Bad Remakes

Most young people today do not realize that much, or most, of what they see in the form of music and movies is in fact remakes of earlier–and better–versions. What happens is that a very good movie comes out and makes a lot of money and is popular. Then a few years later a remake is issued to try to connect to the same audience and extract more money. . .only it turns out that the new movie is nothing than a poorly made remake. But a new generation is unaware that a better version exists, a version that gets dumped into the memory hole and may entirely vanish, becoming unavailable.

Classic example: in 1938 or thereabouts a movie called Beau Geste was issued. It was quite good, starring Ray Milland, Gary Cooper, and Robert Preston. The idea was from a 1924 novel about English volunteers in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. The key scene was when all the legionnaires die and their bodies are propped up one by one in their remote fort to give the attacking Arabs the impression that they were still alive and defending the fort. When the cavalry finally come to the rescue no one is left alive but the Arabs never took the fort.

Beau Geste was remade 3 more times, each time worse than the previous movie. Finally in the 1970s a movie came out called The Last Remake of Beau Geste, a comedy version. Now, of course, Arabs can no longer be the universally acknowledged civilizational enemy, so we’ll never see another “Beau Geste”, but I’m quite sure the plot has been reemployed in other shows.

The same thing has happened to all the old Tarzan movies. Young people today have no idea that in the 1950s there were a slew of Tarzan movies set in Africa in “Jungle Theater” or “Dark Continent Theater” on Saturday mornings. Olympic swimming gold medalist Johnny Weismuller starred in the most successful and best-made Tarzan movies in the 1930s. These were the core of Jungle Theater. When he got too old to wear a loincloth, he became Jungle Jim. The Tarzan movies were also remade repeatedly until they had their last gasp in the 1980s. By then it was no longer possible to show African blacks in a subservient role to whites, so the entire genre disappeared, including dozens if not hundreds of movies. The Tarzan books also have been tossed in the dustbin of history, including perhaps 24 Tarzan novels by the great Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the 1920s and 1930s, Tarzan books were a staple reading matter for all young American boys. I still have a complete collection including my father’s collection.

ERB also wrote a dozen Martian sci-fi novels, which were simply great, in fact better than his Tarzan novels. None were ever made into movies until John Carter of Mars. Needless to say, the movie completely ruined the story, transforming an original sci-fi tale into a Cultic anti-white propaganda screed. In this case, the “remake” was trash from the beginning.

Young folks don’t realize that much of their favorite music is also merely remakes of popular–and better–tunes that appeared decades ago. Hollywood simply adds a disco beat to the original tune and re-issues the music to an ignorant public. Pure trash.

And books are not immune to this bad treatment. Older and better books are being systematically removed from Amazon and from libraries or even rewritten. Young people remain entirely unaware that the “classic” they are reading has been bowdlerized, i.e., censored. How would they know since Amazon arbitrarily places impossibly high prices on the original versions and they are nowhere else to be found?