Reboot

So I've been looking at some talk about reboots in movies. At one point in time I heard them called remakes. I guess to be fair reboots come for movies with sequels and remakes are often standalone films. The question on the tip of most tongues (proverbial or no) is this, "Is it any good?" There's a second question that often accompanies or at least comes through implication (such a dirty sounding word). "Is it any good compared to the original?"

I should pause here to say that the trend also comes in video games, music, and other media as well...Ah...done pausing.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I think that it's a pretty natural extension to the form. Fixing a story in a time capsule like medium (such as a film) is a relatively new invention. Once upon a time the only way to hear, read, or see the hot new story was by attending a live performance. How many of us have seen the Mona Lisa in person? But we know exactly what it looks like because we've seen a hundred pictures. I've seen the framed canvas at the Louvre in Paris. Sure it was nice to see it in person, but it was exactly the same as seeing it in my AP Art History book.

You could argue that writing or movable type preserved stories as well, but even those stories weren't universally available because until relatively recently literacy wasn't all that important to most people.

Reboots and remakes happened every day. If we like a story it becomes part of us. We want to see that story again. We did it with spoofs. We enjoy the basic ideas of a story and then we can make jokes about it. Remakes are inevitable. Sometimes they're great, sometimes they're great disappointments. We can ride the nostalgia, or complain that the artists involved got it all wrong. We'll all love the stories we've come to love, and we'll love them again and again until something new comes along.

Going back to Greece (I guess I was never there), everyone was writing plays about the tragedy of Oedipus we just kept the one they all liked best. Old Grog got pushed aside because Gerome was a better story teller. We're attached to the stories and the ideas, not necessarily the presentation. We may feel an attachment to the first time we saw it, but we'll keep watching as the same story is presented in a format that the current audience relates to better.

The only real question nowadays is, "Who get's the money?"