I see that 22 Jump Street is doing reasonably well, and getting moderately positive reviews. It’s the sequel to 21 Jump Street, which was, in turn, “based on” the late-80s television series. That series is most notable as being the first real success for the FOX network (preceeding The Simpsons by two years), and for introducing the world to Johnny Depp, who would, of course, go on to bigger and better things. I’d like to say that the minute I saw him, I said, “This kid is going to become one of the great actors of our time.” Yes, I’d like to have said that, but I didn’t. Oh well.
I wasn’t especially a fan of the series, it being yet another triumph of style over substance that typified 80s action shows. But that’s not the reason I have no interest in seeing either movie. As I said, they’re “based on” the series, but in the same way that some horror movies are marketed as “based on a true story,” meaning, “Yeah, there was a family, and, yeah, they did move into an old farmhouse in Connecticut. Beyond that… we may have taken a few liberties.”
These movies are just part of a recent trend of taking an existing TV property and turning it into a broad comedy spoof. This bothers me. Now, it’s not exactly a new phenomenon to make a movie based on a TV series, although before that it was more common to go the other way, and make a series based on the movie. But in those cases it was capitalizing on a popular property, and often made use of existing sets, writers, and sometimes even cast members. There are many examples, but usually they are a poor shadow of the source (anybody remember Delta House?). Indeed, only four series stand as not only matching, but indeed surpassing, the movie in terms of quality: The Odd Couple, M*A*S*H, The Paper Chase and Alien Nation.
But now it goes the other way, further proving just how much the film industry is devoid of ideas. They used to make movies based on Broadway shows, with varying levels of success, whereas now they make Broadway musicals based on old (non-musical) movies: Little Shop of Horrors, The Producers, Hairspray. Then, even more bizarrely, the shows get made into new movies, thus giving us, in effect, a movie based on a movie. No wonder the film industry has decimated the publishing industry. When they reach the point that they make movies out of comic books, and then claim these are serious films instead of the popcorn b-movies they actually are, just dressed up with cookie-cutter CGI, there’s little hope left.
So it’s no surprise that the movies are mining old TV shows for ideas. We can see this at least as far back as the Star Trek franchise. But those movies were a direct continuation of the original series. More often we see what amounts to a “reboot.” The problem there is that, once the property is in the hands of a different set of people who had no connection to the original, they all-too-often reveal a total lack of understanding of what made the series what it was.
We can illustrate it with Star Trek itself, which has been given two movies of a reboot that is pretty far removed from the series (although I give them credit for a clever way of discarding continuity while maintaining it at the same time). The actors are generally well cast, but the writers clearly have no idea what made the original characters tick. Chris Pine’s Kirk always seems to be heroic by accident and is at no time the deliberate man of action portrayed by William Shatner, and Zachary Quinto’s Spock isn’t a man wrestling to control his human side through logic so much as just a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome (and don’t get me started on his affair with Uhura!). Karl Urban’s McCoy is spot-on, but we have yet to see him have the sort of heartfelt philosophical conversation that revealed his real role in the series: the embodiment of Kirk’s conscience. To the filmmakers, I pose Guy “Crewman #6” Fleegman’s great question from Galaxy Quest: Didn’t you guys ever watch the show?
The problem with reboots is even more clear with Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies, which are so oblivious to the whole nature of what made the series great that they begin by completely undermining the entire premise, and then eschewed most of the series’ key characteristics, except in the most shallow ways (“Wasn’t there a part where a guy would peel off a mask? Let’s make sure we have that.”) I was initially impressed by the first movie, until they pulled out the rug. I have to say that I would have rather seen a whole movie with Kristin Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez, the only ones who seemed to understand how Mission: Impossible worked.
That’s the thing. I loved the show, because it demanded that viewers pay attention and think, and I was hoping for a serious treatment by people who got it. It makes me very sad when that doesn’t happen. But it’s far, far more painful when an old property is used as a basis for broad, farcical comedy. I’ll give a pass to the Brady Bunch movies. The original was itself a comedy that even those involved considered inane, and playing up the anachronistic qualities was inspired. But it’s a different thing when something intended to be serious is run through the fart-joke machine. I will grant that, in retrospect, we can look back at these shows and say, “I can’t believe this was considered good.” But they were. They were limited by the conventions of the day. Starsky and Hutch was an over the top action show, but it was played straight, not as a vehicle for Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson to play further iterations of the exact same characters they play in every movie. The Green Hornet may have been campy, but its venerable premise was a good one that went back to the days of radio drama: a wealthy man who masquerades as an underworld kingpin to bring down real criminals. It deserved a serious treatment using all the resources available today. Its fans would have loved to see that, rather than Seth Rogan playing yet another clueless idiot.
Which brings me to the most egregious example of all: Land of the Lost. For those unaware, this was an early 70s Saturday kids’ show produced by Sid and Marty Kroft, already famous for their incredibly surrealistic, puppet-driven shows about kids trapped in a bizarre world best appreciated under the influence of hallucinogenics (seriously, that’s the only way H.R. Pufnstuf or Lidsville make any sense at all). But Land of the Lost was different, an attempt to do serious science fiction, an ambitious goal on a 70s kids’ show budget.
People may not realize that the show was actually conceived and developed, not by the Krofts, but rather by Star Trek writer David Gerrold. He laid out an astonishingly sophisticated, mind-bending premise of a pocket universe with its own laws of physics, then invited his friends to come and play. By which I mean established, serious science fiction writers like Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, Samuel Peeples, Theodore Sturgeon and the inestimable D.C. Fontana, who contributed the powerful “Elsewhen,” essentially inverting the premise of her animated Star Trek story “Yesteryear.” The result was one of the most intelligent, sophisticated “children’s shows” in the history of American television, equaled only by the contemporaneous animated Star Trek, which similarly refused to dumb things down, believing children were sophisticated enough to handle serious ideas.
Yeah, the special effects were famously cheesy, and the acting uneven, but the heart was there. The rules were consistent, so that the idea of riding a river that went in a circle, or standing on a mountaintop and seeing yourself in the distance, would be profound and believable. We were fascinated by the mysterious pylons that dotted the landscape; bigger on the inside than the outside (sound familiar?), they controlled every part of the Land, including weather, earthquakes, and possibly even time itself. The backstory was rich and ripe for discovery, giving us a lost civilization and the bestial Sleestak, who were their descendants, rather than ancestors. The writers even invented an actual language for the missing-link Pakuni.
The characterizations were also strong and complex. Here we had a quiet, dependable father doing his best to take care of his kids while repressing his own profound loneliness, and a teen hero who screwed up as often as not, but whose heart was in the right place. And then there was Holly. A feisty, resourceful young girl decades before that was in fashion, she was treated as an equal by her father and brother and was the first crush for a whole generation of boys. I suspect my own fondness for strong girls started with Holly, and I guarantee she would have no patience with Katniss Everdeen’s angry bullshit.
After the first year, the original writing team left. They weren’t even sure the series would continue, ending the season with “Circle,” a mind-blowing finale that had the Marshall family escape the Land by stranding themselves in it (you have to see it, and even then you’ll still be confused). The show was renewed, and a new writing staff took over, but quickly proved that they completely understood the concepts, building on the Land’s strange mysteries (leaving some of them exhilaratingly unanswered), and producing some of the best episodes of the series, notably “The Zarn,” “The Pylon Express,” “The Longest Day,” and “The Musician.”
The third season was another matter. Yet another writing team came in, and relied on dumb formula, where some improbable fantasy character would inexplicably arrive, interact with the main characters, and then leave. They saddled the show with truly ludicrous things like a two-headed swamp monster and a fire-breathing dinosaur, and had the characters meet the Abominable Snowman, the Flying Dutchman and Medusa. Sheesh. Only “Timestop” was even close to what the show had been, not surprising as it was a holdover from the previous year.
A remake/continuation appeared in the 1980s, but it was rather goofy, although it still tried to stay true to the sophisticated concepts. This cannot be said of the Will Ferrell movie that came out a few years back, and tanked. It was clear that, despite Ferrell’s proclaimed fondness for the series, all he really seemed to know about was the dinosaurs and the generally embarrassing production values. No doubt he would sit around with his friends laughing about how ridiculous it was. My heart sank when I learned he was behind the movie. Because I wanted what those of us old enough to actually have watched the show wanted: a serious treatment that would finally do justice to the show’s brilliant ideas. I wanted realistically rendered dinosaurs. I wanted the Sleestak to be truly scary, rather than just basketball players shuffling around in rubber suits. I wanted the bizarre, unreal landscape of the Land to be brought to vivid life (distant mountains that are close up, and so forth). I wanted a rich, provocative story.
But that didn’t happen. Nor will it at any point in the foreseeable future. Not so long as the film industry is devoid of creative people capable of deep, complex ideas, making Hollywood the real Land of the Lost. As long as they continue to mine anything they can for an easy buck, the downward spiral that has allowed us to see nearly a dozen “Marvel Movies” that are all basically the same thin “plot” over and over, and has taken interesting old concepts and literally taken a dump on them, and their fans, we won’t see improvement. I’ve been accused of insulting young fans of today’s lame entertainments, but what about the insult to us older fans of the original source material?
What about you? What old series would you like to see given a serious, respectful treatment? Or do you like the comedy spoof approach? Do I need to get out of the way and stop complaining? Tell me if I’m wrong about all this. Wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last. Please, join the discussion.
The Doors to Everywhere 