Enough with the TV remakes

Unoriginality is nothing new in Hollywood.

Once something becomes successful, it’s copied, whether it’s in concept or visual style. But with an even starker lack of any new ideas as of late, filmmakers and studios are dipping their buckets into extremely shallow puddles — television shows. It’s been going on for a while, but it’s about time they stop.

This summer’s soon-to-be blockbuster and absolute crap-fest, “The A-team,” has pushed us over the edge. Of course, it’s not stopping there.

To your left, you can see Hank Azaria (The Simpsons, The Bird Cage) as Gargamel, the villain in 2011’s “The Smurfs,” a live action/animated remake of the classic television series by the same name directed by Raja Gosnell — the visionary director of Big Momma’s House, Scooby-Doo, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and Home Alone 3. While film adaptations of TV shows can be funny and smart, like 1995’s satire hit The Brady Bunch Movie and more recently The Simpsons Movie, they are, more often than not, failures.

Case in point: Miami Vice, Fat Albert, I-Spy, The Adam’s Family and its sequel, Sex and the City and Sex and Sex and the City 2, Inspector Gadget, The Dukes of Hazard, Transformers, The Flintstones, Bewitched, Garfield, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Land of the Lost, Josie and the Pussycats, Dennis the Menace, Speed Racer, McHale’s Navy, Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian, Car 54 Where Are You?, Lost in Space and Wild Wild West, just to name a scant few. There are more on the way, like The Green Hornet, Gilligan’s Island, and a third installment to the Transformers films.

When I was a kid growing up in the 80’s, Alvin and the Chipmunks made a comeback. Recently, the cartoon turned to live action with CG chipmunks in two movies that spurned the third comeback. When we’re getting to remakes of remakes, you know we’re hitting rock bottom.

I would like to recommend some of the following remakes of TV shows: Go-Bots: Rise from K-Mart, Rainbow Brite: Out of the Closets and Into the Streets, and Punky Brewster’s Breast Reduction Adventure.

The catch phrase for the A-Team movie is, “There is no Plan B.” Apparently Hollywood has no Plan B, either. They’re going to continue on their path of pumping out crap and never look back — aside from their constant search of old material to rehash.

Check out the trailer for The My Little Pony Movie: