It seems to be a fad lately to take old movies and to reboot or spin them off into TV series. For instance, this year we saw Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal get an eponymous TV prequel. Reportedly there are new TV series based on 1978’s Grease, 1984’s Gremlins, 1995’s Clueless, 1998’s Practical Magic, and 2000’s High Fidelity in the works.
What other old movies (say, made about 20+ years ago) would you like to see remade into modern-day TV series, either as a reimagining or extension of the original plot, or as a sequel/prequel series with completely new stories?
Myself, I wouldn’t mind seeing a series based on Krull, the 1983 heroic fantasy film. The original had some rather dull and uninspired writing, but what it lacked in plot and characterization it more than made up for in atmosphere, thanks to some great cinematography and costuming. A latter-day reboot could build on this great visual style, fixing its predecessor’s story and dialogue problems and bringing the scenery and special effects up to modern cinematic standards. I think the producers of such an enterprise would find a built-in audience: there will be plenty of old-timers like me who fondly recall the original movie (despite its many flaws), as well as lots of younger folk who are eager for more Star Wars/Lord of the Rings-style offerings. (There haven’t been many major films or TV series lately that meld science fiction and fantasy the way Krull does, have there?)
What do y’all think of my Krull series idea? Love it? Hate it? Got a better idea of your own?
I saw the unsold pilot for LA Confidential the Series. That might have been OK.
Same, I saw the pilot of Zero Effect - I don’t think it would have worked without the movie cast, but you never know. Lethal Weapon worked, more or less.
I never saw the TV series Conan, so I don’t know if they were any more faithful to the Robert E. Howard stories than the three movies were, but I could get into a series that really did adapt Howard’s material, rather than writing a script that was what they thought Conan ought to be. Give me The Tower of the Elephant and Rogues in the House and Red Nails and I’ll watch. You can even rewrite some of Howard’s non-Conan stories as L. Sprague de Camp and Marvel comics did, as long as you do it right.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Walt Disney comics did a short-lived series of The Adventures of Captain Nemo that was pretty good. It was, of course, based on their 1954 movie, with a very James Mason Captain Nemo, but I’d like a TV series built around him. It ought to be possible to do 1950s-quality effects on a TV budget these days (and, make no mistake, most of the effects were pretty good in that movie). All you have to do is to keep it from becoming like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or SeaQuest, or those other submarine-based TV shows. Keep it Steampunk and Verne-based.
Forbidden Planet – You could have ladies’ man captain J. J. Adams and the crew of the saucer-shaped FTL starship C47D cruising around the galaxy meeting alien civilizations. Adams and his first officer and doctor would make a three-man team that would go down to the surface every week and have a new adventure.
What? It’s been done?
You could change it a little. Make it about a 19th century sailing ship of the line (…all I ask is a tall ship…you could feel the wind…and the ship was yours). With no instant communications, the captain has to make decisions on his own that can have far-reaching consequences.
I’m cheating a bit – I don’t want to redo the Roger Vadim movie, but make a new series based on the same source material - Jean-Claude Forest’s original R-rated space adventure comic strip. HBO could do it with the necessary effects work and tell the stories from the strips in an extended arc, instead of trying to cram it all into an hour and a half movie. The nudity and sex, as with Game of Thrones, would be an added plus.
Hey! Someone else thinks so, too! From the above link:
I thought something like this would make a good anthology show. Someone in the big city has every day repeat on them so they realize they can go out and do whatever they want every day. They’ll meet people, help them, have rapid romances, quick little adventures, always learning a new lesson about life every day.
I’d think the Mad Max movies could be a very fertile ground for a modern cable series. (I’m including them as ‘old’, because with the exception of “Fury Road”, they’re all 30+ years old)
