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San Francisco, 2:25 PM
Sun Dec 6
13 posts in the last 24 hours

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01:52 PM
What offends me, however, is when remakes are done but adds nothing to the canon or worse, screws it up.
12:42 PM
The success of certain reboots is perhaps due to the fact that certain stories such as Star Trek, Dr. Who, Batlestar Galactica, and Batman are particularly successful at retelling those old stories in a way that fits well with contemporary culture. Who is Kirk but Odysseus of the space age? What is Battlestar Galactica but Exodus with rocket ships?
12:52 PM
01:02 PM
01:12 PM
Need, of course, is a conditional statement. Do I need to breathe? No. Do I need to breathe in order to live? Yes. Do I need money? No. Do I need money to pay my rent? Yes. And so on...
So, in saying there is no such thing as an "original idea," you are right on one level. Every element of every story can be found in the stories that came before. Just like every art movement is built upon what came before it. One must have still lifes before one can have impressionism.
Having said that, Star Wars is not original. Hero beats bad guy. The end. Not much original about that. You can expound upon it, bring in the monomyth structure, references to Akira Kurosawa films & space serials, and it would still be considered a derivative work, from a point of view.
However, Star Wars is unique in how these ideas were brought together, how they were presented, as can easily be seen by the reaction of movie goers & the film industry in general. If Star Wars were truly unoriginal, it would have had no effect on movie making on any level.
Is it telling the same story we've seen before? From a non-conditional point of view, yes. Is it a story that the world has seen before? Honestly, from a conditional point of view, which is how we treat the world outside of art critique, no. No one had seen anything truly like Star Wars before.
12:37 PM
Then very terrified.
12/03/09
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The monolith must have been working double-time that year.
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12/03/09
Ah, Number Six, what wonderful things you do to my mind.
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12/03/09
This was intended for edification and humor.
11/26/09
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11/26/09
Then so was Wagner's Ring and the whole Nibelungenlied. And, of course, Puccini.
How about The House of Atreus? And the Oedipus cycle?
I'm gonna do my PhD dissertation: Buffy As A Universal Human Archetype
11/26/09
11/27/09
Well, I'll grant most weren't _sf_ soaps, but look at Wagner's Ring--dwarves (maybe even dwarfs), dragons with magic blood, hero screws his sister, magic swords, magic gold rings, tarnhelms for invisibility, Rinemadens living under the river...if that ain't a fantasy/soap opera combo, I'll eat my Furtwangler CDs.
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