And Not a Moment Too Soon: A New Conan the Barbarian Movie!



 A real actor, John Wayne, receiving
 Oscar in '69 for True Grit

Do you remember back in December when I wrote a piece called Do We Really Need a New Rooster Cogburn?  I caught a lot of flak over that post because I thought remaking a classic like True Grit was in bad taste, it lacked originality, and took away from John Wayne's original performance which, by the way, he won an Academy Award for.  I haven't changed my mind about that.

Oh, Snake, you're the one eye love!

It just seems like the smarter our computers get, the dumber we get.  All these fantastic computer generated graphics, and high tech know-how, and all we can manage to do with it is remake Escape From New York? I wish that were a joke, but it was bound to happen. I mean first Tom Cruise wears an eye patch in Valkyrie.  They spent all that money on the eye-patch so they bring back Rooster Cogburn. It does well, so they think it's all about the eye-patch.  Snake Plissken was the next logical choice. As I said in that original post, sometimes it seems like we're just out of ideas. 

Can Barnaby Jones be far from a comeback?

So I wasn't too surprised I was right about where this was all going. We're about to be inundated by a whole range of remakes, both in the cinema and on our televisions, and in the vast majority of the cases, the original wasn't that great. There are 75 remake projects going on right now. You'll all be excited to learn that NBC is re-booting a new version of the Rockford Files, in the same way CBS re-booted Hawaii Five-O.  And it 2012, Gilligan's Island will be headed to the big screen!  I wouldn't lie about something like that--it's true! 



Director goes "back to the script" for inspiration.  Perfect.

I'm particularly excited about the new Conan the Barbarian movie. In order to recapture that original vision for the film, the director has gone back to the original script for inspiration!  That is a great idea since that movie was so well known for it's witty dialogue, complex characters, and complicated storyline. You don't want to get that wrong. I'll tell you what I'm for. I'm going to want to see cameo appearances. You got to get James Earl Jones back. With modern computer animation, his transformation into the giant snake would be, dare I say, as believable as it was in the original.  What's Marc Singer doing these days? Maybe he could make a cameo as the Beastmaster (or wait, are they remaking Beastmaster too). The possibilities are limitless! 

Call me . . . I'm available!

A lot of exciting new, er, old things coming to a theater near you in the months coming up--tired, old, ideas.  Remakes of movies like Romancing the Stone, Arthur, The Neverending Story (but isn't it about time it did?), Porky's, and even Robocop may be coming back!  You're going to drive by the theater this summer, and think you've traveled back in time thirty years.  I mean, seriously, what are they going to pull out of mothballs next?

~TEC