Today, I ask you folks to name your picks for the best remake of a post-1940 film.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
Remakes of movies are almost as old as movies themselves, and while many of them fail to improve on the original version of the film, there have been some notable exceptions over the years. However, there were SO many silent films that were then remade as “talkies” and other films done in the early 1930s that were done again soon after, I figured I’d make this is a bit more difficult and make it only remakes of films where the original debuted after 1940.
My choice is John Carpenter’s The Thing, a brilliantly nihilistic takeoff on the 1950s sci-fi film, The Thing from Another World.
What’s YOUR pick?
Feel free to suggest other topics for future Pop Culture Theme Times to me at brian@popculturereferences.com.
I know people say The Thing is a remake of The Thing from Another World, but is it? They’re both adaptations of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”, and The Thing is so vastly different that the only real similarity is that they’re both about an alien monster in an isolated research base (in Antarctica in “Who Goes There?” and The Thing, the Arctic in TTfAW). Heck, the alien in TTfAW doesn’t even imitate its victims to blend in with the humans. TTfAW was only very loosely based on WGT?; The Thing is a much more faithful adaptation.
Anyhoo, having said that, my initial thought for “best remake” is Airplane!, a remake of 1957’s Zero Hour!. (Yeah, it’s a parody, but it uses a LOT of the original script, in some scenes verbatim.) (Though if you don’t think that should count, fair enough.)
I agree with Perler. I don’t consider The Thing to be a remake because it’s just adapting the same source material and doing it in a different way to the 50s film. In my book, for an adaptation to count as a remake and not a new adaptation, it has to specifically be remaking another adaptation and following all of the changes it made to the source material, like the recent Disney live-action remakes, or the American version of The Ring.
To answer your question, I guess my favorite remake of an original movie is Ocean’s Eleven, and I didn’t even know it was a remake until relatively recently.