“To write science fiction, or any kind of fiction, you need a strong original idea. It doesn’t have to be your strong original idea...” The words of Avengers and Doctor Who scribe Malcolm Hulke – no stranger to reworking his own ideas, or other people’s in the service of a strong script – seem to have been taken to heart over the past few years, says Owen Morris.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen Star Trek limp to its end as a television franchise, with a ‘reimagining’ of the classic series on the cards for 2008. Doctor Who has come back stronger than it’s been since the mid-1970s, spawning two spin-offs, which themselves are drawing inspiration from other series. But for every Battlestar Galactica, which has taken the core concepts of the original idea and carried them to places that the original creators would never have dared, there’s a Flash Gordon or Painkiller Jane, jettisoning much of what was good about the source material and replacing it with generic superhero action.

Once-strong franchises have produced weak material, seemingly because their creators can’t let go of former glories. There aren’t many serious Star Wars fans who will claim that the recent trilogy is of a similar standard to the original three, while the most recent incarnations of Babylon 5 pale into insignificance against the glories of the Shadow War.

Recognition factor

It’s important to note that this isn’t a phenomenon that is confined to the science fiction genre. You can be scared not-so-rigid by the recent remake of The Hitcher, or revisit a classic Western face-off in the new version of 3.10 to Yuma.

For movie moguls, there’s a certain logic to financing such films: the history of cinema is littered with remakes of earlier films, and it’s not true to say that every remake is a disaster. However, we do tend to remember the misfires more than the successes. Gus Van Sant’s supposedly shot-for-shot remake of Psycho was greeted by one reviewer with the simple one word comment: “Why?” The 21st Century incarnation of House of Wax was a waste of celluloid, barring its disposal of Paris Hilton in a crowd-pleasing manner, and it risked putting people off seeing the much better original. Nobody could better Michael Caine's portrayal of reined-in anger in Get Carter - so why did Sly Stallone feel the need to try? And please preserve us from the proposed remake of The Long Good Friday…

There’s not even the argument that these films need to be remade because they’re no longer available. Silent films were remade as talkies for that reason, and colour versions succeeded monochrome. But now a huge percentage of the cinematic output of the 20th Century is available on DVD, often in prints a thousand times clearer than the original. But movie producers greenlight the films because they’ve got that all-important recognition factor, and so audiences are hopefully drawn in to find out what all the fuss is about.

Staple of the industry

‘New’ versions of TV successes have been a staple of the film industry for the past half century. Hammer Films scored highly with The Quatermass Xperiment, while Aaru Films excited audiences a decade later with Dr Who and the Daleks. And as dreadful as they are, the big screen versions of Steptoe and Son and On The Buses were major money-spinners.

Following the success of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, studios looked to give the bold and brassy treatment to new fodder. But without the vision of a director like Burton, films like The Avengers, The Saint, Wild Wild West and Lost in Space neither worked as complete new versions of their respective mythos, nor as large-scale features in their own right. The use of original actors in cameos highlighted the problem: at the time, Dreamwatch’s review of The Saint suggested that Roger Moore’s voiceover at the end was the best thing about the whole film. And on a related note, let’s hope that Leonard Nimoy’s involvement with the new Star Trek film doesn’t turn out to be its apogee.

Bringing series back on television is not as new as you might believe from the hysteria that has greeted Doctor Who’s return either. For a start, Star Trek fans had an 18 year wait between seasons (or 13 if you start from the animated series). Long running cop shows like Dragnet in the States, or Z Cars in Great Britain had years between series. A lot of popular 1970s series turned up as TV Movies during the 1980s, including a trilogy of films featuring The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and the hugely enjoyable The Return of the Man From UNCLE. Robin Hood has had numerous incarnations, from Richard Greene’s feats of derring-do via the deer-stalking Robin of Sherwood to BBC’s 21st Century-influenced version.

However on the whole, these new versions added something new to the mix each time they returned. With Doctor Who, of course, that has been comparatively easy, in that each production team and lead actor has always brought a change to the show. Revamping the format, thus altering the focus of the stories, has been key to the latest version’s success. Star Trek jumped a century for Star Trek: The Next Generation and its two immediate successors, but the biggest misfire came when the producers decided to jump back 200 years and fill in some continuity gaps in Star Trek: Enterprise.

21st Century attitudes

With their reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick took a 1970s Star Wars rip-off/homage and fed it through a filter of 21st Century mores and attitudes. The result hasn’t always been comfortable viewing, but it’s certainly made for some of the strongest science fiction on television. They’ve even managed to incorporate elements of the old show without them feeling out of place: not simply the presence of Richard Hatch in a completely different type of role, but simple things like the old theme music being the Colonies Fanfare.

Maybe the success of the new versions comes about because the original creators are not involved. With a couple of exceptions, none of the team making Doctor Who and its spin-offs made the ‘classic’ show. Star Trek: The Next Generation took off once Gene Roddenberry’s day to day influence ceased to be felt, but Enterprise failed because by then Rick Berman himself needed replacing. Glen A. Larson may have a nominal executive producer credit for Galactica, but he’s not part of the creative team.

However, Babylon 5: The Lost Tales has the same core team behind it, with all the same strengths and weaknesses as B5 itself. When the writer, director and executive producer are one and the same man, then there aren’t many people who are going to be able to criticise him effectively. J. Michael Straczynski himself clearly gives the impression that he can’t move on from the B5 universe. The same applies to the second trilogy of Star Wars films: the creative input of an Irvin Kershner or Richard Marquand are missing.

In 2008 two old franchises will return to the big screen with the new Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies. J.J. Abrams and his crew are very like Russell T Davies and his team, recreating something from their childhoods. We can only hope that the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull crew aren’t stuck in the same mindset as those who made The Last Crusade nearly 20 years ago, and will bring something fresh and exciting to the screen…

Click here for the Babylon 5: The Lost Tales review.
Click here for the Flash Gordon: Pilot review.
Click here for the Bionic Woman: Pilot review.