mr friendly guy wrote:Speaking of potential remakes, how would they change things to make it fit in with modern realities, unless they deliberately set it back in the 1980s.
Oh, please - let's NOT set it back in the 1980's. For one thing, they're unlikely to get a lot of stuff correct. It is very, very hard to do retro like that and I'd rather they expend the time and energy on good writing/plot/etc. than get distracted with the window dressing.
Also - I cringe every time this show reminds me of what it
really was like for a professional level woman in that time period. Having some big-shot come in and assume Pam was the office go-fer and tell her to fetch coffee instead of a junior partner and attorney is right on target for the time period. I worked in offices in that time period, it really was that blatant and awful (one of my first paying jobs it was explicit that getting coffee for everyone and remembering their preferences was part of my job duties. It was a woman-owned business. Clients would come in and assume the boss was the secretary. In the late 1980's I met a very successful woman entrepreneur who had hired a man to speak for her with clients who simply could not accept a woman in charge. It worked, but it's awful that was necessary). Can we not have that as part of a re-make? It would be one of the benefits of pulling it into the modern time period.
mr friendly guy wrote:1. The Soviets were enemy.
There were enemy agents which Ralph had to fight or rogue US generals who wanted to nuke the Soviets because they felt the US was losing the Cold War. Who are we going to get to supply the equivalent role? The only country that even comes close is China, and even then there is quite a bit of difference in US / China relations compared to US / USSR relations.
Its quite interesting actually about portrayals during the cold war. The US had the Soviets as the EnemyTM but the Soviets had....the Nazis. This wasn't a problem because the US rarely traded with the Soviets (except for titanium IIRC) but the US film industry is now increasingly relying on the Chinese market.
Actually, by the 1980's we were selling wheat and the like to the USSR when their crops came up short. Granted, it was the Reagan years but US-USSR relations were considerably better than they had been in the 1960's.
And tGAH had Nazis, too.
But you're correct, the US doesn't have a Cold War USSR-equivalent right now (which I'm totally OK with). We
do have an issue with some people who haven't gotten the memo yet that the Cold War is over, which could open up some plots for use. The government still has secret technology they don't want anyone else to steal. In other words, not an insurmountable obstacle.
Unless you were around at the time you probably don't remember this aspect of it, but part of the pilot was a plot to assassinate the US President. Then a couple weeks after that aired
someone tried to kill the president in real life. In neither case, not the fictional show nor the real life shooting, were the Soviets or any external enemies involved. The USSR/Red Threat was a convenient plot excuse, not a necessary component to the show. Quite a few of the threats shows in the show were homegrown, including the terrorists who wanted to steal smallpox and start an epidemic, which plot could have been lifted right out of prime-time dramas post-9/11 as well. One episode had Ralph go into a rant about democracy that would fit in perfectly with this election year. The USSR isn't the bogeyman any more, but plenty of threats still exist and some of them are even old and familar.
So its going to be hard for them to use China in the same way the Soviets were used, unless you dial up the yellow peril to strawman level like Yellow Red Dawn did.
So you deal with trade issues and pollution instead, which gets back to the original vision of the show which was less "save the world from WWIII" and more dealing with lesser and more mundane problems. Like fixed betting with major league baseball or Las Vegas casinos or stealing classified information and releasing/selling it.
2. Terrorism
Several times Ralph had to prevent terrorist attacks. Some homegrown right wing extremists who wanted to release smallpox, and some eastern European master terrorist who escaped from a West German jail by using a double.
.... and the release of nerve gas during a rock festival. Among others.
I think in this day and age when people talk about terrorism we think of a different demographic. This would give controversy to a show which is not meant to be serious, and "fun."
Right, but in addition to stereotypical Middle Eastern/Islamist extremist terrorists you still have the potential for home grown varieties, like, say, the American Nazi Party or biker gangs or inner-city urban gangs or Mexican drug cartels. One episode it's good-guy bikers helping to combat Nazi terrorists, then another episode it's good guy Muslims helping against terrorist bikers, and so on. There are ways to handle these things without turning into the worst sort of propaganda mouthpiece.
Of course, it also requires a good showrunner (is Cannell still working or retired?), good writers, and no network executive meddling to pull it off, too.
3. Bill Maxwell and the FBI
In The Greatest American Hero, the FBI were still essentially good albeit Carlyle was an incompetent who had it in for Maxwell. In this day with Snowden, Jason Bourne movies, using social media to spy on the citizens etc, shows like X-files where corrupt government with conspiracies is a strong theme, it would be very hard to portray Maxwell as idealistic without cynicism sneaking in. And yes Maxwell was idealistic in his own way. He stopped a rogue US general nuking the USSR in a preemptive strike. He tried to get mobsters indicted the proper way. He engaged with Tony Villacona in banter rather than knocking Tony down because he disrespected his authorita.
Maxwell
was a cynic. And they had plenty of episodes that dealt with corrupt agents, including a quartet of bad agents that not only were planning a theft and get-away to South America but were also ready to kill Maxwell to keep it all from getting out.
Maxwell could be the good-guy cop trying to root out the bad-guy cops. You actually could do quite a bit with the whole thing.
4. Smart phones
It would be much easier to take a photograph of Ralph in the suit, doing super stuff with the presence of smart phones. However this would most probably be the easiest problem to get around. Just have the suit have a built in feature which interferes with picture taking equipment, which Ralph cannot switch off.
I guess so - you can only yell "photoshop!" so many times. Which, by the way, is a cry we hear often enough these days to discredit real video evidence. But yeah, you'd have to put an anti-documentation thing in the suit for this. Fortunately, it's a Magic Suit
(TM) that develops powers as needed by the plot so go for it.
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