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Do IT this week: Layering
Reworking, reinventing and reimagining breathe new life into popular old movies and TV shows
By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer
Published on Sunday, Nov 15, 2009
Someone who long ago put childhood behind has to gaze occasionally at current entertainment offerings and ask: What happened?
Where is my Number Six? My Spock? My Sherlock Holmes? My rodent-eating alien?
Right now we are riding a wave of cultural reinvention. Tonight, the '60s series The Prisoner morphs into a newer — and shorter — version on AMC. On Tuesday, the latest big-screen incarnation of Star Trek arrives on Blu-ray and DVD. ABC is currently running V, a reworking of the '80s telecasts, and movie theaters will welcome Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes later this year.
The movies in 2009 also offered supposedly fresh looks at Transformers, G.I. Joe and X-Men's Wolverine, while TV has 90210 (from Beverly Hills 90210) and Melrose Place (same name, different decade). Not so long ago, TV viewers could follow new episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman and Terminator, or rush to theaters for The Dark Knight, another reworking of the Batman saga.
The appeal of earlier cultural benchmarks is evident. If nothing else, audiences know the name, making the promotion of a product that much easier. And in many cases, audiences have a fondness for older interpretations of the material, so they might be favorably disposed to a new one. Or — since so much of the reworking involves fantasy and science fiction — they may want to see the new one just to argue about whether it measures up to the old.
But, as appealing as that is to promoters and producers, you still have to come up with product to go with the ads and the Web sites. Sometimes coming up with a new production is simply a matter of updating the technology and effects (as, say, Transformers did) or taking into consideration more modern sensibilities. (90210 has a major African-American character, unlike its predecessor; Star Trek moved women and people of color into more prominent roles in its later TV incarnations.)
But, other times, productions simply use the old concept as the leaping-off point for new ideas. You don't hear the word ''update'' applied to newer productions as much as ''reimagining'' or ''reinvention.''
That's certainly the case with The Prisoner. The original starred Patrick McGoohan as a spy generally considered to be the one he had played on the Secret Agent series. When he quits his agency with a load of secrets in his memory, he is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious, seemingly benign place called the Village. Nice though it appears to be, the Village offers no escape — and everyone has been given a number instead of a name.
Looking back, the production remains a trippy '60s artifact, part Lewis Carroll, part druglike fantasy, with a lot of paranoia about the Cold War and dehumanization underlying it.
Like other relatively recent reworkings, the new Prisoner is much darker and more sinister than the old one. Its Village is full of shadows and mystery. We know far less at the beginning about the past of Number Six, now played by Jim Caviezel, or why he has ended up in the Village.
McGoohan's cry — ''I am not a number. I am a free man!'' — was an individual battling a powerful but morally indifferent culture. The new Prisoner's promotion includes the line ''You only think you're free,'' and at least one critic has seen a post-9/11 meditation on what liberties people will sacrifice for peace of mind.
But The Prisoner has the luxury of dealing with just one piece of source material in creating a new form. The Batman saga, for one, has undergone multiple reimaginings in its printed form as well as on the screen.
Looking just at some of the better-known efforts, we had the deliberate campiness and humor of the '60s TV Batman, which tainted the underlying seriousness of the character. It took 20 years, and Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight, to open the door for the more somber, violent Batman whom director Tim Burton presented in Batman and Batman Returns. But director Joel Schumacher followed Burton with ever more comic, excessive presentation — a return to the '60s campiness. Director Christopher Nolan reintroduced the dark side in Batman Begins and, most successfully, The Dark Knight.
When you consider all those forms and more (such as the animated Batman adventures), you get some sense of the task facing J.J. Abrams with the most recent Star Trek. The '60s TV series had spawned an animated version, other TV series (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise), big-screen reunions, even big-screen reunions of the cast of the first sequel.
The story had moved backward and forward in time, the TV shows mined for movie plots, the mythology ever more tangled — until, finally, with the lackluster performance of Enterprise on TV and Star Trek: Nemesis in theaters, it seemed that the idea was played out.
But Abrams, writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and the rest of their crew used the same foundation as Batman Begins and Wolverine, among others, and concocted an origin story.
They grafted onto it the long-discussed notion of a tale set with young Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy, but did not linger long there; they knew that the modern audience, Star Trek fans or not, wanted big action. But they also honored the past, in plot turns, in characters (bringing in Leonard Nimoy as an old Spock opposite Zachary Quinto's young one), and in arch commentary on the '60s characters by showing their younger selves. (Kirk was always a horndog, for instance, and McCoy was a hard drinker.)
It worked in a way that V or The Prisoner does not. (See my review of the latter in today's Channels.) Like Battlestar Galactica, it argued that well-worn material can still be reworked in satisfying ways. But it takes real (re)invention, real (re)imagination. Otherwise, you just end up with the remake of Knight Rider.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels.ohio.com, on Facebook and on Twitter. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
Someone who long ago put childhood behind has to gaze occasionally at current entertainment offerings and ask: What happened?
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