Oddly enough I watched the original over the weekend and was struck by how crappy it was.
From Aintitcoolnews, "Quint here with the geekiest news to hit the trades today. In another round of remake mania at Warner Bros. they've taken the next step in their redux of CLASH OF THE TITANS. They announced a while ago they wanted to remake the flick and now they've hired Travis Beacham to script the thing. Beacham's an up and comer whose original script KILLING ON CARNIVAL ROAD is in the works with Guillermo del Toro directing.
My thoughts... I love the original, one of the last films Ray Harryhausen worked his magic on. I still think his Medusa is one of the most well executed creatures in movie history and I love the cast, which are all badasses... okay, except for Harry Hamlin. But everybody else rocks in that flick. Burgess Meredith especially. One of the things I love the most about CLASH OF THE TITANS is it was one of the last fantasy films to actually feel truly fantastic. There was an awe to Harryhausen's work in the film that I don't think was rivalled until LOTR.
Beacham's got a tough road in front of him. On one hand I'd love to see an epic Greek Mythology flick, on the other there's a possibility of tarnishing CLASH OF THE TITAN's good name with some winky-wink at the audience imposter. Gonna be interesting to see who is picked to direct and see how the cast shapes up after that. What do you folks think?"
7 comments:
Awful, awful, awful movie.
Interesting only for the Harryhausen purists amongst us. And Peter Jackson already gave those people all the closure they will ever need with the cave troll sequence.
It's one of those films that I remember being good only because I hadn't seen it in 25 years. Looking at it now I'm struck by how much our childhood brains accept really bad movies/TV shows. It's why TV shows like the Power Rangers are able to sustain an audiance. I used to love Land of the Lost. The Sleestacks scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I used to freak out whenever the cast wondered into the caves because I knew they'd run into those dreaded monsters.
I used to like the "action" on Batman.
Yeah, I know what you mean. What's interesting is that some of the stuff was actually good, and you just can't trust your childhood brain to have gotten anything straight back then.
I still vividly remember visiting my mother's friend's son up in Chappequa NY when I was about eight years old, and watching Star Trek for the first time. (It was "The Squire of Gothos" -- the one with Trelane.) It was scary as hell! Kirk was in serious danger throughout. But I could follow it, and I immediately locked on to it. (I think he had a color TV, also, although 1974 color TVs were super-bad).
Star Trek is good anyway, but to my eight-year-old eyes it looked 100% real. The "cheese"/"camp" elements people manage to find in Trek were invisible to me. It was a real as a documentary about a present-day nuclear sub would have been. The communicators, the transporter...all totally plausible and real.
Space: 1999 was unavailable for about 20 years, so I was really excited when the DVDs came out. It turns out that the show is visually as excellent as I remember (save for some crappy optical compositing) but I had no idea the stories were so incredibly dumb (to put it harshly). It's not "cheesy" or "unserious" (in fact it's way, way TOO serious) but it betrays an extremely limited understanding of sci-fi. It's very pre-Lucas; the 1960s-1970s future. Still, it's fun to watch if you don't take it too seriously and just grok the quaint ideas about "future habitats" with enormous numerals painted on the walls.
I also liked the "action" on Batman. I remember one where they did a "dry-for-wet" sequence in a "flooded" bank basement in which Robin lost his SCUBA gear and nearly drowned (while everyone's walking around on the floor "underwater" with bubbles in the foreground).
I remember watching the Spider-Man cartoon at a friend's house. Peter Parker and a friend are wandering around when a giant robot appears. Parker uneasily says, "I have to go back to school. I, uh, forgot something." My friend said, sardonically, "Yeah—he forgot to put on his Spidey suit!" I asked, naively, "He has a Spidey suit?" everyone laughed at me.
I remembered that last part years later during Batman Returns, when Christopher Walken asks Bruce Wayne "why he's dressed up as Batman" (and Michelle Pfeiffer says, "because HE IS BATMAN, you idiot," or something like that).
Those memories are wonderful. In particular I love your Spider-Man memory. I used to love the Batman show. It was on everyday at 4pm in Rhode Island. At 4:30pm was That Girl. For some reason I always thought that “That Girl” was “Batgirl” and I remember that I cried once because I watched an entire episode of That Girl and Marlo Thomas never donned the cowl, not even once. I used to love it when Batgirl showed up on Batman. You always knew that she was going to be in an episode because during the opening credits a cartoon version of her would be inserted into the action.
Battlestar Galactica was another show I thought kicked ass as a kid. When it came out on DVD a few years back I picked it up because I realized that I hadn’t seen every episode (even thought it was technically only on for 1 season). Well, I still haven’t seen every episode because I couldn’t get through them – they’re so bad!
Right, Batgirl would swing through.
Every parent I knew absolutely HATED the Batman music for some reason. "What's that awful song?"
My favorite part of the Batman title sequence was after they beat up all those guys (hitting them hard enough that they sail horizontally through the air like when you hit a beach ball) and then Batman and Robin shake hands. Then Batman's like, "All right...now get out of here so I can manifest myself into the show's logo."
Watching any kind of live-action stuff designed for kids is difficult to swallow. I first realized this when I was watching clips of Ultraman -- U-man and the monster he was fighting were meant to be giants, but I couldn't divorce myself from the image of real people dressing up and acting goofy. The Godzilla movies are a teensy bit better b/c they use a lot of slo-mo to fake size.
My favorite whacko moment re-watching Land of the Lost as an adult was when Holly, in the first ep, says "Dad says when we fell down the waterfall we came to a different dimension" and Will responds "Wow, if that were true this really would be a land of the lost."
And I said "why the hell did he say that? Because it's the name of the SHOW THEY'RE IN?"
Like when Zephram Cochrane (who for purposes of their story is a drunk idiot) said, "You're all travellers on some kind of star trek."
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