Reboot or Ripoff?

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cyharding
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Reboot or Ripoff?

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Postby cyharding » Mon Sep 03, 2018 8:09 pm

It seems that in recent years, there have been reboots of classic shows from the 1980s & 90s, with several coming out this year. One of them is Magnum PI. Today, one of my brothers who is a fan of the original show with Tom Selleck in the lead, remarked negatively when he saw a something about the reboot on TV, claiming that Hollywood is out of ideas. I didn't disagree with him, but I did remark that if a television network created an show with original characters, but used many of the tropes used in that show (private dectective, exotic location, expert in the intellengence community, action scenes, etc...), people would be complaining that the show would be ripping off Magnum PI.

So that brings up a question I want to ask all of you: Since TV became widely avialable in 1950s, along with the development home video & streaming access to various material, we have beeen awash in TV content. Could it be that the suits ran out of ideas, not because they're willing to try, but because every concept has been tried? I hope I've made myself clear as I have trouble typing things up on the fly like I am now.
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Re: Reboot or Ripoff?

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Postby pwhodges » Tue Sep 04, 2018 2:40 am

You can argue that; or you can argue that the suits are limiting the means of expression to suit their constrained view of the world of entertainment as a branch of finance. After all, stories of human relationships and conflict are always going to have common aspects; what is new in each good work of art is the detail of how things are put across, both in writing and in playing. Remember, many of Shakespear's plays can be described as rehashes of previously available dramas, and yet he made something unique out of them - and I would say this still happens. But not everything will be great, and nor was it so in the past. And not everything happens under the control of suits, either.
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Re: Reboot or Ripoff?

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Postby Chuckman » Tue Sep 04, 2018 1:46 pm

The Greeks sitting about their campfires didn't complain about ripoffs when someone made up some new shit about Hercules.
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