• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Fiction Friction: Reboots, Remakes and Reimaginings

I meant most people who are knowledgeable about such things.

I believe Tom's point is that this is, by and large, a small minority of the total audience.

The MCU may be about to change that with the current releases (Loki, What If? Spider Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness) but we'll see how that sticks.
 
I believe Tom's point is that this is, by and large, a small minority of the total audience.

True in terms of video games, sure but I disagree when it comes to comics, if only because I don't see how you could possibly read any superhero comics made in the last 30 years without being generally aware of the continuity nonsense that most of them are about.
 
True in terms of video games, sure but I disagree when it comes to comics, if only because I don't see how you could possibly read any superhero comics made in the last 30 years without being generally aware of the continuity nonsense that most of them are about.

Why do you say it's nonsense? I like different continuities though they sometimes get too confusing.
 
Why do you say it's nonsense? I like different continuities though they sometimes get too confusing.

As Tom says in the article, DC in particular seems less interested in actually telling fun superhero stories then it is in constantly changing the continuity. It's fan wank instead of narrative and is part of the reason for the consistent fall in sales of superhero comics going back decades.
 
True in terms of video games, sure but I disagree when it comes to comics, if only because I don't see how you could possibly read any superhero comics made in the last 30 years without being generally aware of the continuity nonsense that most of them are about.
Indeed, I don't even read any recent ones and even I've learned of this through general popcultural osmosis.

Which doesn't, in theory, translate well to the big screen and a mainstream audience, hence the desire to use reboots as well as general adaptational tricks.
 
The old pre-Crisis multiverse at DC was probably the least continuity wank, as it started out as "hey look, the old stuff is over there, the reboot can crossover with it for a special story once a year or two" and turned into "here's another universe we sometimes go to where stuff's changed", always with a caption or three explaining it. But then you merge five into one and suddenly "there's another Flash and Green Lantern over there" becomes "there was a Flash and Green Lantern in WW2 who were completely different in every way and unrelated to this other Flash and Green Lantern, the ones you're following, also here's their kids and--".

And that's one thing to read about the Flash and Green Lantern, heroes that sometimes have top creative teams and are Big Deals in their worlds and have been on the telly. But when you throw in vast amounts of continuity for the Mighty Crusaders and most of them comics not in print... Then you should probably reboot. Properly too!

Though here's an eye-opening oral history of DC trying that very thing with the New 52 and all the various things that tripped it up...
 
Alternate universes are usually how the franchise gets around a reboot later, if people keep asking and want to know a continuation of the old stuff 'counts' - "ah, well, it's an alternate universe". I don't think anyone outside of DC Comics and Star Trek has ever done multiverse FOR the full-on reboot.
 
I wouldn't be surprised. As we all know, it's not as if anyone posh is popular with the general public (BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS SOLVING JACOB REES-MOGG'S MURDER OFFSCREEN WITHOUT USING DEDUCTION AT ANY POINT, IT TURNS OUT TO BE BORIS JOHNSON BUT THE JURY LETS HIM OFF).


An excellent point. The Bond example is slightly complicated by the fact that Sixties Sean Connery Film Bond is already quite a different beast to Fifties Ian Fleming Book Bond; most obviously, the earlier version actually fights actual Communists from actual Russia in From Russia With Love, whereas by the time the films roll around, the Cuban Missile Crisis has scared everyone off that simplistic worldview, so now it's all a plot by a third fictional faction behind the scenes to engineer war.

So, while it's reasonable that Bond can mutate and evolve with the times (Jonathan Ross' programme on GoldenEye when it came out made some points along these lines) at some point you do have to ask if there's anything consistent behind the name. We haven't got there yet, but the modern focus on name over content could send us in that direction.
I'm not sure about the books but I did see someone noting earlier this week that the original film version of Bond is Scottish and yet every subsequent one is English and this never seems to come up as a "ruined forever" or anything.
 
I'm not sure about the books but I did see someone noting earlier this week that the original film version of Bond is Scottish and yet every subsequent one is English and this never seems to come up as a "ruined forever" or anything.

I think in a classic 'morse' like situation, Fleming never gave any detail about Bond's background until the two last books which were written after the Dr. NO film and they reveal Bond was scottish in order to tie in.

But you're right it never stuck, in fact it never stuck to the point that when ERB did a Craig bond vs Connery Bond rap, Craig gets the line 'maybe they should cast a Bond who's actually english' because at that point the assumption was that english is the default Bond and Connery the outlier.

Whereas if instead of Moore they had cast a scottish actor, you could easily see it become a core part of the character.
 
Time to cast Welsh or Northern Irish Bond to really mess with everyone's heads then.

Already done with Brosnan to be fair though I think he played Bond is more English.

Lazenby was Australian of course. You do wonder if that had worked, even the british thing would become far less important than it's seen now.
 
Alternate universes are usually how the franchise gets around a reboot later, if people keep asking and want to know a continuation of the old stuff 'counts' - "ah, well, it's an alternate universe". I don't think anyone outside of DC Comics and Star Trek has ever done multiverse FOR the full-on reboot.

I am well aware of that. I was just disagreement with @Thande's definition of a true reboot.
 
Of course the really odd thing is them suddenly veering back to that in Skyfall with the implication that even Craig's Bond is Scottish, just having been educated at posh English schools.

Meanwhile, back in the Brosnan era, you have The World is Not Enough, which was literally the motto of the Bond baronets, who were definitely English (though I don’t remember whether the phrase was associated with Bond before that film). Though they were also extremely Stuart-aligned to the point that they were created baronets by Charles II while Cromwell was actually in fact still running the country; the 1st Bt was on Henrietta Maria’s staff.

You could play that off as a coincidence, but you could actually make a decent mini-AH justification out wherein Bond is descended from the Bond baronets and they didn’t go extinct, but they did end up in Scotland with their baronetcy stripped due to their Jacobitism rather than ending up dying out IIRC in the Jacobite court on the continent.
 
Meanwhile, back in the Brosnan era, you have The World is Not Enough, which was literally the motto of the Bond baronets, who were definitely English (though I don’t remember whether the phrase was associated with Bond before that film). Though they were also extremely Stuart-aligned to the point that they were created baronets by Charles II while Cromwell was actually in fact still running the country; the 1st Bt was on Henrietta Maria’s staff.

You could play that off as a coincidence, but you could actually make a decent mini-AH justification out wherein Bond is descended from the Bond baronets and they didn’t go extinct, but they did end up in Scotland with their baronetcy stripped due to their Jacobitism rather than ending up dying out IIRC in the Jacobite court on the continent.

I like how the 'same bond, different actors' vs 'James Bond is also a codename' schools of thought both really struggle with Skyfall for different reasons- especially the whole 'the Groundskeeper was written with Connery in mind' aspect.

I've literally seen 'Bond is a codename, it just happens to also be the real name of the Craig iteration' as a theory.
 
Meanwhile, back in the Brosnan era, you have The World is Not Enough, which was literally the motto of the Bond baronets, who were definitely English (though I don’t remember whether the phrase was associated with Bond before that film).
It previously appears in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" when Bond goes to the Royal College of Arms and they show him his own in passing. On checking the book (grunts to prise it out of the complete set carboard box holder thing), it did appear there, and I think this is what @Gary Oswald was referring to as Fleming tying the last few books into the film series (the book was published in 1963).

Bond: "My father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss ... my father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe..."

Griffin Or: "You may be able to claim ... descent from an ancient baronetcy founded ... in the year 1658! Does it not excite you that a possible ancestor of yours was responsible for the name of one of the most famous streets in the world - I refer of course to Bond Street? That was the Sir Thomas Bond, Baronet of Peckham in the County of Surrey, who, as you are no doubt aware, was Comptroller of the household of the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria..."

(goes on into excruciating detail about Bond Street's historical connections while Bond tries to drag the conversation back to Blofeld)

"...Argent on a chevron sable three bezants...and this charming motto of the line, 'The World is Not Enough'. You do not wish to have the right to it?"

Bond (dryly): "It is an excellent motto which I will certainly adopt."

So to Fleming it certainly wasn't a code name, though whether Bond was one of the Bond Street Bonds is left ambiguous and, perhaps appropriately, he clearly doesn't care in the slightest about his ancestry throughout the conversation.
 
A lot depends on how much of the essences of the character remains intact.

For example, Bond is - at base - a secret agent performing acts of mayhem for Britain (cheers, cheers) and defeating secret agents performing acts of mayhem for other powers (boo, hiss). He can be updated as the years roll on, with his enemies shifting from Russia to terrorist groups like Spectre and AQ. It doesn't matter, at base, if his stories are set in 1960 or 2021. What matters is the role Bond plays. The same can easily be said of the Doctor. By the time the First Doctor passes on, the character is firmly established as a time-travelling meddler and as long as that is there, the rest is just gravy. Of course, this does depend on both good actors and good scripts. Colin Baker and Jodi Whitaker both had problems with those and their doctors suffered, particularly when Chibnal decided to take a wrecking ball to the franchise.

A slightly wider franchise opens the range for newer actors. Star Trek could (and did) handle a captain who was not Shatner. The role of captain wasn't defined by a single person or persons, allowing Sisko and Janeway to have a shot at it. Archer was a weaker candidate and Burnham was not, at least at first, a captain in her own right. Rather the opposite. Nor was Green Lantern ruined by Hal Jordon being partnered by Guy Gardner and John Stewart, although things wobbled a bit when Hal turned evil and Kyle took his place. There's a place in the lanterns for Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz and no reason, at least on the surface, why they shouldn't have a chance. There's no rule that says Lantern #2 has to be a carbon copy of Hal Jordon (or Alan Scott).

Really, though, it depends on the character. Kyle suffered because he got a hell of a lot of character shrilling in his first few appearances in Green Lantern. He was really redeemed by his role in JLA. The idea is to allow a character to develop naturally, which is a great deal harder if your character is filling someone else's shoes. The character must make mistakes and learn from them, rather than getting everything right the first time.

The idea of a female Bond, therefore, would depend upon the 'Bond is a codename' theory becoming fact. This would anger a lot of the purists, who would argue 'Bond' is always the same person. Changing his race would raise other issues. My way to tackle the problem would be to introduce a new female agent in one movie, then give her the starring role in the next.

Chris
 
Back
Top