5 Upcoming Remakes of 80s Movies (That Must be Stopped)
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Nothing from the 80s belongs in today's world. The themes we cared about then are sad reminders of how naive we once were, and the fashion trends that interested us are even sadder reminders of how idiotic we were. Which makes it all the more ridiculous to see which 80s movies Hollywood wants to awkwardly jam into today's world. Movies like... #5.
Communists invade America by paratrooping into a small, Colorado town. But they didn't count on running into a scrappy group of teens with a truckload of guns and everything to prove. Why It Made Sense Then: If you don't remember the 80s, just imagine listening to Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" playing on a boom box that at any moment could explode, killing you and everyone you know. It was the peak of the Cold War, and America was basically standing around in parachute pants waiting for Armageddon to start. Back then, we all pretty much expected that one day we'd glance out the window during study hall and see a sky full of Communist paratroopers.
Now, how the bad guys in Red Dawn flew several thousand miles in hundreds of aircraft undetected until they suddenly landed on a high school football field in Colorado isn't really explained, but you couldn't put anything past those crafty Ruskies. Not a teenager who saw that movie at the time doubted it. We also didn't doubt that our high school football team was badass enough to turn those fuckers back! WOLVERINES!
Why It Doesn't Now: In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, screenwriter Carls Ellsworth says the new Red Dawn will be an updated version, set in today's world. So, we're assuming that eliminates a contingency of Soviet and Cuban forces as the enemy. The producers have said they will update the threat to be more in keeping with a "post 9/11" mindset, which is just a nice way of saying all Middle Easterners and brown people in general.
There's the problem. Right now we're not in the heart of a massive arms race with another superpower, who at any moment could brazenly try to take over America despite the best efforts of Colorado's proudest high school football program. We know how the modern terrorist attacks. They're not the "paratrooping" type and they're not going knock over the government and set up re-education camps. So how in the hell is our band of teenagers hiding in the mountains going to make any sense?
And, uh, not to get all political here, but notice how all through Red Dawn the Commies refer to the kids as "insurgents?" Where else do you hear that term in the news these days? That's right, their movie is going to ask you to root for scrappy insurgents fighting with homemade weapons against an invading force, in a world where, in reality, we're the military superpower hunting down those kinds of people. Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't They Remake It? The original Red Dawn populated its cast with all the big teen celebrities of its day, which means there's at least a half chance we'll get a Red Dawn featuring some High School Musical bastards and at least two Jonas brothers.
#4.
Sick of being picked on, two scrawny nerds with everything to prove create the perfect woman using the strange and mystical power of computers. When the computer is struck by lightning, the woman comes to life because screenwriter John Hughes has never seen a computer. Why It Made Sense Then:
Lightning + Technology = Magic was just a standard formula for the 80s. It worked in Weird Science, and it worked in Short Circuit, (Hey, they're remaking that, too! Fuck!). How amazing it must have been in the 80s to not exactly know the limitations of computers. The newness of computers and the fact that the internet was just a distant fraction of a thought meant that technology could be whatever we wanted it to be. Two nerds take a computer, throw in a dash of lightning and create life? Sure, why the fuck not? We leave our toaster on the roof during every electrical storm because we desperately hold out hope for that very thing to happen in real life.
Why It Doesn't Now: You're on the internet right now. Look around at all the options on your browser. Refresh. Stop. Home. Any "Create Life" buttons? No? Not one? Hm. Do you see anywhere at all that you can just feed cutout pictures from Playboy, automatically combine those pictures to form the perfect woman and then bestow sentience upon that woman? No? Get outta town!
In 1985 you could treat the home computer as a god-like box of magic (movies today do the same with genetics and nanotechnology), but that pill is just a little bit harder to swallow now that most people own and work on several different computers. And none of them can even get Windows fucking Vista to work properly.
Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It? You may have heard that a shitty Sims movie is also in the works, but what you might not have heard is that it's going to be almost exactly like Weird Science. Somehow. So we basically have two remakes of movies that don't need to be remade in the first place with premises that will not work today. Why not be the bigger man, Actual Weird Science Remake, and politely bow out, and let The Sims Movie be the one to shit all over our childhood? #3.
Sick of getting picked on, a scrawny kid with everything to prove stands up to bullies, wins the girl and saves the day using karate. Why It Made Sense Then: The 80s were a decade of fads, and this movie's titular ancient martial art was the fad of choice for teenagers who pictured themselves thrashing every bully in school at once with a blur of hands and feet.
Knowing its audience to a degree that borders on cynical, The Karate Kid functioned as propaganda for nerds who wanted to believe they could basically learn to use the Force if they just met the right Asian custodian.
Why It Doesn't Now: Of course, what the news really meant was that, like the meat at McDonald's, the karate at the McDojos was a bullshit imitation slowly poisoning an entire generation. And not in the badass way that bad dojos poisoned people in The Karate Kid - making you roam the night with your motorcycle gang kicking nerds off cliffs. McDojos fed them a much lamer poison: the mistaken belief that yelling "yah" when you slapped at someone gave you the ability to defend yourself.
Of course all that really did was make you look ridiculous in the moments immediately before getting your ass kicked. American kids eventually figured out that their sensei was the same guy that taught their mom's aerobics class, and karate fell off the continental shelf of cool and assumed its current slot next to boy scouting on the depth charts of awesome. At best, kids today know karate as the reason Asian people could fly a long time ago, at worst, the 80s version of disco. The only possible sliver of hope for a remake would be giving it to an awesome director who understood that the only enjoyment anyone gets out of the original is the ironic, nostalgic kind.
Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It? The producers decided to go in another direction, and give it to a rapper-turned-actor-turned-inexperienced-director. Also, instead of having a proper audition process for the lead role, they decided to allow this director to put in his kid as the star.
That's right, Will Smith plans on putting this remake through his production company, Overbook Entertainment, directing it, and making his son, 9-year-old Jaden Smith, the star. How about getting your wife Jada a role, too, so no other family in Hollywood makes money off of this? Hell, just announce the casting of D.J. Jazzy Myagi already so we can get this whole abomination over with. |
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granted,I could be and very well might be talking out my ass here(does that make me qualified to write for Cracked??? I have seen Top Gun maybe twice once straight through and the second in bits and pieces here and there), yet I could have sworn that the 'dogfight' happened in/over a gulf in Libya not in/over the Indian Ocean kind of a recreation of Reagan's conflict with Quadaffi(or however you spell his last name,it seems no one uses the same spelling twice), a conflict bordering on the absurd since nothing much happened and according to international law Libya was in the right, as it was all about for them how far their territorial waters extended, and for us it was all about bullying a small country..and telling the world that for the USA international laws and rules don't matter(considering we still claim the same rights we refused to acknowledge for Libya). There was also the fact we were covering up Iran-Contra..and the fact that some of those weapons ended up in Libya and were used to blow up a passenger plane or two...then again we lined up in the flick against planes known to be 3-4 generations behind our own and not against the then current top of the line models from the USSR, since they wouldn't sell those even to their client states behind the 'Iron Curtain'. Much like the tanks we faced in both wars vs Iraq although the big ticket item in those were tanks, we faced very few t-84s in the second one,and none in the first..yet by the second war we were using 2nd or 3rd generation Abrams, hell in the first war Iraq had only a handful of t-76s ment originally to combat the tank the Abrams replaced. Basically on a much smaller scale the dogfight in Top Gun was the same sort of mismatch....even Saddam was smart enough to know his old ass planes couldn't begin to match US planes as a comparrison to how stupid Quaddaffi was by trying, during both wars Saddam sent planes OUT of the country so they wouldn't get shot down. Tanks on the other hand...well USSR didn't produce a new version after 84(get it T-84,tank made in 84) or rather no new designs made it into production, and those if made they would have sold,it's a long,long way from the gulf to mother Russia. Top Gun was pure propaganda to hide high crimes at the worst,and a really s****y movie about a bully winning at best(don't forget Libya might have had some Russians to train pilots but there is no way those pilots would have risked nuclear f*****g war,or a US Soviet war of any sort by flying outdated planes against the US for Libya, considering both sides just spent the early part of the 80's avoiding each other in Afghanistan to prevent such a conflict, much like we only armed and trained Afghani's they did the same for Libya...Cuba on the other hand would have jumped at a chance to have a reason for a 'hot' as opposed to a 'cold' war with the US thus making 'Red Dawn' somehow insanely more likely).
is it really that hard to believe that we could still get nuked? i mean, u can go onto wikipedia and look up the exact design of our bombs. if u had uranium all ud have to do is check it out. plus iran n north korea dont really give a f**k and will sell a weapon to anyone. and the fyi, the chinese are the enemy in the new one. and in the old one they explain that the soviets invaded from mexico first, then 747s that looked like regular planes carried the paratroopers. so obviously u never even saw the first one, or bothered to really check out what the new ones about. so u suck.
why can't hollywood just make original movies? seriously. sequals prequals and remakes and licensed products are pretty much all there is anymore
actually, I had heard that Doug Bradley might actually play the Lead Cenobite in the remake, so it may not be a total loss (word has it that Freddy vs Jason was originally going to end on a cliffhanger, with Pinhead draining the lake and dragging them both back to hell; before Halloween was remade, there was talk of Michael vs. Pinhead)
The Evil Dead is indeed being remade, but Sam Raimi & Bruce Campbell are also working on Evil Dead 4; Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash was proposed, but Sam Raimi wouldn't allow it unless he could write & direct (and they actually turned him down?!?!)
Nightmare on Elm Street is being remade -- Jackie Earle Haley (Rorsharch) is Freddy
MTV is remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show this Halloween (no doubt filled with High School Musical rejects) with *new* songs in place of the beloved classics!!
that would be like Will Smith replacing "You're the Best" in the final montage with "Getting Jiggy with It"!!
They're also working on Hellraiser and Evil Dead. Although, Evil Dead might not get made. Sam Raimi (and every other Deadite) want Evil Dead IV.
Found a great video on youtube about Hollywood remakes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68U0v1UNCc&feature=channel_page
So the remake of the karate kid is basically going to be Daddy Day care with Nun-Chucks. Great.
FYI, Jason was a machete wielding maniac. In fact he NEVER ONCE in the three hundred Friday the 13th movies did he ever use a chainsaw. The closest he came was a telescopic pruning saw in Part 7.
I don't care what you say. If Weird Science features Megan Fox, then hey, I'm already in the movies!
Great article. But yeah--remakes are killing ALL our memories. I'm organizing a demonstration for this summer to send a message that we want new stuff. http://noremakes.11.forumer.com
Top Gun? The Karate Kid? and Weird Science? aw man they're killing my memories.
You know, a Karate Kid remake in the right hands could be really, really good. While the McDojos that sprung up in the 80's may have been crap, and may have fed off of the success of this movie, the premise in the Karate Kid is that he's getting old-school martial arts training from a genuine karate badass. The problem is that the project looks to be in entirely the wrong hands, and rather than being a coming-of-age story wherein a boy learns discipline and self-mastery through the martial arts and enjoyable by viewers of all ages, it'd be a piece-of-crap, insufferably stupid "family film" targeted to 8-year-olds.
The Friday the 13th "remake" actualy wasn't bad. I mean, not a cinematic masterpeice, but it's a f*****g Friday the 13th movie. you go to a movie like that to see titties and blood, and if you say different, your lieing. period. I didn't really see it as a remake though. It was basically just another sequal. It wasn't bad though.
Okay,Red Dawn predated Top Gun by two years.
However,PLEASE!!!NO MORE 80's REMAKES!!!IN THE NAME OF JESUS;BUDDHA and MOHAMMED,NOT NO BUT HELL NO!!!
and zac efron is doing footloose
I think it began to blow at the word efron
who's going to be the chick in the new weird science also are we going to have the sex factor in this one if not than screw it
This doesn't make any sense why oh why would anyone want to remake these movies?
Weird Science? Really you want to remake Weird Science what is the purpose of remaking it...... Everyone involved in all these remakes should be punished...... in a very cruel manner
I don't care about these movies, as long as they don't remake ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK!
Don't be assholes. The "insurgents" in Red Dawn were fighting off the red hordes. The insurgents in Iraq are a bunch of lowlife, murdering, cowardly, bastards who deserve to die in a pool of their own waste.
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If Hollywood droped off into the ocen would any one care? notice?hmmm come on Mel Gibson make another one dude.... please.... however i do plan to see V as it is suposed to poke fun at the criminals we have in congress now ...........this should be good . Hollywood needs to have brain beno shiped in by the tanker load. it is FULL of dumb asses with brain farts!