I heard about part of an argument that's been coming up a little bit more recently, especially in light of the new Star Trek movie that debuted this past Thursday.

That being the discussion about reboots/revampings/and other re-dos of various properties.

I am getting to the point where I can see a case to be made both for and against the do overs basically, and I do have a couple of cases to support it.

A case for reboots:  Thundercats
I don't know if you saw the series in the 80's but while it was great for the time, it hasn't held up.  The hardest part was the voice acting, getting people who know English as a 5th language...just... doesn't really work too well.  Plus having Snarf being the whiny parental type was a bit annoying back then and now it's worse.  Fast forward to a couple of years ago and a new take on Thundercats comes out, and boy is it night and day on the changes.  There is an actual backstory, the voice acting is much better, the explanation for why Lion-O acts the way he does is better, and Snarf doesn't talk this time.  Really that last one is the best part right there.  Anyway since it was done with an eye to coherency and seemed more intelligent it naturally got pulled from Cartoon Network's line-up (that argument has already happened).  At any rate it was one time where the do-over was much better than the original.

A case against reboots: DC's New 52
DC Comics has been around since the late 1930's if memory serves, and within the last couple of years they decided to overhaul everything, backgrounds, outfits, which character is now which hero, everything except for a few details in the backgrounds of characters.  In the process they pissed off a lot of people and some of the characters don't seem entirely like themselves anymore.  Now I know why they did all this, it's a sales gimmick to get new people into reading comic books.  Much like the total revamping of White Wolf's World of Darkness and Wizards of the Coast's move to D&D 4th ed from 3.5 (which are totally separate arguments) this is done not to clean anything up in the long run, but to make a change that will hopefully get loads of new people into the hobby.  However in doing so the people who have grown up on these comics are now floundering trying to figure out what happened (okay it's been long enough that they should know by now but still the damage is done) to their favorite characters.  I do find it interesting that bits of the pre-overhaul universe are creeping back in (Powergirl should have her boob window back by now).

I think the biggest problem are the disconnects between the people who want to stick with the previous version versus the people that embrace the new version.  I think the biggest part of that boils down to where your interests lie.

The people embracing the new may not have liked things the way they were before in that property/idea.  They may have thought it was too stuffy or too stupid or they couldn't make heads or tails out of the backstory to that point.  So when the new version of the old thing comes out it's time to jump on that bandwagon.

I can still remember the story the Onion ran about how the 2009 Star Trek movie angered Trekkies for being accessible to people who weren't die-hard fans of the series, I still laugh at that one.

Now on the other side are the people who don't like the new version, usually because it diminishes the property/idea in some way.  These are usually the people that understand the backstory of the stuff from the first time around and also get what the characters in the property stand for, and they don't see the same things in the new version.  In some of the more extreme cases they may hate the company that took the idea in the new direction for "abandoning" them like that.  In cases like that I'm pretty sure it wasn't personal, I doubt the company even knows your name regardless of how many letters/e-mails you've written.  In other cases people that don't like the new version think the company has abandoned the values the characters have to make them 2 dimensional in order to make a quick buck, in effect ganking the essence of the character(s) in order to appeal to a lower common denominator.

Really, I get both sides of the argument.  And while I may not agree with how everyone sees a particular property I can probably figure out why people see things the way they do after a bit of a conversation.

Anyway, I'm sure we can all agree on these stamps:




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