My memories are obliterated by celluloid

Wednesday Night Music Club: I’m going to lead with this today on the hope that people will click on it. I have no idea how many people actually watch the videos that I include but I will continue to do this until I run out of music that I enjoy that no one else has ever heard. Last week I saw Last Town Chorus open for Kathleen Edwards and I feel a great need to include their cover of David Bowie’s “Modern Love”. It is pretty spell binding. Give it a listen.

So apparently (and I say that because I can’t drag myself to the theater to find out personally) they have ruined another childhood memory with a bad movie remake. How someone could ruin a concept as awesome as Speed Racer is beyond me. We are talking about drama in its simplest form. Young hero. Fast car. Cute girlfriend. A monkey. Shakespeare used the exact same components to write The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Speed Racer was probably the first anime I ever watched on a regular basis. You never quite understood what was going on, or why the characters mouths always seemed to be half a beat behind what they were saying, but it was the ultimate entertainment for a nine year old boy. It had auto races that consisted entirely of crashes. Hell, one episode featured a race where everyone crashed other than Speed and the uber-cool Racer X. When MTV started replaying the episodes when I was in college I was stunned to discover that there were at least three fatal crashes in the opening credits alone. Watched that way it is a rather disturbing show.

But it is strange to try to turn that franchise into a tent pole summer movie. Let’s look at the fanbase for the original series: dudes in their thirties who watched a lot of television. We’re not exactly the best demographic to try to attract. We won’t go to movies by ourselves and will only go with our significant others who would much rather not watch a movie about a car. If you were a big enough geek like myself to be a huge fan then the entire concept of the movie will upset you because you are ruining a beloved original. Most other people, especially your teenage crowd, will have no clue what the movie is supposed to be about.

This should be a warning for those who wish to film the Voltron movie. I’m so concerned about that turning into a big pile of suck. As someone who owns the entire series on DVD (and yes, it is prominently displayed in my DVD collection) I really don’t want to watch the greatest series of all time turned into a joke. Giant robotic lions. Ro-beasts. This is the basis of my childhood. You shouldn’t be allowed to direct the film unless you can name the pilot of each lion.

And don’t even get me started on the G.I. Joe movie. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, unless Tomax and Xamot are in it I don’t want to see it.