Maybe I’m an old person, but I feel like one of the weakest ideas for a show or movie is a remake. It’s like, you can’t find anything new to do? The reasons to do remakes I can see (outside of just money chasing):

  • It’s been like 60 years and no one remembers. This is the weakest.

  • You do a interesting twist or change(The various Sherlock Holmes in modern day, redoing in a different language, doing a live action version).

  • The previous adaptation was completely off the rails and considered bad.

  • There were shots that you just couldn’t do in the past due to less technology.

For the recent Trigun, and now Spice and Wolf and Rurouni Kenshin - were the previous anime’s way off the source material? I don’t think Spice and Wolf was, I haven’t read the source for Trigun or Kenshin. If not, I’m struggling to see why anyone who was interested in these would wait to see the “new” version versus just watching the existing one RIGHT NOW.

For those of us who watched the existing version, why would we want to waste time on re-watching the same story when there’s other shows that are new, either to everyone or at least to us? I guess in my limited time to watch a firehose of entertainment (heck, just in Anime, forget about shows like The Witcher, various Star Trek, books etc), tell me what I’m missing by just skipping these and remembering the stuff I watched 15-20 years ago?

Heck, I even tried to watch the live action movies of Kenshin, and while the first was interesting enough, I was also kind of just like, oh yea - this scene now. And never watched the rest because I know the story.

OTOH, I recall these being enjoyable enough that I watched Trigun and Kenshin several times, bought the translated light novels for Spice and Wolf (though I did peter out around book 11).

  • zabadoh
    1·
    1 year ago

    If the Japanese copyright system is anything like the US, the copyright holder has to exercise their copyright, i.e. produce new product, to renew their copyright every few decades.

    So that’s why you see Disney making things like the new Little Mermaid movie 30 years after the original, so their Little Mermaid IP doesn’t pass into the public domain.

    That is, even though the Little Mermaid was based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale that was in the public domain.