Hollywood has done it again...

[Drtooth]

Okay, let's take a look... what have we seen within the last few years that got turned into remakes? Let's see...

Bewitched
Land of the Lost
Alvin and The Chipmunks
The Smurfs
Underdog
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Alice in Wonderland
Get Smart
Hawaii Five-O

I openly refuse to call anything based on a book a "remake" of a movie. That's like calling any revival of a Shakespeare play a "remake" of an older one. Books and plays were meant to be adapted and re-adapted, mainly because they can keep getting more and more accurate with every new adaption. Like when they did the television version of The Shining... closer to the book.

Now, I have to say, I find BOTH Chocolate Factory movies overrated. The only thing I really liked about the first one was Gene Wilder. Everything else looked like something out of a nightmarish Krofft brothers world. The Tim Burton version was... well, the Tim Burton version. The BOOK version is superior to both.

Need I say that the Hawaii Five-O and Get Smart remakes were really popular and pretty well done (though, frankly, it seemed that Steve Carel was the only one who knew what the tone of the original show was). I have yet to bother to say anything about the various Charlie's Angels remakes because...

And I'm going to take a lot of heat for this...

Charlie's Angels, even with all the "contributions" to pop culture it "made," the show sucked. I mean, the entire show was just excuses to put them in bondage or something. The A-Team's a LOT better for that sort of action/adventure/goofiness. If nothing else, A-Team has Howlin' Mad Murdoch and Mr. T. Why we needed a remake of that was beyond me... the toys never sold, and they never bothered to do a classic line. Only good thing we got out of it was the Sesame Street parody.

But still, Charlie's Angels? The entire point is sexual hot girls in skimpy clothing beating people up. It's a thin premise to begin with.

The same way they did a Super Mario Bros. movie back in 1993.

Yeah, but Super Mario Brothers had a PLOT. A plot the producers completely dumped and ruined, but a plot nonetheless... and it wasn't the first Super Mario Movie...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzMKxdSI7lk

And that was released barely a year after the game

Video games with extensive plots or backstories always have the potential for media. Just, they rarely do it right. A GOOD Mario movie can and should be made (all CGI animation using the character designs from the game), but Nintendo learned its lesson, and refuses to ANY outside media that isn't Pokemon. Mario NEEDS a good Japanese cartoon series...or a Link one.

 

[CensoredAlso]

I openly refuse to call anything based on a book a "remake" of a movie.

I will call them "remakes" sometimes. Because often a new film can't help but be influenced by the original film. Or they're clearly cashing in on the success of the original film.

 

[Slackbot]

Video games with extensive plots or backstories always have the potential for media. Just, they rarely do it right.

Oh, lordy. I think back to the Silent Hill movie. That could have been amazing if they hadn't taken the original game's plot, thrown it into a blender with chunks of the other games (apparently you can't have Silent Hill without Pyramid Head), and gender-bended the characters. But they left in the "Look for thingies that you might need later for puzzles, despite the fact that your child is missing in this terrifying town" aspect in.

I'd also mention the DOOM movie, but then the game didn't have the strongest plot either. But, still, they managed to foul what little there was up with terrible, inconsistent science, making the monsters mutants rather than demons, and leaving out the Cyberdemon when it would have been so very easy to have turned The Rock into him the way they transformed Pinky into...well, you know. Its one saving grace was the Berserker sequence, which had me laughing out loud.

 

[Drtooth]

I will call them "remakes" sometimes. Because often a new film can't help but be influenced by the original film. Or they're clearly cashing in on the success of the original film.

I hate that. I do NOT want to see any Wizard of Oz's "inspired" by the 1930's film. I want something new and bold and close to the book. or better yet, just gimme the book and maybe I'll read it sometime.

Still, like Sherlock Holmes, the character has been re-imagined in every way possible, but I shudder to call anything a remake. Even though a lot of Sherlocks keep the "Elementary, My Dear Watson" quote that never really happened, they're all different and separate. I don't call the movie Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy a remake of the series, since it did stuff completely different... other than keep keeping the same thread of all the other versions in some aspects. Still, I wish Douglas was around for the complete production and didn't die... movie would have been better. Though it got me into the other versions, clearly.

Still, I find both Charlies just...decent, but no match for the written word.

And Charlie's Angels sucks no matter what you do with it. I Spy with Eddie Murphy was a joke, but that matters because the classic series was actually GOOD! Only way to ruin Charlie's Angels is to make them all female impersonators or Drag queens... on second thought, that could only improve on it by being interesting.

 

[CensoredAlso]

I hate that. I do NOT want to see any Wizard of Oz's "inspired" by the 1930's film. I want something new and bold and close to the book. or better yet, just gimme the book and maybe I'll read it sometime.

Wizard of Oz is one of those situations where the movie took on a life of its own separate from the book. Which is fine, nothing wrong with that. So yeah, I'd tend to call another film of that particular Oz story a remake. Even if there is a book. For it to be not a remake, it would really have to make an effort to be its own film (no easy task, and I rarely see it happen!).

 

[Slackbot]

I hate that. I do NOT want to see any Wizard of Oz's "inspired" by the 1930's film. I want something new and bold and close to the book. or better yet, just gimme the book and maybe I'll read it sometime.

L. Frank Baum wrote 14 Oz books, but hardly anyone in the film industry pays attention to any but the first. Okay, Return to Oz is a mix of the second and third, but that's about it.

I'd love to see The Road to Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, or The Lost Princess of Oz on the screen. Sadly, that just ain't gonna happen, because people just keep on hammering the first book.

 

[Drtooth]

Wizard of Oz is one of those situations where the movie took on a life of its own separate from the book. Which is fine, nothing wrong with that. So yeah, I'd tend to call another film of that particular Oz story a remake. Even if there is a book. For it to be not a remake, it would really have to make an effort to be its own film (no easy task, and I rarely see it happen!).

Until Wicked came along, any Oz material lived in the shadow of the movie. And I like the movie, I really do... but it was a SERIES of books. That would be like... uh, for lack of a better example of something I just mentioned, if they made one huge Hound of the Baskervilles movie, they could never do anything with the rest of Sherlock Holmes ever again, and even if they did, we'd just come to expect Hound of the Baskervilles. Though it IS his most famous case.

Oh, lordy. I think back to the Silent Hill movie. That could have been amazing if they hadn't taken the original game's plot, thrown it into a blender with chunks of the other games (apparently you can't have Silent Hill without Pyramid Head), and gender-bended the characters. But they left in the "Look for thingies that you might need later for puzzles, despite the fact that your child is missing in this terrifying town" aspect in.

I remember hearing a rumor in the mid-90's of a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and it was all about someone coming up with the cure for baldness, or something REALLY stupid, like that... and nothing ever happened with it. Thankfully.

I still wonder why they bothered with Chun Li's movie, especially since Street Fighter's first movie was well over a decade before, and only became cult popular for being crap.

But the worst has to be Double Dragon. I mean... I'm not even going to talk about it. it was... Double Dragon wasn't that popular of a game to begin with. Why they needed to make the worst possible movie they could was beyond me. I mean, was it supposed to be a comedy?

 

[CensoredAlso]

Until Wicked came along, any Oz material lived in the shadow of the movie.

Exactly, I wouldn't call Wicked a remake. First obviously it's a stage musical not a movie. But also because it didn't just retell the original story. It was more like Grade A fanfiction, lol.

 

[Drtooth]

Exactly, I wouldn't call Wicked a remake. First obviously it's a stage musical not a movie. But also because it didn't just retell the original story. It was more like Grade A fanfiction, lol.

I mean, Oz media in general. It took Wicked (the musical a little more than the book) to get people to realize that there was more to the Oz world than just one movie.

The only Oz thing I consider a remake of the movie is the failed ABC/DIC cartoon show that was DIRECTLY based off the movie. Everything else is a re-imagining (like the Wiz... even then, it was much closer to the movie) and the Return to oz movie I've never seen. it's so sad the legacy of a series of books gets crushed by the legacy of a movie. A good movie, but a movie none the less.

I'm not a huge bibliophile, but the books are always better than the movies they base them off of, even if the movie is great.

 

[CensoredAlso]

I'm not a huge bibliophile, but the books are always better than the movies they base them off of, even if the movie is great.

Well I think it's like how movie novelisations aren't as good as the actual film. The story does best in its original media format, no matter what that is.

Though I'll be honest, while I thought the Wizard of Oz book was interesting and well written, I wasn't that compelled to finish it. But that's not a reflection on the book; that's just my own opinion.