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Hello again, wonderful parents,
There’s a trend in cinema at the moment which I find a bit disturbing. Apparently every story ever has already been told, so filmmakers are simply remaking old movies. A secondary trend is to do prequels (the slightly dull story behind the real story) and sequels (because no one should ever walk out of a movie wondering what happened). Is this the future of entertainment our children are going to inherit?
Take Star Wars. There’s Harrison Ford who was 35 in the first movie. He’s now 72 and tackling the same role. I saw the first movie when I was six years old, and now I am older then he was when he filmed the first movie. It captivated me then, but I am unlikely to be waving an imaginary light sabre and going “pew, pew” at invisible stormtroopers this time around.
I have seen Spider-Man and Batman revisited so many times I lose track of the actors and thinly-disguised storylines compensated for by the evolution of computer graphics.
The movies are faster, louder and brighter than their prehistoric, film-o-saurus relatives. They’re loud extended music videos.
My take on certain movies is that they are classics as they are and can’t be updated.
Is that mean? I’d love to share some of the moments in entertainment history with my kids when the age restrictions allow, but I don’t like watching remakes and having to mutter that the original one was much better in a geriatric, curmudgeonly sort of way.
Childhood shoots by so fast. The Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve began in 1978 when I was seven; Superman IV, his last, was in 1987 when I was 17 and unlikely to care about comic book heroes for much longer. There have since been others, but the four originals carried me from the age of towel-capes and leaps off the garage roof to adulthood, where a phone booth was a private place to chat to a girlfriend.
Yes, there were some badly-made movies, but that’s how they should remain, in my opinion. The awful tinfoil-and-red light bulb special effects of the original Star Trek make the series special, not worse.
My childhood was not a practise round for the next generation, just as my kids deserve a fresh slew of movies of their own to grow up with.
I can’t go back to being a child, so why are people ruining the film icons I grew up with? The thing is, my kids don’t mind, they’ll watch anything, like former life-long prisoners ordering everything off the menu at the Spur.
What old movies or series would you like to see remade and updated for your kids to enjoy? Tell us at chatback@parent24.com and you could feature on Parent24.
