Perhaps no decade has overstayed its welcome more egregiously than the 1980s. The party’s over, your guests have left, your spouse has gone to bed, and yet the ’80s are still jamming in your living room to Starship’s “We Built This City.” That’s not to say that everything from the ’80s was bad. Just most of it. The rest was mediocre. Yet for some reason, virtually every pop-culture property from the Reagan Era has been resurrected in recent years. Just last week, The Thing and Footloose were back in theaters, and though Footloose apparently proved to be harmless fun the second time around, the reimagining of properties already short on imagination has reached epidemic proportions. In the past two years, we’ve seen remakes, sequels, prequels and spoofs of The A-Team, Teen Wolf, MacGyver, Fright Night, Clash of the Titans, Conan the Barbarian, The Smurfs, and Arthur, just to name a few.
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint when our current infatuation with the 1980s began, I’m willing to blame 1999′s Inspector Gadget, one of the early needless adaptations and a template for the quality of recycled entertainment that followed. The Matthew Broderick-starring film was not good, in any respect, but was it even supposed to be? I mean, you remember the cartoon, right?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. READ FULL STORY »
