How come no one complains about the old school remakes?

[EmmanuelZorg]

I mean the ones like Scarface, The Thing, The Fly and Cape Fear? what is the difference between the older remakes and today's?

Do people even realize Scarface was a remake? i guess they are too lazy to do their research.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

I think because waiting so long to remake a film allows you to place it in an entirely new era and context. Scarface was able to go from a depression-era American gangster motif to a Reagan-era Cuban drug dealer motif. Remaking a movie that feels like it was just put out yesterday just smacks of opportunism and lack of creativity.

 

[Checkmate]

Because they didn't have the Internet back then.

 

[John Picard]

I mean the ones like Scarface, The Thing, The Fly and Cape Fear? what is the difference between the older remakes and today's?

Do people even realize Scarface was a remake? i guess they are too lazy to do their research.

You forgot to mention Heaven Can Wait.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Because they didn't have the Internet back then.

The Internet is just a remake of the letters page.

 

[T'Baio]

Fucking internet raped my childhood, man. I loved the letters page.

 

[Christopher]

I mean the ones like Scarface, The Thing, The Fly and Cape Fear? what is the difference between the older remakes and today's?

The passage of time. Heck, it makes me feel old for you to call those films "old school remakes." I don't doubt there were complaints about Hollywood's "lack of creativity" when they came out, but time has passed and people have grown up with them, so they accept them and maybe aren't even aware of their predecessors, as you say.

Now, you want to get really old-school, how about the half-dozen cinematic versions of The Wizard of Oz that were produced in the two decades prior to the Judy Garland version? What about the various versions of The Front Page produced just a few years apart? Remakes were actually a lot more common 70-100 years ago than they are today, probably because there was no home video and less widespread distribution, so once a film was gone, it was gone.

But human perception includes persistent flaws such as the recency illusion. We notice the little annoyances that are going on around us today, but tend to forget the ones that happened in the past or else just never read about them when we learn about history. So that creates the illusory impression that the patterns that bug us today never existed until recently, when in fact they've always been around.

You get the same thing in Star Trek fandom. Today the purists are screaming about how the Abrams movie is the worst corruption of Trek ever, and are conveniently forgetting that they were saying the same thing about Enterprise five years ago. Or that twenty-odd years ago, their forebears were screaming about what an obscenity it was to do Star Trek with some bald French guy and a robot instead of Kirk and Spock. Given enough time, we get used to things. They become part of the landscape. So we react more strongly to new things than to older things that are really no different.

 

[Teelie]

Another possibility is how many recent remakes have been as good or even better than their predecessor? The reason The Thing, Scarface, etc. are considered successful and memorable movies is they were able to top their previous incarnations. Of course you'll have people who disagree and think the original was better but the general consensus is the remake is superior. Of course there are far more remakes that fail to accomplish that and are subsequently forgotten. The most notable one I can think of is the Psycho remake that was an attempt to almost frame-by-frame recreate the original. It was a dud but more recognized for that fact than anything else.

 

[paudemge]

I mean the ones like Scarface, The Thing, The Fly and Cape Fear? what is the difference between the older remakes and today's?

As others have said, passage of time, plus the fact those are all pretty good movies doesn't hurt either.

 

[Too Much Fun]

I mean the ones like Scarface, The Thing, The Fly and Cape Fear? what is the difference between the older remakes and today's?

Do people even realize Scarface was a remake? i guess they are too lazy to do their research.

I think the reason those remakes are not as frowned upon as others is not simply because so much time passed between the original and the remake. It's also the fact that the original wasn't exactly a classic in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the originals were bad. I've seen the original "The Fly" and thought it was great, but that movie and the other ones listed were not exactly timeless masterpieces. They were respectable, but not considered some of the most iconic, prestigious movies of the past.

There was room for improvement with all of them, and the remakes were so original and clever in their own right, that their re-working of an old plot and old title with a new sheen did not come across as gratuitous or unnecessary. On the other hand, remaking a movie like "Casablanca", "Citizen Kane", "Gone With the Wind", or even "Star Wars" would be just stupid, no matter how long after their original release Hollywood waits. The actors and characters as well as the writing and directing styles on display in them create perfect time capsules of high water marks of cinema for their period and messing with that would be sacrilege.

What really bothers me is the remakes of movies that are truly worthy of all-time classic status, which had a unique charm and originality that made them perfect as they were, and therefore could not possibly be improved upon. For example, "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", "King Kong", "Psycho", and "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three".

I thought there was room for improvement with "Wonka" since it had the wrong title and interpreted a dark novel as much lighter than it originally was, but the remake was so misguided, it proved that the film, flaws and all, was a case of "if it a'int broke, don't fix it". I feel the same way about the rest of the movies I listed.

 

[Obiwanshinobi]

essentially its just easier. the blueprints already there. maybe we should just accept it to be it is what it is and that this is a cyclical thing, like this 3D kick we've been on lately.

 

[Mistral]

I think in the past it was more about someone saying-there's a good movie there but I have a way to make it better. Now, its more about, well, that movie got NAME out there but performed poorly(or didn't)-let's do it again only we'll blow up more cars, put in more flash and pretend the previous iteration didn't exist-and we'll save production money (Hah!) doing something that has been done before. No exploring new ideas from scratch, creating all kinds of new and unique issues-just tried and true $ makers...

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Yeah, it's just about taking a proven concept and making it look more contemporary, with explosions and puking and state-of-the-art CGI.

You get the same thing in Star Trek fandom. Today the purists are screaming about how the Abrams movie is the worst corruption of Trek ever, and are conveniently forgetting that they were saying the same thing about Enterprise five years ago. Or that twenty-odd years ago, their forebears were screaming about what an obscenity it was to do Star Trek with some bald French guy and a robot instead of Kirk and Spock. Given enough time, we get used to things. They become part of the landscape. So we react more strongly to new things than to older things that are really no different.

Not exactly the same thing. TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT were continuations, not remakes, and only a bunch of cranks complained about them. nuTrek is not only a re-imagining, but a mind-bendingly bad one.

 

[rramarr]

They need to remake movies we forgot about not the ones that are still on saturday morning TV.

 

[Davros]

Another thing about those remakes are that they were decent, and in some cases better than the original.

 

[Christopher]

As others have said, passage of time, plus the fact those are all pretty good movies doesn't hurt either.

Part of the same thing, really. In any time period, there are a few good remakes and a lot of bad ones. But decades later, it's only the good ones that get attention paid to them, and the bad ones tend to be less well-known. This creates the false impression that remakes were better in the past. (You can substitute just about anything for "remakes" and get the same result. The present looks worse to us than the past because our memory of the past is selective and tends to gloss over the bad stuff.)

Not exactly the same thing. TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT were continuations, not remakes, and only a bunch of cranks complained about them. nuTrek is not only a re-imagining, but a mind-bendingly bad one.

You're just making my case for me. The controversies over the new movie today are the same as the controversies about TMP and TNG and so on. It was just a few years ago that plenty of people on this BBS were insisting that ENT wasn't a true continuation because of its differences in interpretation, and there were people saying that about TMP and TWOK and TNG back when we had Starlog and Cinefantastique letter columns instead of the Internet. The only real difference is time and perspective. You've had time to get used to thinking of all those different Trek productions as continuations and have forgotten or trivialized the controversies. Because time has a way of softening things.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Maybe it's because there was no Internet, but I don't remember very much negativism toward the movies or TNG. I remember one serial whiner who hated DS9 on the AOL boards when I first came online. There were fairly significant numbers of complainers for VOY and ENT, because the audience had become more miserable by then.

If they had done a reboot instead of TNG back in the 80s, there probably would have been more of an uproar (and I don't think it would have gone over as well).

 

[23skidoo]

Because they didn't have the Internet back then.

That's the main thing. Also in some cases 30-40-50 years had passed between remakes. We're seeing remakes today of films and TV shows that are only 20 years old. And in the case of the planned big-screen reboot of BSG, not even a few years.

Back in the day the only people who were heard to complain were the critics, and believe me they bitched like mad when Scarface came out. And The Fly.

Also, we didn't have DVD and widespread cable networks making things like the original Scarface and The Fly ubiquitous. Anyone with $15 to blow can buy the original A Team seasons at Wal-Mart. And depending what part of the world you're in you can also access a lot of "originals" via things like Hulu.

Up until the mid-80s something like the original Scarface only showed up once in a blue moon on the late late late late late late show. Sometimes there might be a VHS kicking around, but it's not the same. Also in many cases the remakes were of very obscure films. If 5% of the audience who went to see Brooke Shields romp around in 1980s The Blue Lagoon were aware it was also a remake of a 1949 film which, in turn, was based on a novel, I'd be surprised. And if you found enough of those people who had seen the original, or read the book, to fill the corner booth of a Starbucks, I'd be stunned.

If you want to go further back, say to the 1960s, the 50s, and earlier where it was not uncommon for remakes to be made within the same calendar year, especially if it was a case of a foreign film being remade for American audiences, the situation was in many ways worse than it is today. But people back then didn't care. Movies cost maybe a buck to go see, and the novelty was still the kind. And there was absolutely no such thing as home video, so if, say, someone had made a Scarface remake in 1962 odds are maybe 10% of the audience would have even been aware of the original.

I'm sure when Hammer remade Frankenstein and Dracula most of its audience, while they may have been aware of the Karloff/Lugosi originals, likely had never seen them.

However today you look at someone doing, well, a remake of BSG. The percentage of the audience who would go to see such a film in the 2010s who were a) aware of and b) had seen either the original series or the Moore/Eick version, would be approaching 100%. And 99% of those people would be on the Internet either supporting or complaining about it.

We also have to make the distinction between a remake and a retelling. As far as I'm concerned retellings of classic stories such as Hounds of the Baskervilles, or Hamlet, are not remakes. Any more than the multiple stage productions of Shakespeare that happen every year. For me a remake is when a story made for the screen (big or small screen) is redone.

Which means Peter Jackson's version of Lord of the Rings is not a remake of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, any more than his version of the Hobbit will be a remake of the Rankin & Bass cartoon.

Alex

 

[Greg Cox]

Actually, things have improved in one respect. The great thing about the new remakes is that it almost always means that the earlier versions get a lot more exposure: new DVD releases, airings on TCM, reviews and retrospectives, etc.

Back in the old days, the studios used to suppress the previous versions in favor of their new productions. They'd bury the old version in a vault, hoping that people would forget it existed. Now we get to enjoy alll the versions at once.

When the new SHERLOCK HOLMES movie came out, for instance, TCM ran a great Holmes marathon. And plently of older, more obscure Holmes adaptations came out on DVD.

So bring on the remakes. It's the best way to keep the original classics alive and in print.

 

[Shazam!]

You get the same thing in Star Trek fandom.

Star Trek has never been remade though. In the case of Trek XI, it occupies some nebulous territory between remake/reboot/sequel to the point where fans can't even decide if Spock Prime is the original Spock or not making it even trickier for fans to partake in reasoned discussion because even the most fundamental aspects of the movie can't be agreed.