than the Colonials. Meanwhile, the ruthless Cylons are in pursuit, determined to exterminate every last human in existence…<\/p>\n