A friend of mine sent a link to an article today where David Duchovny talks about their working on another X-Files movie script.
I was not pleased. I had seen an article about it the other day and had hoped that if I ignored it hard enough, it would go away. My reaction was to shake my head and go no, no, or for the love of-- NO! Please, Chris Carter, I'm begging. Let it go!
Look, I loved the X-Files. I was hard core. I watched every episode. I taped them. I went to after episode chats. I participated in the fandom. I wrote fanfic. I participated in Virtual Season 8 and Virtual Season 9. Joined Scully_fic. I saw both movies, bought DVDs, and read every tie in novel. Hell, I watched The Lone Gunman series (and Harsh Realm)... and I'm begging, PLEASE DON'T DO ANOTHER MOVIE! Let my beloved old fandom not be bastardized out of greed. M'kay?
I got a good ending (Requiem) and a less good ending (whatever was the name of the final episode of the tv series). I even got a movie that warmed over the old coals, but it did at least give some relationship stuff that I didn't hate (actually, CC never bastardized the relationship. He was good on that score). But... enough is enough. Mulder and Scully were wonderful. Now, leave them the hell alone!
Which is going to bring me to the subject of reboots. I'm not really going to discuss the Non-Joss/Non-TV Series "Buffy" reboot because I've said my fill about that elsewhere (gist: I don't see the point of a reboot when nothing from the TV series can be used. That effectively eliminates 99% of Buffy's origin story, most of the mythology, her sidekicks, her villains, and her love interests. Try rebooting Superman without Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, The Daily Planet, the Fortress of Solitude, Smallville, or Metropolis. It's not so easy. Sure you've got a baby in an asteroid, but what else that's recognizable?) Instead I was thinking about reboots that worked and perhaps why they worked.
The Battlestar Gallactica reboot worked. I'm mumbledy-mumble years old, and I was a fan of the original BSG... when I was in first or second grade! (I remember us playing BSG on the monkey bars after the regular argument over who could be Athena... as she was the only female pilot on the show.) Let's examine that for a moment. I'm probably in the youngest age bracket of folks who could remember the original series and I'm on the upper end of the target demographic. I could barely remember the original series and my memory amounted to basically "Cylons destroyed the planets, there was a lot of Greek stuff, Starbuck was cute, and they were in search of Earth". Anyone younger than myself wouldn't remember the series at all. Anyone more than a few years older than myself probably didn't watch, because the original was a kid's show. This allowed the reboot to adopt the basic outline from the original but not a whole heck of a lot else. It wasn't necessary. The elementary schoolers that watched the original were all well into adulthood with barely any memories of the original beyond the big stuff (cylons! Destroyed planets! Greek names. Starbuck and Apollo.) Even then, they kept many of the basics. Adama was the Admiral. Apollo was Adama's 'good guy' son. Starbuck was a snarky, cynical bad-ass who smoked cigars and played poker (even if in the original Starbuck was a guy, the characteristics were true to the original Starbuck... just now on a female rather than a male... and there was a great deal of wank about that fact when it was first announced. But, remembering the playground days when we had to argue over who could 'be' Athena, I was pleased that there would be more than one female pilot now). Oh, and Baltar was kind of crazy and in cahoots with the Cylons.
So, the primary character basics from the original were there in a recognizable fashion in the reboot. Plus, as a pacifier to the hard core fen (which I gather actually existed), they offered one of the orignal leads, Richard Hatch, a featured role in the remake in the part of Zarek.
So basically, they had a 25+ year old franchise whose original audience had largely been in elementary school children that only remembered the bare outline of the series and who are adults rather than kids now anyway... and the original fairly cool premise with a handfull of characters being used in roughly the same way as they were in the orignal (at least through the mini-series). That gave a lot of lattitude for reboot. Although, most of the differences from the original to the miniseries weren't in story so much as in execution.
The story of the reboot miniseries -- the planets were destroyed, Adama had the only remaining Battlestar, (the other remaining Battlestar showing up later in both series), Baltar as the sell-out to the Cylons, Apollo and Starbuck as the featured favorite fighter pilots on the front lines, and the ultimate, scary decision to try to find the lost colony -- Earth ... was all the same, just instead of pure cheese it was given a far more gritty, adult treatment. It basically took the original concept and characters, gave it an update and superior writing, and added just a couple of twists (there was no Roslin in the original. Boomer was a guy and Athena was just a female pilot and not a cylon, cylons were easily spotted what with their being metal and all). It was both recognizable (to folks who only barely remembered the first with affection from their childhoods) and better. Because of that, it was a reboot that worked.
The other reboot that worked is the recent Trek reboot. Yes, the reboot is spiffy. And it had the JJ Abrams cult cred as he's a sci-fi guru in his own right. Gene Roddenberry couldn't be offended as he died several years ago. Majel Barret, his widow, gave the reboot her go-ahead before she died. The original cast are now far beyond their sci-fi action hero stages (and a few of them have passed away), and even then the reboot still called Leonard Nimoy back into active duty and gave him a significant role... his original role. He was still Spock.
And it's hard to miss that the Trek reboot delivered a significant dose of nostalgia in a fun way. It gave the bang and glitz and hotties for a new generation, while delighting fans by giving us the relationships and the notes we loved. I remember cracking up at the away mission when it was Kirk, Sulu... and a Red Shirt. And of course the red shirt immediately died! Loved that. People in the audience got the shout-out, were in on the joke, and enjoyed that nod to Trek history. People enjoyed the heck out of Sulu announcing that he could fence, then his kicking ass fencing. Keith Urban's Bones characterization was one big ol' hommage to DeForest Kelly. It was a treat. That was McCoy almost exactly as we knew him... only younger and hotter. But, still, it was recognizably him. And Scottie! Uhura! Chekov! Even Pike! (in a wheelchair no less). And of course, we finally got to see Kirk sabotage the Kobayashi Maru. (Spock losing his shit over it was a bonus!)
So much of the Trek Reboot was simply about re-introducing us to the old characters we loved in younger form, and then showing us that these were still the characters we loved. And the relationships we loved. They didn't skimp on the Kirk/Spock (or the Kirk/McCoy). If you're going to do TOS Trek, you have to honor those relationships. It wasn't just that Kirk was recognizably the same character. It wasn't that we had not one but two Spocks. It was that the friendship of Kirk/Spock was paramount. Hell, the friendship of the entire crew was paramount. The joy of the reboot was getting the old gang back together and proving to us, that despite the younger faces and bods... they were still the old gang. And we still got Spock, original version showing us why we loved the original version all along.
It was also pretty brilliant of Abrams that he allowed the original timeline to stand undisturbed, telling us -- quite literally -- this is an alternate timeline. The Trek Reboot worked because it used the relationships of the original and gave it its own different place... and made it fun. Somewhere in my LJ is my review of the Trek reboot when it came out and I remember saying something along the lines of it delivered what it had to -- it gave us the characters we loved and showed us why we loved them all over again.
I think most reboots that work tend to be ones that have enough age to them that there's nostalgia supporting them. Nostalgia (helpful if perhaps our memories have clouded with time) and the relationships and characters we love in the way that we love them.
Give me another fifteen years and I may be all for an X-Files reboot (still, please no continuation. The series had a 10+ year run. They exhausted the material.) But it really just hurt to watch the last X-Files movie because, though I could believe the way that things had changed in the story, that wasn't really the Mulder/Scully I loved. The Mulder/Scully I loved were bullheaded rogue FBI agents not people in a mid-life identity crisis having retired and wondering what to do with their lives.
I liked the way that the series ended -- yes, even the out-of-gas ending of the series finale, because it left Mulder and Scully fighting the good fight... together. That's what I wanted. That's the way I like to remember them -- so Chris Carter, quit screwing them up by bringing them back! Maybe in fifteen years I'll feel differently and someone can do a reboot and I'll squee, but for the time being, I like my originals just the way they were.
(And honestly, what's the point in rebooting the Kristie Swanson movie when it was the Fox and Mutant Enemy Buffy characters and stories that we loved? What's next, Harry Potter sans Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Voldemort, Snape, or Hogwarts and without the blessing of JK Rowling?)
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