Thursday, January 17, 2008

Bring It Back

With the recent trend of bringing back old tv shows (see Knight Rider, American Gladiator, etc..) sweeping the nation, I've compiled a list of the top 5 shows I think are worthy of a second life. Noticeably absent from the list is Futurama because technically it is back already. Perhaps not on a regular weekly basis yet, but new episodes are being produced. So here we go, in no particular order except the one you see below.

1. Sledgehammer. This was a comedy in the mid-80's which never quite caught on. Sure it was a little corny, but this is the perfect opportunity to weed out all of the corn and turn it into a full fledged gut busting comedy. And if you only remember the show with the original, nails on a chalkboard laugh track, do yourself a favor and rent the DVD's which are presented without said laugh track, as nature intended.

2. The A-Team. If you've got a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team. Yes, with today's technology, they could easily fire off thousands more rounds of ammunition every episode without actually hitting anyone, and they could have even more cars flipped going off a ramp with only 2 wheels. Don't even pretend you don't want to see that.

3. Land of the Lost. That's right, I said it. Imagine how good this could have been without the stop motion animation and guys running around cheap sets in bad looking costumes. CGI could make this show a huge hit. It's just like Lost, except with dinosaurs. How could this possibly go wrong?

4. The Tick. No, not the awful live action version with Patrick Warburton. The original cartoon in all it's glory. The Tick was hilarious. Ridiculous, over the top villains, a big goofy super hero with possibly the greatest battle cry in history - Spooooooon! And don't forget his talking pet dog speak, who doesn't actually talk and only later does he find out isn't actually a dog.

5. Firefly. Cutting it down to just 5 was difficult, but in the end, I had to go with Firefly since it never really got a fair chance. I think they only made 14 episodes before it got canceled, but it was an extremely well done show. Had people actually heard about it before it was canceled, I have no doubt it would have been huge. As a matter of fact, I had never heard of it until the critically acclaimed film Serenity - based on the tv show Firefly - was released. If you like sci-fi, or just well written television in general and haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Other shows that I considered but didn't quite make the top 5 cut: Perfect Strangers, Alf, Mr. Belvedere, Miami Vice, Magnum PI, and Amazing Stories. Free praise to anyone who can come up with something better than my top 5.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sledgehammer wasn't just a little bit corny. It was way, way, way corny. I'm not sure if I'd like it now since that was then, (and it wasn't all that great back in the 80's), and this is now.

A-Team, sure why not. Especially if they got better stunt guys and effects. And this time around, could someone please actually shoot someone with a gun?

Land of the Lost could be cool. Walking with dinosaurs meets running for your life. The only problem is that no one would believe humans could survive the new dinosaurs since back then, dinosaurs were thought to be real slow (physically as well as mentally). This time around we'd have to give the humans some sort of weapons like rocket launchers, sniping rifles, you know technology that makes big explosions. Now that could be cool.

I'm not sure Magnum PI should ever be remade because they won't do it nearly as well as they did the first time around. Although I wouldn't mind seeing the cast get back together and do another season or two.