I remembered the title of the book I mentioned earlier; it is called The Lost Worlds of 2001.
Would one remake Citizen Kane? Nope. It stands just fine as it is. And so it is with 2001. It’s a classic and doesn’t deserve to be effed with.
I have the theater lobby poster hanging in my living room, right alongside Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, another film I don’t want touched.
Thanks
Q
I was thinking to myself that Hollywood would never attempt remaking 2001…Then I remembered that they remade **Psyco *** cries
Player pianos? I’ve never heard that before. I’d heard that some thought the Blue Danube would be associated with something else. One place mentioned the Cocoanut Grove tragedy maybe the Blue Danube was a signature song there). It certainly didn’t have any such associations for me. Th only thing I associated The Blue Danube with was the Bob Clampett Fantasia parody Corny Concerto, where it’s the music the Geese (swans?) swim around the lake to. This is till the major association it as for Pepper Mill.
IMDb will tell you this, but there was an entire original soundtrack for 2001, but Kubrick decided not to use it. At first, the classical music was just filler while he waited for the actual score. Then he saw how well it worked and just used the classical music.
I really like 2001, but the last 20 minutes (my favorite part) are, to me, very 60s/70s. A remake of it would seem really, really overindulgent, especially with pricier effects; the original just misses being overindulgent if you like it.
You can get the soundtrack that was written for the movie, however, I don’t recommend listening to it. The composer (who wasn’t told that Kubrick had decided not to use his score, and only discovered it while watching the premiere), knew that Kubrick was probably going to want to keep the soundtrack he’d picked out, so he tried to compose something similar sounding to it. It sounds like a very poor imitation of the music Kubrick picked out.
Actually, Kubrick originally planned for the starchild to blow up the nuke platforms, but decided it would be too much like the end of Dr. Strangelove.
Ah, but HAL wasn’t dead, just brain damaged. If you remember, he gets revived in 2010, both book and movie. I’ll give you that scene is the best lobotomy ever filmed, though. 
Actually, Quasi, I’m going to disagree with you here, slightly. I think that if Metropolis were handed to the right director (say, Ridley Scott or Kubrick’s zombi), a decent remake of the film could be produced. Properly packaged when it hit DVD format, with the restored original, it might just get some folks to start watching silent movies again. However, I think that this would only work with a director who knew what the hell he was doing, and sadly, there’s few of them working in Hollywood today.
For the voice of Hal, there is no other choice but Al Gore.
I refuse to believe that 2001 has a sequel. 2010 is not a bad movie, but as far as I’m concerned it has no relation to 2001. HAL is dead.
This remake is available now, and is comparatively user-friendly;
(flash movie)
http://www.kubrick2001.com/2001.html
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
I agree with everything except that “2010 is not a bad movie”. It’s a terrible movie!
HAL recovers in the 2010 book also, which came first. What Sir Arthur says is the truth!
Slight hijack: I was reading the preface to the millenium edition of 2001 today, and Clarke mentions that he was in NY to meet Kubrick because he was working on “Man in Space” for Time Life books. When the researcher asked him for a source for information in the book, Clarke said “you’re looking at him.” Made things go much faster.
Another film they’re discussing ruining; Forbidden Planet! According to this website http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/forbidden_planet_darabont_000413.html (pardon the lack of vB) they’re also looking at Barbarella 