Does anyone even have a definition for "re-imagining" here? It seems like writers use it in order to not call their work a remake. And it seems like you're using it to separate the remakes you like and don't like.
I use the term re-imagining to indicate a drastic change in concept. For example, the new version of
12 Angry Men in the 90s was a remake (and a rare good one); nuBSG, nuTrek et al are re-imaginings, because they have little in common with the original aside from the re-use of names and terminology.
And do you really think the 1907 version of BEN-HUR is as good as the remake with Heston (or even the 1925 silent)? A fifteen minute adaptation of an epic novel substituting the New Jersey beach for the coliseum does not a great movie make. The only reason I even remembered the damned thing is because it's a significant landmark in copyright law as applied to film, not because it has any cinematic importance.
I was referring specifically to
Fly and
Thing being as good; I've actually never seen the 1907
Ben-Hur (although it could certainly be as good in its own way).
Would this go into the successful category or not?
http://rjdiogenes.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1jnhrb
That would fall into the brilliant category.
Actually that's more of an homage to the archetype, and not necessarily meant to be a specific character.
As for BSG's use of contemporary props and clothing... As I've said before, they made things interesting. A distant alien civilization that mirrors our own not only breaks expectations, but it gets your attention. It made some of us wonder about a number of things such as what Earth would be like or what was at work that made their society look the way it did. Spandex jumpsuits or togas wouldn't have given us that kind of experience. Flashy costumes and fancy props, as nice as they are, would have been fairly mundane and more of the same.
To me, it was a symptom of the overall mainstreaming of the creative genres (at least in movies and TV). A large part of the contemporary audience seems embarassed by the colorful and creative nature of SF and wants to turn everything gray and dull (this is the same segment of the audience that equates "dark" with "mature"). It's interesting that if
Star Trek does an episode about an alien civilization that perfectly mimics Earth in some way it's considered "cheesy," but when nuBSG bases a whole series around the concept it "breaks expectations." Not that I doubt what you're saying, but it does baffle me.
Even if you never see BSG or its style of scifi in a positive light, I hope that you can at least see where people who do like it are coming from. We don't want scifi that's mainstream or stripped of imagination. Quite the opposite. We do want something different. Something better. Something we've never seen before. And a lot of us have seen enough colorful jumpsuits, forehead aliens and cheap cardboard sets to want something else for a change.
Different would be great; better would be fantastic. I'd love to see genre fiction move into something as new as Trek was when it first appeared. I don't see stuff in the vein of nuBSG as doing that, though; it's just the zombie 80s refusing to lie down.
I don't think Moore was going for doom and gloom, I think he was going for a level of drama and overall seriousness that's rare in televised scifi, and there is an audience for that. Some people may be tired of things being overly dark, but others are equally tired of scifi that's too light, quirky and doesn't take it's subject matter seriously. That's why you have stuff like BSG.
I'd also love to see something that takes its subject matter seriously. But, as I noted above, I see nuBSG as something that is afraid to take SF seriously and must go mainstream instead. And the attempts at drama just made me cringe; as I said, it generally struck me as a Monty Python sketch without the laugh track.
Redoing things differently is not only a perfectly valid form of art, it's what artists do. Personally, I think it's fun and intertesting to see various works updated for the times or simply changed just because someone had a new take on an old idea. It'd be a boring world if art had to remain static and unchanged.
I agree completely. Artists should be inspired by their fellows or their predecessors; but their inspiration should be expressed in original concepts, and the artistic integrity of the original concept should be respected.
Briscoe County wasn't a remake of
Wild Wild West; it was original concept in the same vein that went off in a new direction.
[Edit] On a side note RJ, I was surprised to see that you like Heroes and Supernatural. Those shows seem to have all the things you say you don't like.
I like a great variety of things (another reason I don't like the homogenization of contemporary entertainment). Both
Heroes and
Supernatural are original concepts that were inspired by earlier concepts;
Heroes by things like
Wild Cards,
Supernatural by a bunch of stuff from
Night Stalker to
Route 66. Both of them certainly owe some of their success to the D&G fad, and
Heroes went too far on occasion, but both were good (
Heroes kind of faded, but
Supernatural has been consistently excellent). It's not so much that dark and gritty is intrinsically bad as it is that it permeates almost everything, and is usually handled in such a juvenile way.
