Reboots and Remakes

There was an article in The Walrus which I stumbled across on Twitter titled "I’m Sick of Reboots and Rewatches and You Should Be Too" and I had a lot of thoughts I wanted to share; I was originally going to tweet this reaction in a thread but it grew in length to the point where I thought a blog post would better suit, and the topic touches on the nature of writing and the creative process so I thought it would be relevant to share here.

I have disagree quite hard with this idea of abandoning old ideas and old content and focusing solely on innovation.  My retort firstly comes on the basis that most people who consume old content aren't experiencing it for the first time, but rather they are reliving their past experiences of that content. The vast majority of people don't go back and explore old content they have not already seen - reboots and remakes reach new audiences.

Drawing from my experience of content creation, of which this isn't the first blog I have run, indeed there have been many I have published over the years and their syndication varied. Some reached a few dozen people, some a few hundred, and some a few thousand. There are analytics scripts and server logs that are accessible to the publisher [me] that vary depending on the platform but they all generally provide insight into how you the reader explore the content provided here and one thing remains consistent, old content is generally ignored. You may occasionally land on an old post from a search result in Google but you'll jump to the home page after reading it and read only recent content, the remaining old content is rarely explored.

Other digital platforms providing content for consumption can corroborate this, in fact using Spotify as an example which is one of the most transparent in terms of disclosing consumption metrics, there are over 70 million tracks listed on the platform and approximately 4 million of those have never even been played, not even once which means roughly one in every 18 tracks added to Spotify will never be played. As for those that do get played they also skew quite heavily towards recent releases over old content. The point I am trying to make here is that there is most certainly a glut of content available for consumption, but that most of it is never explored.

It is not just the lack of exploration that justifies reproducing old content there is also the concept of novelty, that is the idea of something being experienced for the first time even if it's not necessarily "new" it's still new to you. The UK has a crude birth rate of about 700,000 that means every 10 years there are approx 7 million people who weren't even born when the content predating the last decade was created, and the US is even higher. Any content predating the last decade is therefore likely to be novel to that generation even if the content itself is no longer new. As you grow older and witness content creation and consume it, the wealth of knowledge and experience you acquire also grows with you. The logical conclusion here is that exhaustion with remakes and reboots is a sign you're getting old not a sign of a decline in innovation; or to put it another way you've been around the block enough and experienced enough to the point where less and less content you encounter is novel to you.

If you genuinely care about the content you love and the enjoyment you got from it then you should embrace remakes and reboots as a way to reach a new audience and a new generation. It's unrealistic to think those generations would or even should connect with your version of that content now in the same way that you did then. Whether you want to admit it or not the content you consumed is dated. The connection you formed with it relies in part on the environment that existed when you first consumed it.  When time passes and environments change, that content becomes dated because the humour, the references, and the mentality of the writer no longer aligns with that of the consumer. That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet some 430 ish years ago; it has been reimagined and retold countless times since, but the story and concept remains the same, the individual interpretations however have changed set against a forever evolving world which is arguably why it has endured.

Most people will have a particular interpretation of the story they connected with, and for the majority that won't be the original version, in fact most people find Shakespeare's original versions too dense to connect with. Indeed beyond mandatory reading as part of academic study the vast majority of people will never go back and explore the Bard's repertoire. Despite the original stories being dated they have endured as timeless classics because of their reinterpretation and retelling. To abandon an old story or to take a point of purism are one and the same. Insistence that only the original or a specific iteration is valid is an ideological stance one that belies a belief that the world was somehow perfect in its composition and particular configuration at that specific moment in time.

By complete coincidence a few hours before I saw this article trending I tweeted about the movie Bedazzled which was released in 2000 starring Brendan Fraser opposite Elizabeth Hurley. That movie is one of my favourites but it is itself a remake of a 1967 movie of the same name starring Peter Cook opposite Dudley Moore. Going even further, the story itself dates back hundreds of years specifically to the life of George Faust with the particular premise named for him as a Faustian Pact or a Deal With The Devil and the latter more literally speaking is a concept that goes back even further by thousands of years. Bedazzled exemplifies the point that the concept itself is not novel, and that the content which first exposes you to the concept will vary by individual. For some people of a certain age for instance, their first exposure to the Faustian Pact trope will have been Homer Simpson's deal with the Devil where he sold his soul for a doughnut.

Which iteration of the story you connect with most and recall will depend a lot on a myriad of factors beyond that of the author's control. No single iteration can be asserted as definitive without resorting to ideological devotion. To decry retelling of old stories is to exclude future generations from enjoyment of that content and ultimately reflects a disdain for the fact that the world moves forward and that your particular experience of it is no longer relevant to the generations that have come after you.