Updates

Anyone who's talked to me recently knows how excited I am about the A-Team film that will be coming out supposedly next year. It doesn't matter who does it or who's in it, man I'm watching. As a kid I had a great time watching that show, and it was pretty important for me to watch that in my formative years. Granted a lot of it looks funny now, but when you get to the bare bones of it is was a group of guys who were trying to do right even though the world had done them wrong, and they were doing it by outsmarting everyone else.

Now it's great and I hope that the film makes me happy. All us big kids were happy to see the Transformers on the big screen. Whether it was a disappointment for you or not, whatever, you gotta admit you were happy it made it there. I was happy to hear that Knight Rider was coming out again. Sadly, it's a terrible show. Or what I've seen of it so far is terrible. Mostly laughable. The material has to be updated. To take something from the same creator, see what they did with BSG. It was supposed to be a Star Wars rip-off and it was super-campy, but look at how the update it, making powerful statements about the world we live in and telling a spellbinding story with characters we care about.

G.I. Joe's in the works now and it looks pretty good. I'm very excited about Get Smart, because I watched that show every night when I was a kid. I'm watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and it plays it smart by trying to go deeper into the psyche of someone who knows what will happen in the future. It's also a pretty good case of cyber paranoia. There's just so much material there to build on, to play with. Is it a bad thing that we're updating things, does that mean we're out of ideas? I don't know. I have been making the claim that 24 is an update of Miami Vice (it is from the same creators) as it follows a cop who doesn't know how to draw the line and take care of his family. He goes under cover, loses himself in his work, and puts his family at risk. I had the same feeling watching jack Bauer try and save his family as I did when I watched the old series again and saw Crocket trying to save his family from people who had attacked his home.

I think that updating ideas is important. After all, all the stories have been told in this post-modern age. It's just how we tell that now that makes them different and special. Adam said Heroes is the 4400 except that 4400's better. I'm inclined to agree, but what Heroes did was it made the whole superhero concept accessible to a large audience. I think that we can see a lot of connections among shows. But again, it's how these things are thought out that makes them superior.

Take for example Breaking Bad, which was a show about a chemistry professor who starts making crystal meth. Man, we've seen stories of middle aged men going through a crisis, and we've seen stories about cancer patients trying to cope. And we've seen stories about druggies and the culture they inhabit. But the worlds that collide here is something new and dangerous and phenomenal. It's exhilarating to watch all the exciting moments, but there are also quiet family moments of tearjerking power.

So now, here are some updates i'd like to see, and maybe they will offer us some conclusive answers, unlike, say, Alvin and the Chipmunks.

1. Alf
2. MacGyver
3, Airwolf
4. Gilligan's Island (Like Lost, were they really meant to stay on the island? Did their island keep calling them back too?)
5. Parker Lewis Can't Lose
6. Weird Science (How does it end?)
7. Perfect Strangers