Reruns on TV are one thing. Remakes of old movies are another. Rewrites of old books may have new covers but the same words. Repeats in life? Now that is another series of films that seems to re-collide into pages of memories.
I was watching the new Willie Wonka film that turned out to be the old Willie Wonka film with a new licorice twist, so to speak. I liked the old one better. Which brought me to write about life and going thru the real Old Willies and pondering the New Willies of reality.
When I was young, radio and television was young along with record players and mail that people actually wrote, put into envelopes then stamped with a little spit. The new old cliche of people my age really did not last long. Past generations dwelt in the past for generations after generations. My generation progressed so fast, in the last 100 years, that new thoughts and ideas only last a week or less. Sometimes not even a day!
That is the way it is suppose to be. Today anyway.
Things are going by so swiftly that paragraphs are reduced to a sentence or two.
History is repeating itself. Only faster. With so much going on so quickly the norm seems to be Attention Deficit Disorders gone wild. Our synapses are firing so many times that they cannot keep up with themselves making fried brains to be the breakfast of the future.
This is good.
Finally the 90% of our brains that have been dead the last million or so years are beginning to wake up.
Unless. Maybe every million or so years our brains will grow another 10% for a 100 or so years. Then they will hibernate and go back to sleep for another million or so years. If that happens how many remakes of Willie Wonka can we stand? How many Lucy, Sienfield, or Saturday Night Live reruns can we handle? Will the same books keep rolling off the presses with new covers and the same words?
Wait a minute. A generation only really lasts for a hundred or so years then it dies out. So why am I bothering to write about this now. Well I am 54. That means if I live to be 100..................
Damn that is still a lot of reruns. remakes and rebooks I have to live thru.
I promise I will only write this once. So pay attention please. I am starting a redo revolution.
Unless I get paid for them.
How will you rethink all this?
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3 comments:
Good morning, Chumly, and thanks for dropping by my knitting blog. With knitting, one becomes quite accustomed to doing the same thing over and over. Two sleeves, two socks, two mittens, . . . in fact, when making socks and mittens (and sweaters) for "real" men, one does the same project in virtually the same colors over and over and over until one can (and does) do them in the dark. And yet, the lack of variation in no way impairs the utility.
Remake of "The Posiedon Adventure?" Bad. Remake of those favorite grey wool hand-knit socks? Good.
Maybe it's a question of the purpose for the re-make, re-do, repeat. Another pair of socks for my beloved husband is an act of love. Another version of Willy Wonka is an act of - well - greed?
Good points Chumly, it's funny though, I have the New Willy Wonka on and then I click over to your site and find this post, wild huh. They redo stories because there are new crops of kids, new generations, and you have to pitch them something new, with new effects and current movie stars. You can rent an old version for your kid and they would probably love it, after all, to them it is a new story. But to make a big deal out of it and advertise it and get tons of theaters to show it, it has to be 'new'. I think Jonny Depp is pretty amazing in this and so are those Oompa Loompa guys. lol...
absurd thought -
God of the Universe hates
Nickelodeon...
.
I have thought a lot about this. For me, it seems like a sort of vanity. On the one hand, it's an homage to the original, and on the other hand, it's a statement that says, "I think I can do better".
But in a way, it also shows us that we are so busy looking backwards that we are not looking forward as much. Some people call it a state of cultural exhaustion. I am not suffering from that- only from dealing with other people who have it. And no- I don't think it's necessarily good or bad. It's just when it comes at the expense of forward looking material that it gets costly in the long run.
But with everybody postponing their concern for a future that happens after they die, what does it matter?
It's as though nihilism is a requirement for survival in today's World.
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