Fiction Friction: But What If Your Reboot Sucks?

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article by @Thande here

 

[Ricardolindo]

Digimon Adventure 2020, which ended a couple of weeks ago, is a reboot of the 1999 Digimon Adventure. How bad it was is debatable but there's a consensus that it was worse than the original.
I don't see what problem @Thande has with the Pokémon games. While the game play is the same, the characters and regions are usually different.

 

[Thande]

Digimon Adventure 2020, which ended a couple of weeks ago, is a reboot of the 1999 Digimon Adventure. How bad it was is debatable but there's a consensus that it was worse than the original.
I don't see what problem @Thande has with the Pokémon games. While the game play is the same, the characters and regions are usually different.

I didn't want to get into that as it's not the main point, but I think it's a good example of how a series is clearly designed for a new generation of young players each time, not appealing to veterans (e.g. very basic, unskippable tutorials and explanations every time, dialogue and plots aimed at ten-year-olds) yet still manages to have a continuing adult fanbase. The regions being different is probably the best argument, I don't think there's enough characterisation to really say the games have distinct characters. But this is an outsider looking in of course.

 

[Charles EP M.]

"If you're doing a reboot, why are you just redoing the old plot with more CG?" is definitely a question many franchises would rather we didn't ask, as the answer will often be "well the old one looks dated now and that might effect sales, but the reboot definitely will never age". Really a hiding to nothing there.

 

[Masteroftheuniverse]

Reboots would seem to have fallen out of fashion recently, at least in Hollywood, probably because some recent examples have ended by being poorly received. The trends these days are either to do a soft reboot, or, most recently what has been described as a "requel", where part but not all of the original franchise is acknowledged (for example, the most recent Terminator film not acknowledging anything after Terminator 2).
This allows the new work to distance itself from the old without having to take the inevitably controversial move of jettisoning everything, as in a traditional reboot. In fact, it can be a selling point to hardcore fans who would otherwise hate the idea of a reboot ("Remember how that film you loved got ruined by all those crappy sequels? None of that happened anymore, this is the REAL sequel").

 

[Charles EP M.]

The "requel" is a very interesting way of doing the reboot, because like you say it doesn't jettison the beloved original - but it also turns the original into a far more sacred tome, these weighty important events, and to some extent traps you in a narrow lane. Lots of tales of legacies and aging characters or Son of Character - like, Ghostbusters Afterlife is going "look, Egon's kid!" while the remake gives you Holtzmann, a female Egon type.

 

[Thande]

Reboots would seem to have fallen out of fashion recently, at least in Hollywood, probably because some recent examples have ended by being poorly received. The trends these days are either to do a soft reboot, or, most recently what has been described as a "requel", where part but not all of the original franchise is acknowledged (for example, the most recent Terminator film not acknowledging anything after Terminator 2).
This allows the new work to distance itself from the old without having to take the inevitably controversial move of jettisoning everything, as in a traditional reboot. In fact, it can be a selling point to hardcore fans who would otherwise hate the idea of a reboot ("Remember how that film you loved got ruined by all those crappy sequels? None of that happened anymore, this is the REAL sequel").

A good point, and I discuss an example of this in a later article in this series.