Topic Control: Character Assassinations

Well lookit that! It's Monday and someone else got to choose my topic!  Tonight we will be talking about the current need of the powers that be to totally destroy beloved characters in order to make the more current. It's a horrible trend that needs to be beaten with a stick.

My roommate and I are huge Scooby Doo fans and were pretty thrilled that new ones were going to be made. However, some of the directions they've taken the characters (to make them more "appealing") are just wrong. Of all of them, Velma is the one they've screwed over the most.  They took a character that was composed and sure of herself and made her into a whiny, insecure brat who is is jealous of a dog.  It's insulting to the character.

I noticed it again in a Winnie the Poo movie we watched. The characters were all just.... caricatures of themselves.  The makers of the production took the most obvious and shallow aspects of the characters and tried to make that all they were. Poo was JUST driven by hunger. Tigger was JUST spastic. Piglet was JUST twitchy. It was like watching a bunch of junkies just into rehab.

I think the most offending example of this is Michael Bay's movies about the Transformers. Transformers is a cartoon that my brother's generation grew up watching. The characters are complex, dealing with an eons' old war, being lost from their homeland, and struggling with what it means to be a soul in a machine. Over the years, Transformers has tackled a lot of topics and built a pretty complex history and mythology.

Did Michael Bay look at all of that before making his movie? My guess is no. At least, that is how it seems from what he did with his movies. Basically, he kept the names of the characters and what side of the war they were on. Then he did his usual formula of 1 part cliched story to 2 parts T&A to 3 parts fuckery that makes no sense to 5 parts explosions.   Add all of that together and you get one Michael Bay movie.

It's basically gotten to where whenever I hear that someone is "reviving" an old childhood favorite, I cringe.  Yes, cringe. I take the basic theory that whatever it is, it will suck so horribly that people will want to take to the streets and riot.  If it's better than that, then I get to be pleasantly surprised.

Most of the time, however, I end up just gnashing my teeth at the idea of the Lorax being used to sell cars. Fuckers.