He is definitely an exception to the rule. I think the problem is, when they remake bad 70s shows or movies, they have to cast people who aren’t really good actors.
James Garner is a good actor in any era.
That wasn’t Noel Neill, that was Phyllis Coates, who first played Lois on that series. Jack Larson also did a cameo, playing Jimmy Olsen as an old man.
I’ve never had a problem with it, but then such remakes are rarely of serious stories. I suppose if Robert Stack had popped up in *The Untouchables * I would have thought it cheapened the movie, but I can’t think of any other movie or TV show where I would have thought that.
DD: HN was not a remake. It was IIRC a prequel. So, not really an example.
Funny how some remakes work. There are no shared actor references at all to Alfred Hitchcock’s two versions of *The Man Who Knew Too Much * and the two versions of The Maltese Falcon filmed ten years apart, or the many movies about L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
But there are some movies with direct homages to (sometimes classic) earlier versions…
Raymond Burr reprised his role as Steve Martin in both the 1956 original and the 1985 remake of Godzilla.
Big-hearted Alfred of the inimitable 1939 version appears as the doorman in the 1994 remake of Miracle On 34th Street.
Robert Mitchum played Max Cady in the 1962 version of Cape Fear, and appears as Lieutenant Elgart in the 1991 Scorsese remake. Martin Balsam played Mark Dutton in the 1962 version and the judge in the 1991 version.
The one and only original John Shaft, Richard Roundtree, shows up as Samuel L. Jackson’s uncle in the remake.
Lou Ferrigno, TV’s late 70s and early 80s The Incredible Hulk, appears as a security guard in the 2004 movie.
While not a remake per se, in *Badaasss! * Mario Van Peeples plays his own father in the docudrama recounting the making of America’s first blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasss Song, in which he infamously plays an eight-year old pimp and future revolutionary.
To end this on the monsterish note I began: if she had lived, the original beauty, Fay Wray, was slated to appear in the final scene in the 2005 remake of King Kong and given the final lines of both films: “'Twas Beauty that killed the Beast.” That line was given to Jack Black instead.