movies/tv Rebooting Classic TV

[Mortar 143]

I heard on the radio today that Netflix is rebooting Lost In Space.  For you youngins, it was an old TV show from back in the '60s.  A new pilot came out in 2004 but wasn't picked up as a series; you can watch this on YouTube.  There's also a movie that came out in '98.

The DJ asked the listeners, what classic TV show would you like to see come back as a new series, and I thought I pass that along here.  So what would you like to see come back?  Me?  I'd like to see a new Green Hornet series.  I really liked the original that came out in the mid-sixties.  It starred Van Williams and Bruce Lee (his first TV role).  It was made by the same folks that produced the Batman series, but GH was a bit more darker and dramatic.  I also saw the GH movie and really liked it, even though I think it bombed in the theater, and would like to see the same kind of characterizations.

I also though Time Tunnel would be cool, but time travel's been done to death.  Than I thought, how 'bout Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but that's already been done as SeaQuest DSV.

[Pr0m4NV14 839]

The cheesy Batman television show with Adam West.

[ThunderCrush 1,850]

Although I am young I know quite a bit of oldies. XD I'd love to see a remake of The Greatest American Hero

[cuteycindyhoney 13,316]

How about another cool old sci-fi show?

"Space 1999"

 

Or how about "UFO"?

 

 

[Ganondorf8 11,392]

I was thinking that they could bring back some old British programs that were popular during their runs back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I know that they had been trying to create a new version of Knightmare though it never took off on account of it being too big a project to see it through, but I'd like to see a modern take that would show the youth of today that what it did back then was ahead of its time. I'd also want to see a new iteration of the Crystal Maze which shouldn't be all that difficult.

[Fluttershutter 2,544]

NONE!!!

There's entirely too much of that crap. People need to quit being so damn lazy and think of new things.

Edited February 22, 2018 by Fluttershutter

[Fhaolan 4,484]

They've been trying to reboot a lot of stuff that I grew up with, probably because the people with money to sink into these projects are about my age, but ... not doing so well with it, in my opinion. Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica were the odd-one-out of the 'recent' ones, becoming popular on their own, but those are exceptions. They tried to reboot Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, Charlies' Angles, the A-Team, Avengers (the other one), the Prisoner, Get Smart, Land of the Lost, etc. Some of those reached as high as 'okay' in my mind but that's about it.

Mainly a lot of these shows are products of their time, and what made them popular/good are things that don't seem to resonate with current audiences. Or at least, the producers of the remakes don't believe they do, so leave that stuff out. From the 60's to the 80's, most of the shows were short story driven, meaning the important thing was the situations the writers/producers wanted to put on the screen. From the 90's on, stuff is far more character driven, where the story is a long drawn-out arc and honestly isn't that important. It's how the characters react to it, and each other, that is the primary focus of the show. The characters in the old shows, when looked closely at, were actually rather flat. Any interest in them was either from the fact the characters went through a lot of story throughout the series and accumulated interest from that, or the actors themselves had enough charisma to insert into them. Old shows rebooted tend to miss the idea of the short stories, and attempt to backstory the characters to death in order to create a pre-existing interest. And they overload on exposition trying to shove all that backstory in as fast as possible.

The best ones in my opinion, are the ones that the writers/producers/actors really, really want to do, not because they want to rehash the original series, but because they have something to say using parts of the original to springboard off of. Without an idea of what you want to *do* with it, leads you to the bland and uninteresting Knight Rider reboot and things like it.

So I wouldn't really wish that on anything, unless I personally had an idea of what to do with it, what stories to tell. I have some *ideas* around some Space 1999 stories, but to be honest they make *no* sense in a modern context.

[Here No Longer 5,277]

It usually doesn't end well...

11 hours ago, Mortar said:

Time Tunnel would be cool

No offense, but that show's freaking awful  

I lived through 7 episodes of it before I just thought "this show is way too cheesy and a bit uncreative. I'll stop while I'm ahead." Looking at the plot summaries of later episodes, I'm relieved I came to that decision.

[TBD 17,256]

• The Diamond Brothers, i would like to see BBC take a swing of making a reboot of that.
• The Green Hornet. 

[Altastrofae 936]

On ‎2‎/‎22‎/‎2018 at 12:46 AM, Pr0m4NV14 said:

The cheesy Batman television show with Adam West.

Too bad ol' Westy died... He made that show what it was

[Narcissus 355]

As much as I would love to see a lot of the cool old shows come back in a new incarnation, I HATE the way they always do it! Even the big-budget movie versions drop the ball more often than not. Mission: Impossible was a great show, but it took four tries before the movies came up with a good one.

Battlestar Galactica was a fantastic show, but the new one they made was absolute unwatchable crap. Richard Hatch had a great project to bring back the series and funded it out of his own pocket to present to the studios, but they went with the decidedly un-Galactica trash we ended up with instead. 

Look at Baywatch, CHiPs, Star Trek and The Prisoner. The movies sucked for the most part and the TV versions, when they apply, are even worse.

There are many TV shows I'd love to see return, so in the spirit of the topic, and if they could do them right, I'd love to see Magnum PI, The A-Team, Greatest American Hero, Simon & Simon and all the other aforementioned ones that failed so badly. 

[Mortar 143]

On 2/22/2018 at 12:46 AM, Pr0m4NV14 said:

The cheesy Batman television show with Adam West.

Unfortunately, he's a bit too old for that kind of role.  Can you think of a contemporary actor that might fit the cowl?

 

On 2/22/2018 at 12:53 AM, ThunderCrush said:

Although I am young I know quite a bit of oldies. XD I'd love to see a remake of The Greatest American Hero

Loved that show.  If they did it again, I'd like to see a more dramatic version.

 

On 2/22/2018 at 1:46 AM, cuteycindyhoney said:

How about another cool old sci-fi show?

"Space 1999"
Or how about "UFO"?

Abosolutely.  I have both in my DVD library.  Course they'd have to call it Space: 2099, or 2199 given our current space program's progress.

Little trivia on 1999: It was the first TV show that showed ships actually landing on the ground.  Doesn't sound like much today, but back then, it wasn't easy to do.

 

20 hours ago, Narcissus said:

Battlestar Galactica was a fantastic show, but the new one they made was absolute unwatchable crap. Richard Hatch had a great project to bring back the series and funded it out of his own pocket to present to the studios, but they went with the decidedly un-Galactica trash we ended up with instead.  

Ah, a pony after my own heart.  I was also NOT a fan of the new BG.  Hatch's version made so much more sense.

[cuteycindyhoney 13,316]

15 hours ago, Mortar said:

Abosolutely.  I have both in my DVD library.  Course they'd have to call it Space: 2099, or 2199 given our current space program's progress.

Little trivia on 1999: It was the first TV show that showed ships actually landing on the ground.  Doesn't sound like much today, but back then, it wasn't easy to do.

 

I've watched most of both "UFO" and "Space 1999". My very own BBBFF lent me both on DVD a while ago.

Here's a little more trivia. Did you know that the original intent was that Space 1999 was going to be a sequel series to "UFO"? it was going to feature the fight against the aliens from the secret moon base. Somehow or other, it became a tale of the moon being blasted out of Earth's orbit. In Space 1999, I always thought that the ships, the Eagles, were wonderfully thought out. I loved the modular design of them. you could swap out cargo pods for passenger pods with full life support. The control cabin could also be put onto totally different bodies.  

 

[Mortar 143]

9 hours ago, cuteycindyhoney said:

I always thought that the ships, the Eagles, were wonderfully thought out. I loved the modular design of them. you could swap out cargo pods for passenger pods with full life support. The control cabin could also be put onto totally different bodies.  

Agreed.  In an interview with Gerry Anderson, he said one of the goals of 1999 was to be as accurate as possible with respect to how ships would look and fly, how lunar gravity would behave, building construction, that would exist in 1999.  Too bad none of it came true, except for the gravity thing.

As for the Eagle itself, I still consider it one of the best sci-fi ships out there, because of its realistic approach to design and flight characteristics.  In fact I had a metal model version when I was a kid. 

This one, in fact: