Jerry Beck says the best thing I've heard yet about Loonatics, the forthcoming project out of Warner Brothers cartoon studios with characters that appear to be some sort of manga spawn of Bugs, Taz, Daffy, Wile E. Coyote, Roadrunner, and Lola. Warning: he says it with some grown-up language, but we are all grown ups here. He has a point: the more we object to Loonatics--one blog even implied the new show would be a war crime under the Geneva Conventions--the more we encourage WB to keep milking the creative genius of dead animators instead of creating a set of characters for our generation.
On a personal level, I find it at least irritating when studios take established properties and "remake" them by creating what is essentially an entirely new property that is at best loosely related to the original, with the name of the old one. Oftentimes, they don't even give us that. For all they know, the new property would succeed on its own merit and find an audience, but that is risky. Slapping the name of an established property on the project guarantees press and an audience, at least until we realize one has been put over on us, but by then we realize the new property is pretty good and we keep watching or reading. Being tricked into watching makes me resent a perfectly good story.
Related: when the studios "re-imagine" a property and try to convince us they didn't. Harris did it with Vampirella, my bar-none favorite horror magazine from the '60s and '70s, where she was an alien vampire/magician's assistant. They created Vampi, which they try to bill as a "completely separate character" from Vampirella, even though they admit Vampi and Vampirella have "the same general abilities and motives." They forgot logo in that list, but apparently giving one character a more futuristic costume and gadgets and shaving 10 years off the age makes it a "completely separate character."
1 comment:
Another case-in-point: Battlestar Galactica. I've been a fan of the original series for years. When SCI-FI decided to do a "reimagining" of the show, people were up in arms. There were petitions, protests, call for boycotts....I'm amazed people didn't take up arms against the studio. And all this was before the script was finished and the first actor was cast! I myself was skeptical but was willing to watch the miniseries before I made up my mind. I saw the first showing and you know what? I liked it. It wasn't the original for sure, but it was able to stand on its own merits. In fact, the cinematography was the best I had ever seen anywhere. Apparently, a lot of other people liked it too, because SCI-FI turned it into a regular series. I look forward to watching it every week. The point is, don't object to a "reimagining" before you've seen the vision.
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