The A-Team (comic) finally breaks the taboo (IDW comic spoilers)

[23skidoo]

I picked up the first issue of IDW's new A-Team comic book, based upon the upcoming movie continuity (it doesn't appear to be an adaptation of the movie).

It wasn't too bad. Got a feel for the new takes on the characters, and there's a funny shout out to a certain maverick politician from up north.

But about 2/3 of the way through something happens that actually makes me sad.

During battle, both Hannibal and BA shoot several people dead (including one somewhat bloody incident).

You might say so what to that, unless you're of the generation that grew up watching the original series and that understands one of the show's major charms and why it was so popular and well-remembered.

MacGyver could make a working space shuttle out of a piece of string and a 9 volt battery.

John Steed and Emma Peel may have been going at it like rabbits in their off hours, but there was never to be anything more than a peck on the cheek on screen.

Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers had bionic limbs that worked fine despite the fact that in reality the torque involved in running at 60 mph, jumping 100 feet or pulling a safe out of a wall would destroy their remaining real limb and most of their organs.

Mission Impossible is about a team of virtually faceless individuals brought together by a virtually faceless leader.

And so on. These are the rules. Most involving suspension of disbelief, they were what the shows relied on to maintain interest in the viewers.

The A-Team had a major rule. They could cause incredible car crashes, blow up buildings, and fire machine guns for hours on end. And no one ever died.

It was one of the rules, and one of the things that made the series a cult favorite. Yes it was unrealistic. It was also funny. And it furthered the filmmaking cliche of people being shown getting out of car wrecks unhurt, even if they just went off a cliff. But no one cared - Steven J Cannell wasn't making a documentary, he was making a comedy action series based very loosely on the Dirty Dozen.

Obviously the comic and the upcoming film are different animals. And the fact the trailer makes things look so much like the original series -- even including the van -- gives me confidence that they're remember what made the series so popular. The comic missed the point, I think.

Hopefully the film will understand "the rules", because there have been more than a few TV shows made into movies that I believe flopped because they in some way broke the rules. The Avengers movie inserted a romance between Steed and Peel. I Spy abandoned the original Robert Culp-Bill Cosby idea of the two being equal partners (plus it made the Cosby character comic relief which he was not in the original series). Wild Wild West messed around too much with the characters of Jim West and Dr. Loveless. Mission Impossible didn't bomb, obviously, but it alienated a lot of fans of the TV series by making it into the Tom Cruise Show, not to mention making Jim Phelps a villain. Again, a case of the writers missing the point of the original series, though in that case they got lucky and did it in such a way that enough people liked to make it a franchise.

If there were more successes than failures in terms of TV adaptations abandoning the rules, then I might say "go for it - make The A Team into a clone of The Losers". But, really, in terms of the big screen (and more than a few times on the little screen, too), remakes have failed because they forgot or ignored why the original series was so popular.

If you want the example that ultimately proves my point, the Get Smart movie is possibly the most successful big-screen remake I've ever seen in terms of getting things right. Yes, they reinvented a few things, they updated others, and they allowed Steve Carrell to do a version of Max that wasn't an imitation of Don Adams. Yet the show stuck to the basic rules and as a result it worked. They could have decided to "darken" Max and make him a Jack Bauer-type character. Or make 99 into the villain of the piece. They didn't. And it worked.

I hope the A Team film does the same. The comic just jarred me a little, is all.

Alex

 

[auntiehill]

Actually, the "no one ever died" rule is a fallacy. Characters did die, it just mostly happened off-screen. The sheriff in "Sheriffs of Rivertown" was killed, Ray in "A Nice Place to Visit" was murdered, and Fullbright was killed, and died, on screen, at Hannibal's feet.

But yes, the main attraction of the The A-Team is that, despite all the violence, it really wasn't a mean-spirited show. It was cartoonish violence without any real consequence. I remember one particularly ridiculous scene in "Battle of Bel-Air" (I think) where the baddies helicopter smashes into a cliff, bursts into flames, crumbles to the ground, and then they cut to the guys climbing out of the wreckage, relatively unharmed. Yeaaahhhh, right.

What really made the series work, aside from the silly stunts and crashes, was the fact that the guys all truly liked each other. It was about camaraderie and helping the little guy overcome the bad guy. That was the true heart of the show: the friendship between the guys and the way the characters worked together.

I have VERY mixed feelings about the film; if they try to make it "dark and gritty," they will lose the entire theme of the series. If they turn one team member against another, then it won't be "The A-Team" anymore. I really, really hope that doesn't happen, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[John Picard]

Face it -- people die.

 

[captcalhoun]

from what Carnahan's said, the movie will see them kill people because they're fucking Green Berets. he particularly said Murdoch is nuts but you're also slightly scared of him because he's a soldier and he could kill you.

as a kid, i never really took notice of whether anyone died or not. as an adult, i find it ridiculous that a Special Forces A-team can't hit the wide side of a barn.

 

[Christopher]

Mission Impossible is about a team of virtually faceless individuals...

Including a famous actor/magician and a celebrated supermodel. Not exactly faceless. I often wonder how Rollin and Cinnamon could manage to pull off undercover roles in stateside missions. I could buy it when they were overseas, given the less pervasive global media culture of the day, but stateside, people should've recognized them. Not to mention that there were episodes (such as "The Trial" and "The Confession" in the first season alone) where team members appeared on national or global television as part of rather shocking events that would no doubt be remembered for years to come, and yet were able to continue going unrecognized in subsequent missions.

The A-Team had a major rule. They could cause incredible car crashes, blow up buildings, and fire machine guns for hours on end. And no one ever died.

It was one of the rules, and one of the things that made the series a cult favorite. Yes it was unrealistic. It was also funny. And it furthered the filmmaking cliche of people being shown getting out of car wrecks unhurt, even if they just went off a cliff. But no one cared - Steven J Cannell wasn't making a documentary, he was making a comedy action series based very loosely on the Dirty Dozen.

Yep. The A-Team was a live-action cartoon. The plots were just excuses for four wacky characters to do their schticks. The violence was a parody of '80s action shows.

Hopefully the film will understand "the rules", because there have been more than a few TV shows made into movies that I believe flopped because they in some way broke the rules.

I agree it's unfortunate when a remake misses the point of the original, but I don't agree that's a causative factor when the remake flops. After all, the established fanbase for any property, especially a decades-old show, is going to be comparatively small relative to the audience size a feature film needs to succeed. That's why the remakes change things -- the goal is to make the films appealing and satisfying to a broader audience that isn't necessarily familiar with the property being adapted. Missing the point or betraying the spirit of the original may alienate pre-existing fans of the original, but those fans won't make up the majority of people filling seats in the theaters, not unless the film is so bad in other respects that the loyal fans are the only ones who come anyway. That's the thing about established fans -- they'll come whether it's any good or not. So alienating the established fans is not going to have a major impact on a film's box office (although it might negatively impact long-term home video sales).

Of the examples you offer, The Avengers, I Spy, and Wild Wild West failed because they were just bad, regardless of their fidelity to their source material. But as you say, the Mission: Impossible films did well enough to become an ongoing franchise even though neither of the first two films bore any actual resemblance to M:I. So it's not about lack of fidelity. Most of the people who went to those films wouldn't have been familiar enough with the sources to know whether the films were faithful or not. They just knew whether or not they liked the films per se.

I Spy abandoned the original Robert Culp-Bill Cosby idea of the two being equal partners (plus it made the Cosby character comic relief which he was not in the original series).

Actually, Eddie Murphy played the Culp character, Kelly Robinson. They inverted the races for the remake.

If there were more successes than failures in terms of TV adaptations abandoning the rules, then I might say "go for it - make The A Team into a clone of The Losers". But, really, in terms of the big screen (and more than a few times on the little screen, too), remakes have failed because they forgot or ignored why the original series was so popular.

No, most remakes have been failures because most films are failures. It's Sturgeon's Law -- 90% of everything is garbage. Pick any given category of films -- remakes or original stories, comedies or dramas, romance or horror, you name it -- and count up the successes and failures within a given time frame, and you'll find that the percentage of successes is low. There's no category-specific reason for that -- it's just that in any type of movie, there are a lot of factors to juggle and a lot of things that can undermine a film's quality, and it's hard to make all the pieces fall together into a film that's actually good.

If you want the example that ultimately proves my point, the Get Smart movie is possibly the most successful big-screen remake I've ever seen in terms of getting things right.

Sorry, but one example doesn't prove anything. You need to demonstrate a pattern, a clear and repeatable causal relationship, before you can legitimately call it proof rather than a coincidental correlation. And indeed, I've heard people complain that the Get Smart movie missed the whole point of the series and the characters, and though I haven't seen the film, what I've heard about it inclines me to agree.


After all, let's use logic. Filmmakers are in the business of making profit. If there were a simple correlation between how faithful a remake was and how successful it was, then filmmakers would've discovered that pattern long, long ago and made every remake as faithful as possible, because it would've been in their financial interest to do so.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

I remember one particularly ridiculous scene in "Battle of Bel-Air" (I think) where the baddies helicopter smashes into a cliff, bursts into flames, crumbles to the ground, and then they cut to the guys climbing out of the wreckage, relatively unharmed. Yeaaahhhh, right.

The producers put that scene in to send themselves up. It intentionally took things to a ridiculous extreme.

 

[auntiehill]

^Of course. That was what the show was about. It was a live-action cartoon. That was kind of my whole point.

I'm hoping the movie stays in the realm, but I rather doubt that it will.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

A-Team and GI Joe were pretty infamous for this in the day and it looks like both debuted in '83. Is there any precedent prior to this for over-the-top yet casualty-free violence?

 

[Aragorn]

^ I remember when action cartoons gave the bad guys an endless supply of army robots so that no humans ever got killed -- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe spring to mind.

 

[Christopher]

^The practice endures to this day. Most of Samurai Jack's enemies were robots. Then there's the droid army in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That show does occasionally portray death, but it's usually inflicted by the villains.

 

[Brikar99]

I'm totally cool with the A-Team killing people in the movie, as long as that sense of fun and the humor is still there.

 

[Aragorn]

^ So you want some Schwarzenegger/Stallone type of deadpan one-liners?

"Want to hear my big bang theory?" BANG! BANG!

 

[Christopher]

I'm totally cool with the A-Team killing people in the movie, as long as that sense of fun and the humor is still there.

I find that a rather contradictory statement. That's not my idea of fun.

 

[Brikar99]

I'm totally cool with the A-Team killing people in the movie, as long as that sense of fun and the humor is still there.

I find that a rather contradictory statement. That's not my idea of fun.

It's an action comedy... with the emphasis on the action, it's looking like. The A-Team is a bunch of special forces types. Fistfights, explosions, gunfights, car crashes... and witty repartee are what I want to see in an A-Team movie. If people get shot, they get shot.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, it's a comedy, and I don't find death funny. Action doesn't require death.

Besides, in-story it makes sense that the A-Team would try not to kill people if they could avoid it. They're not really criminals, they're loyal Americans who were framed for a crime. Now they're at large in the US, trying to clear their names. If they go around killing civilians in the course of extralegal mercenary operations, that's crossing a legal and ethical line they can never come back from. So while it's cartoonily implausible that they could shoot so many bullets and never hit anybody, it's entirely believable that they'd be trying not to hit anybody. That's how I always rationalized it -- that they were all such good marksmen that they were able to avoid killshots, just like the Lone Ranger shooting guns out of the bad guys' hands rather than killing them. A fantasy from a logistical and physical standpoint, but plausible from a character standpoint.

 

[Lonemagpie]

from what Carnahan's said, the movie will see them kill people because they're fucking Green Berets. he particularly said Murdoch is nuts but you're also slightly scared of him because he's a soldier and he could kill you.

as a kid, i never really took notice of whether anyone died or not. as an adult, i find it ridiculous that a Special Forces A-team can't hit the wide side of a barn.

No "can't" - *won't*. Big difference.

 

[ToddPence]

I think that the first person ever to be killed during the course of the TV show was in the first season episode "The Rabbit That Ate Las Vegas" - a mob boss is murdered and the A-Team is framed for the killing.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

^ I remember when action cartoons gave the bad guys an endless supply of army robots so that no humans ever got killed -- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe spring to mind.

Yeah, I'm torn about making the Foot Ninjas robots in the cartoon. On one hand, it's very cheesy. On the other hand, it's nice to see someone with a Katana actually use the fact that the sword is sharp to their advantage (in the first movie, for example, they might block with their sword, but they'd kick the person or something like that to defeat them. In the second, they'd use fish or something cartoony to make a joke rather than their weapons). Robots were the nice compromise of 80s and 90s cartoons.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I picked up the first issue of IDW's new A-Team comic book, based upon the upcoming movie continuity (it doesn't appear to be an adaptation of the movie).

It wasn't too bad. Got a feel for the new takes on the characters, and there's a funny shout out to a certain maverick politician from up north.

But about 2/3 of the way through something happens that actually makes me sad.

During battle, both Hannibal and BA shoot several people dead (including one somewhat bloody incident).

You might say so what to that, unless you're of the generation that grew up watching the original series and that understands one of the show's major charms and why it was so popular and well-remembered.

MacGyver could make a working space shuttle out of a piece of string and a 9 volt battery.

John Steed and Emma Peel may have been going at it like rabbits in their off hours, but there was never to be anything more than a peck on the cheek on screen.

Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers had bionic limbs that worked fine despite the fact that in reality the torque involved in running at 60 mph, jumping 100 feet or pulling a safe out of a wall would destroy their remaining real limb and most of their organs.

Mission Impossible is about a team of virtually faceless individuals brought together by a virtually faceless leader.

And so on. These are the rules. Most involving suspension of disbelief, they were what the shows relied on to maintain interest in the viewers.

The A-Team had a major rule. They could cause incredible car crashes, blow up buildings, and fire machine guns for hours on end. And no one ever died.

It was one of the rules, and one of the things that made the series a cult favorite. Yes it was unrealistic. It was also funny. And it furthered the filmmaking cliche of people being shown getting out of car wrecks unhurt, even if they just went off a cliff. But no one cared - Steven J Cannell wasn't making a documentary, he was making a comedy action series based very loosely on the Dirty Dozen.

Obviously the comic and the upcoming film are different animals. And the fact the trailer makes things look so much like the original series -- even including the van -- gives me confidence that they're remember what made the series so popular. The comic missed the point, I think.

Hopefully the film will understand "the rules", because there have been more than a few TV shows made into movies that I believe flopped because they in some way broke the rules. The Avengers movie inserted a romance between Steed and Peel. I Spy abandoned the original Robert Culp-Bill Cosby idea of the two being equal partners (plus it made the Cosby character comic relief which he was not in the original series). Wild Wild West messed around too much with the characters of Jim West and Dr. Loveless. Mission Impossible didn't bomb, obviously, but it alienated a lot of fans of the TV series by making it into the Tom Cruise Show, not to mention making Jim Phelps a villain. Again, a case of the writers missing the point of the original series, though in that case they got lucky and did it in such a way that enough people liked to make it a franchise.

If there were more successes than failures in terms of TV adaptations abandoning the rules, then I might say "go for it - make The A Team into a clone of The Losers". But, really, in terms of the big screen (and more than a few times on the little screen, too), remakes have failed because they forgot or ignored why the original series was so popular.

If you want the example that ultimately proves my point, the Get Smart movie is possibly the most successful big-screen remake I've ever seen in terms of getting things right. Yes, they reinvented a few things, they updated others, and they allowed Steve Carrell to do a version of Max that wasn't an imitation of Don Adams. Yet the show stuck to the basic rules and as a result it worked. They could have decided to "darken" Max and make him a Jack Bauer-type character. Or make 99 into the villain of the piece. They didn't. And it worked.

I hope the A Team film does the same. The comic just jarred me a little, is all.

Alex

I never watched A-Team-- it never looked appealing to me-- but I'm in complete agreement with this Post. Every concept has a core, a theme, an essence that can't be forgotten or violated without losing the whole deal. Sure, there is room for pushing the boundaries, doing an occasional off-beat story, or evolving the concept, but you still have to respect the integrity of the story's roots. That's why I have a visceral opposition to remakes, reboots and reimaginings; it's almost impossible for them to recapture the magic of the original-- especially when the producers almost never understand what made the original work.

 

[Nardpuncher]

Face it -- people die.

Come on,I don't think the OP had any misconceptions about that.

He has a point, but I also don't mind if the A Team shoots people in the movie.