10 THINGS THAT SHOULD NEVER (EVER) BE REBOOTED OR REMADE

The noughties may well be remembered for being the decade where the movie industry woke up in the middle of the night, realised it was peckish and, finding its fridge bare, went down into the basement of cult entertainment to feed on the cultural morsels found there. If a comic or long-dead television series looked like it could provide any kind of box office nourishment it was swiftly remade into a big-bucks event movie.

The only thing that the below list items have in common is that they were all - in their own way - successful. This in the past has proved irresistible to film studios. People loved Dukes of Hazzard in the 70s! Right? And who can get enough of Sean William Scott right now? Exactly - no one! This thing remakes itself, let's go listen to that Linkin Park CD again and clear some space for all our future money.

Here is the list of things I don't want to see Hollywood bundle into the back of a van...


Preacher
Persistent rumblings suggest this is already on the cards. Thankfully I'm too lazy to do even the most cursory of internet searches to find out whether Preacher, the hit graphic novel series, is in fact already being remade for film or television. The comics were hit and miss but stood out thanks to a consistently witty tone of voice and an original premise.

If Preacher ever ended up in the hands of Hollywood producers it might very well suffer the same fate as Watchmen. That is to say, it would be directed by a hired gun eager to slavishly follow the comic's every frame while its PR would desperately attempt to convince the mainstream that it somehow had universal appeal. It didn't work for Alan Moore's opus and it wouldn't work here.

Metroid
Good games don't necessarily make good films. What might seem like a stable premise for a Super Nintendo game ("he's a fox that flies in the stars! He's a Star Fox!") will probably not be enough to support a 90-minute feature film. Metroid, as original and significant as it was, doesn't boil down to much more than a suited-up lady shooting aliens in space. And actually, in retrospect, the eponymous monsters were basically just jellyfish with teeth.

Redwall
A long-running series of children's fantasy books revolving around the titular Redwall Abbey - a sanctuary for adventuresome woodland animals. It was a great franchise back in the day - and not only because it taught children to discriminate blindly on the basis of species (all mice, badgers and rabbits were "good", all weasals, rats and stoats were irrecoverably "evil").

In an age when 3D films about talking animals regularly rake in millions and millions of dollars it's a miracle that no one big has jumped on Redwall yet. You'd think in the wake of Lord of The Rings and Ratatoille a series about vermin fighting each other with medieval weaponry would be a no-brainer.

Friends
How bleak. How predictable. Everybody went mad over Friends in the 90s. Unlike Frasier it hasn't aged particularly well however. Watching it now, Friends seems absurd. This is probably because unlike Frasier, Friends was a pretty old-fashioned construct. The way the characters spoke and interacted with their surroundings had a lot in common with early sitcoms like Leave It To Beaver, while the exaggerated mannerisms of the cast and the easily-pleased canned laughter harked back to turgid 1980s schlock like Married With Children.

But it was popular. And the entire cast - despite doing nothing of note subsequently - are still frequently in the public eye. That means that the temptation for producers would be to kick around some kind of Friends at 40 motion picture where the gang reunite as fat, middle-aged people for one last outing. Or what about an Aliens vs Predator style franchise-mash-up called something like Friends vs Sex in the City? As long as the plot necessitated some kind of mutual assured destruction visited upon all the entire cast I would probably watch it.

Visionaries
A moderately successful franchise in its time, Visionaries is - in fairness - probably quite low-down on the list of things destined to be remade. Which is of course no guarantee it won't be. Did anyone anticipate Alvin & The Chipmunks becoming a money-spewing super-title? Was there a single right-thinking human who thought they'd see the day that these guys would get their own major motion picture?

So a Visionaries film, upon reflection, isn't as unlikely as it seems. Obviously said film would be a monstrous carbuncle. The original cartoon relied on a peculiar kind of apocalyptic 1980s morosity, also found in Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Any attempt to recreate this would end in misery for everyone involved.

Robocop
Oh God, have you seen Robocop recently? It's awful. Even with Paul Verhoeven's customary, pointless nude scenes it's a real effort to watch this or the sequel and take either seriously. The action sequences stand out, even in the context of the 1980s, as being aggressively unpleasant and, unlike something like Hard Boiled, the carnage can't even be called stylish.

In fact all Robocop has going for it is the iconic design of its roboprotagonist. It's one of those cultural tropes which refuses to go away. A Robocop Returns-type thing would obviously just try and milk that shitty-looking suit for all its worth. In fact, in the wake of Iron Man's success this doesn't seem at all unlikely. Expect a teaser trailer which opens with a close up that black visor. It all goes dark. "Your move, perp." Gunshot. Yawn.

Top Gun

A film so full of tropes, memes and visual trademarks a sequel would most likely write itself. Top Gun was massively successful in its day (as well as proving very durable culturally) so it's a miracle its brand has thus far remained untarnished. I say untarnished. The truth is Top Gun - like Robocop - was highly tarnished from the offset because it's no good at all. It can just about be enjoyed ironically, but, like everything Tony Scott touches,the whole thing feels like one long, miserable advert. For the remake we can also probably look forward to a Paramore cover version of Take My Breath Away.

Akira
Another title that's been on the lips of film execs for what feels like forever. It's hard to justify a live-action Akira. Sure, it's massive and epic and thought-provoking and panoramic, but it's also willfully baffling. And if there's one thing that big-budget doesn't do well it's baffling. In fact Akira's entire plot premise is so of it's time that remaking it now would be an uncomfortable filmic exercise in trying to fit a round, cyber-punky peg into a square, post-millennial hole.

Any kind of Brit-pop cash-in
At some point someone will try and mythologize the 90s Brit-pop scene, either on television or film. They'll look at Backbeat, 24-Hour Party People and Telstar and ask why nobody has yet tried to do the same thing with the guitar-band boom which seemed to dominate music like a persistent fungal infection for so long.

What seems like a good, sure-fire money-spinning idea on paper is in fact an awful, sure-fire money-spinning idea. When the Brit-pop scene is looked back on objectively, and without the benefit of rose-tinted glasses, the pickings are decidedly slim. Sure Blur and Pulp have a couple of good albums, Oasis have the athems, but let's call a spade a spade. Brit-pop was absolute tat. It's guitar music without any guitar playing. Apart from the bands mentioned above who else is even worth mentioning? Menswear? Elastica? The fucking Boo Radleys? Exactly.

The Games Workshop
Sporadically popular throughout the 80s and 90s and then extremely popular for a short while in the noughties (thanks again Lord Of The Rings!), The Games Workshop are a company that make table-top wargames designed to allow adolescent boys to forget how much they fear the real world for a few hours. Crucially - as far as Hollywood is concerned - the games (Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000) are also designed to rob said boys' parents of as much of their money as possible.

At this point in time the only tie-ins that I'm aware of are a couple of PC games, but it can't be long before an exec realises how fertile the Games Workshop would be for a series of dull, humourless films, set either in the distant future "where there is only war", or in the distant past where there is "no time for peace".

The inevitable problems connected to such a series of films stem from the fact that nothing - absolutely nothing - in the entire Games Workshop universe is either original or compelling. Dune had that Spice stuff, Battlestar Galactica had a strong post-911 message , even Conan had an anti-religious bent and a worryingly Nietzschian sub-text. The Games Workshop has this. Billions of guns firing in every conceivable direction. Forever. The Warhammer universe has about as much depth as the Micro Machines franchise. And at least girls "got" Micro Machines.