The Story’s The Same?
I may be repeating myself here. If so, consider it an added bit of meta-commentary, because I think the time is right for this conversation again.
In the last ten to twenty years, the reboot has joined the remake as a source for new programming. Serialized stories, from TV shows to movie series to comic books, have had their story continuity restarted, sometimes but not always with some kind of link to what has gone before. Examples include the Star Trek movie from 2009, the Battlestar Galactica series that aired on Syfy, Daniel Craig’s James Bond films, and every third week of DC Comics publishing. Many of these stories are well-received, but there is also a certain stigma attached – a reboot is considered a sign of laziness, or inability to come up with something new. I wonder if that stigma is deserved.
This came to a head in the last few weeks because of two events. A couple of months ago, DC announced that they would restart all of their comics from new issue #1s in September. Many, but not all, of the previously-published plot points would be wiped from the storylines. And then J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the cult-favorite SF series Babylon 5, announced that he had been in negotiations with Warner Brothers to reboot that show along the lines of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The premise would be kept, everything else would be up for grabs. Actors from the original series might be used, but perhaps they would play new roles.
Now, at this point in time, the last time anyone tried to put a new Babylon 5 story on television was ten years ago. One low-budget direct-to-DVD project went nowhere. The reruns are nowhere to be found on television, although they have been available from various streaming services over the years. So this is not a household name we’re talking about here. But even after all this time there is a small number of dedicated Babylon 5 fans who keep their antennae up for any sign of new stories, and when this news came out . . . well, let’s say there was some consternation.
“Why do something that’s already been done?â€
“Why insult the work of everyone who made the original?â€
“Why would Straczynski do something so unoriginal?â€
“Why go back and do something that’s already been done?â€
Now, I’m in a strange place, hearing this news. Straczynski is one of those writers that I’ve described as a bitter breakup – his work meant a lot to me at one time, but now something has changed and I find a lot of it annoying. So I feel like I should be thinking this is a bad idea. To be honest, I don’t know if I would watch it if it ever happened. But I almost find myself more fascinated by this idea than I would be by a straight continuation. To understand why, I had to think about all of those questions, and about the notions of reboots in general.
And what I wonder is, where did this idea that a story should only be told once come from? In societies with oral traditions, stories are retold all the time. Live theater is based on the idea of telling the same story performance after performance. Stand-up comedians have an act that they take on the road, and they keep doing some bits for months or even years. Where would the Walt Disney Company be without its retellings of myths, folk stories, and fairy tales that had been told and retold throughout the years?
The use of recording media to preserve and distribute specific performances to a mass audience has to have something to do with it. There was no way a Homer or an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare could share one carefully constructed performance with the entire audience that would want to see it. But now, I can experience Cary Grant’s performance in Arsenic and Old Lace or William Shatner’s TV portrayal of James T. Kirk even though both occurred years before I was born. And because recorded media let me watch those portrayals as many times as I want, I associate that specific performance and that specific actor with the role.
There’s an irony. On the one hand people say that they don’t want to see the same stories over again. On the other, there are entire industries built around making sure that people are able to experience the exact same performance of the same story over and over again. That familiarity then creates resistance to a revised or rethought version of the story.
I think there’s another unintended side effect of all that recorded permanence. Patton Oswalt wrote in Wired that thanks to the Internet, we live in a world that is close to making Everything That Ever Was – Available Forever (etewaf). Once upon a time, only a few films or TV shows could be become evergreen classics, replayed forever in syndication. If something made it past that bottleneck, it was available to a large chunk of audience that, hopefully, would be able to appreciate it for both its timeless and dated qualities. But now there is so much available from the recent past that there’s less time available to dig into the archives, and we’re much less patient with things that don’t speak to the moment that we are in right now.
So to push past that, a storyteller needs something big and shiny to stand out from the crowd. They need the push that only comes with something new. They need an audience that’s willing to sample something new, the audience that doesn’t want to feel like they’ve come in at the end of a novel. So you can’t just take a Babylon 5, remaster it, and put it out on DVD. That way lies the remainder shelf at Target. So if the Babylon 5 story is going to find a new audience, it may need to do so in the form of a new project, a new ground floor for a new generation.
There’s a model for this in children’s animation, of all places. In 1992, Bruce Timm and a group of excellent creators developed Batman: The Animated Series. For Batman fans that were young and young-ish at the time, BTAS is an icon. I myself consider it pretty close to the Platonic form of Batman, thanks to the writing, the art style and the performances. And Kevin Conroy has continued to portray Batman in animated series and video games for the last 20 years. But Warner Brothers has also created at least three animated series that “rebooted†Batman in that time, so that the young and young-ish Batman fans of the 2000s and the 2010s would have a Batman that connected to them. This rebooting meets with less protest when it happens in kids’ animation because it’s taken for granted that each new generation of kids will want its own cartoons (and because toymakers need reasons to market new toy versions of the characters to those kids). But I think the principle extends beyond animation.
Star Trek was about human exploration and adventure. But we are exploring different frontiers today than we did in the 1960s. Babylon 5 examined how human conflicts and frailties fester, and how heroic figures can struggle to overcome them. Why not examine the very different notion of peacekeeping and global politics that we have in the early 21st century? The second verse doesn’t have to be the same as the first.
All that said, one piece of advice for Warner Brothers: let Harry Potter rest for a while, OK?
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.