The film starts with the previous actor having a fireside chat with someone, and they say, let me tell you of the time when I… the screen goes all wobbly, and the film segues into the main film with the new actor.
Has this technique been used?
You mean like … have Shatner tell his grandson some adventure he had in the Enterprise, and then it fades into the new flick with the new guy as Kirk, and the new movie is totally different than the first one that starred Shatner?
I can’t think of a time when it’s been done, but I think it’s a good idea, except for one thing. I would bet the producers don’t want to explicitly remind the audience that it’s been done before.
There’s a Young Indiana Jones episode that does just this. Starts with Ford playing the sax then he tells how he used to play jazz. Then it switches over to the younger version of Indy. I don’t remember the name of the episode though.
I thought of the same thing - in fact, I believe that was used multiple times throughout the series.
Isn’t this sort of like “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Goldbergs?” An older actor we don’t see and who isn’t in the show, narrates the story for that episode.
I also remember that was the main theme of the show. Old Indy talking to a curious kid at the beginning then the scene fades to young Indy and his story.
Ford only was on the show once to the best of my knowledge. However they did frame the original series, before they put them on DVD, with Old Indy bookends. Some of those were really good too and helped the episode out, too bad they took them out.
In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which stars George Lazenby as James Bond, the title sequence of the film contains clips from the prior (Sean Connery as Bond) films, and there is a point in the movie where he comments, with a wink, “This never happened to the other guy.”
Not a reboot, but an actor switch: Ian Holm as Bilbo narrating his Red Book while Frodo cavorts around, fading out to Martin Freeman as Bilbo beginning his Hobbit adventures.
I thought it a very nice nod to Holm, and a nice visual technique.
(And I liked “old Indy” in the Young Indy Chronicles.)
Not quite the same, but when Fred Clark left the The Burns and Allen Show to do a Broadway play, George Burns actually stopped in the middle of a scene, explained to the audience that Clark was leaving, introduced Clark’s replacement (Larry Keating) and then resumed the action with Keating now playing the role.
But only the Harrison Ford one counts for the OP.
Also, “The Wonder Years”.
The biggest issue is continuity - a reboot often makes changes to important plot elements that wouldn’t make sense if they were in the same continuity. For example, if Shatner/Kirk narrated the start of the Star Trek reboot how would you explain the Spock/Uhura relationship which wasn’t in the original?
Using actors from the original series handcuffs the creative staff - they often want a clean slate to work with.
I doubt that’s the biggest issue. It’s certainly something that diehard fans will gripe about, but the vast majority of people won’t even know the difference, or if they do know, they won’t care, or if they do care about the continuity, the actor being there won’t matter much.
I know that Shatner played Kirk, and might find it fun to see a Star Trek movie bookended by him, but I don’t actually know the original series, so I wouldn’t care that the new movies don’t fit canon.
On the other hand, a serious Star Trek fan who does know that the new movies aren’t maintaining continuity is likely to be annoyed about that regardless of whether Shatner shows up for an introduction in the first scene.
They even did this kind of thing with the recent Star Trek reboot, and I believe it was generally enjoyed. Nimoy reprised his role as Spock, even though the movies do not maintain continuity. Didn’t seem to tie the hands of the writers.