Posted on 08/29/2020 11:45:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
I saw that HBO had a Perry Mason thing as I was like WTF.
Probably means they’ll remake Matlock next.
Meh “Legal drama” TV shows were never my thing. I haven’t seen one episode of the 5,438th seasons of Law & Order or its 137 spinoffs.
Can't be as bad as what Little Orphan Annie eventually became over the years. Harold Gray is spinning in his grave over that one! If ANY damn franchise needs a "reboot" that wipes the slate completely clean and goes back to the ORIGINAL source material, its that one. As if the FDR worship in the Broadway musical weren't enough, they blackwashed Annie in the latest version (cuz "diversity") and set the story in "modern times"
Personally, I would like to see "modernized" versions of Charlie Chan and MASH (both are LONG overdue for a "reboot" and haven't been relevant to pop culture for years). But, knowing the current climate of the "entertainment industry", I have no doubt they'd ruin those. So we should probably be thankful it hasn't happened.
Interesting trivia: the 1984 film "Graystoke" rebooted Tarzan franchise after the laughable Bo Derek remake. It "went back to the source material" and received critical acclaim after decades of campy, ridiculous Tarzan movies. And that was long before Nolan's annoying Batman movies made the "Reboot" craze popular. It also meant that Graystoke was a stand alone movie. It had been done now, it would have launched a dozen more movies set in the same universe.
This December, they are going to try a THIRD attempt to adapt DUNE on screen, which is considered to be the "Lord of the Rings" of sci-fi franchises. Obviously, the previous 1984 and 2000 adaptations didn't reach a big audience. I'm very curious about the new one. We'll all praying on the internet they don't infest it with SJW propaganda.
Heh. Reminds me when my friends and I binge-watched season 1 of HBO's "Westworld" reboot.
Q. Why is there random full frontal nudity in this show?
A. "It's HBO"
I did think season 1 was excellent though, especially Ed Harris putting a whole new spin on the Yul Brenner type character. Doomcock says season 3 (which I haven't seen it) is hot garbage, but he said the same thing about season 2... and I LIKED season 2 very much. Don't get the hate for it.
My wife and I just finished this show. Very well done. Matthew Rhys is excellent as Mason — both as the private investigator and as a lawyer for the accused. The period setting of the 30s was a great choice and very detailed.
It appears that this is not to your liking, but in this version, he was in the army in WWI. The flashback scene to his experience was one of the most harrowing war scenes I’ve seen in film since the D-Day landing re-creation in Saving Private Ryan.
If they want to come up with a new story about a Great War veteran who becomes a Private Investigator and then a celebrated defense lawyer that is fine. They can call him what ever they like but when they take an established character who has already has a back story and then lift only the name it is annoying. Worse then that it is stealing.
Come up with your own stories. Don't write poorly plotted woke fan fic and try to say that it is something it is not.
Why do I call it poorly plotted? Because if it had a spark of virtue they would have done it under their own name and under their own character's name. They would have insisted on it. When you hide under someone else's creation it is because you know that what you are pumping out does not have enough creativity, plot and vibrancy to stand on it's own.
I’d have worked with the Blannie (Black Annie) idea. Set it in Baltimore during Zero’s regime, where this scrappy young orphan exposes the epic-level Demonrat corruption of the city that leads all the way to Zero himself, and he goes to prison. An epic chase scene through Baltimore to D.C. where she’s attempting to be whacked by Loretta Lynch, Elijah Cummings and John Lewis for trying to break the deathgrip the Dem party has on the Black community.
She’s then rescued and adopted by an up-and-coming Presidential candidate named Donald Trump and goes to live in the White House and helps lead uprisings across the nation by the Black community against corrupt, entrenched Demonrat machines and eventually becomes the first Black woman President, Annie Trump.
Paul Drake is now black?
Heh. Interesting way to set the story in "modern times" and make Annie black, while being faithful to Harold Grey's original intentions.
But I would prefer to have Little Orphan Annie as a period piece (set it PRE-depression for the first film, it would be the year 1924 if they were following the launch of the comic strip), with a little curly haired redhead protagonist.
The supporting characters, if they were accurate to the source material, would have plenty of "diversity" and include Daddy Warbuck's bodyguard Punjab (an 8 ft. fall native of India), his Asian-American driver The Asp, and the mysterious God-like figure Mister Am, (the first two of which would probably cause politically correct liberals to go into meltdown mode because "people of color" are servants).
>> I don't care what the forgery says, Perry Mason was in the Navy in World War II not in the Army in the Great War. <<
Honestly, changing the character's backstory from a WWII Navy vet to a WWI Army vet is pretty minor compared to the liberities a lot of modern TV shows and movies take with the source material. It's like how I recently watched the 1980 remake of Flash Gordon for the 40th anniversary of that movie. In order to "update the character for the 1980s", they changed Flash Gordon's backstory from a professional Polo player to a professional NFL player. Again, this is quite minor compared to the 2007 TV show "reboot", where they changed Ming the Merciless from a bald, futuristic, outer space version of Fu Manchu, to a blond, clean shaven evil corporate businessman. Puke.
A lot of franchises that have been around for decades have the problem of a main character's backstory being "World War II veteran" not working UNLESS you make it a period piece. Otherwise, the character would be 90 years old by now! (the X-Men movies actually did that with Magneto, I believe, so they could keep his holocaust survivor origin story) Otherwise, they simply change it to another war (like saying he's a "Gulf War veteran" if the show is set in contemporary times), or they come up with some sci-fi twist, like both the 1990 and 2011 versions of Captain America keeping the "Steve Rogers was a WWII vet" backstory and getting around it by having the character "cryogenically frozen" for decades, until he's awakened in the present day to kick butt.
Changing the character's background to make him a veteran of an EARLIER war is an odd choice, though. I assume the show is set in the 1930s or something? In any case, he'd be a lot OLDER than the 1950s version of the character by the time the show takes place, if he served in World War I INSTEAD of World War II.
I think Wonder Woman similarly changed the origin story setting from World War II to World War I, but probably only because Captain America, X-Men, and a slew of other comic book movies had already done the World War II origin story.
And if the TV show is some "realistic, grounded" courtroom legal drama show, you can forget about the sci-fi twist. They are not gonna cryogenically freeze Perry Mason so a World War II vet can argue court cases in the present day. ;-)
And yeah, I object to taking established characters, stripping out all but the name (because if we don't no one will even look at our fan fic) and then making them what they are not and never were meant to be.
Come up with your own stories, don't rip off someone else's work.
I don’t know about the original novels or the new HBO show, but from reading the premise of the 1950s Raymond Burr TV series, it sounds completely AWFUL! Sorry! I’m at a loss why people would so eagerly tune into this show and why it was the “most successful” courtroom drama on TV. From Wikipedia:
Each episode typically follows a formula. The first half of the show introduces a prospective murder victim and a series of persons involved with the victim, who through word or deed, reveal themselves as the likely perpetrator of the crime; in a parallel story, Mason’s eventual client or someone associated with that client is introduced. Once the crime has been committed, Mason, his private investigator Paul Drake, and his secretary Della Street have some adversarial dealings with the homicide detective (Lt. Arthur Tragg in the early years), who arrests the wrong suspect, and perhaps Mason’s legal nemesis, Los Angeles County District Attorney Hamilton Burger, who prosecutes an innocent suspect, until finally Mason’s client is charged with murder based on the circumstantial evidence.
In the second half, Mason spars with Burger in the courtroom, either during the trial or the preliminary hearing, in which the district attorney is required to produce just enough evidence to convince the judge that the defendant should be bound over for trial. As the courtroom proceedings advance, Mason often finds the case going against him, so outside the courtroom, either Mason himself or Paul and even Della pursue further leads. As the investigation or examination progresses, Mason and sometimes Burger uncover the morally ugly or even illegal conduct of some of the witnesses or participants, thus complicating the moral and legal intrigue of the case.
Eventually, some detail uncovered or remark made inside or outside the courtroom gives Mason the clue he needs to enter into the line of questioning that causes the surprise perpetrator, whether on the stand or not, to break down and confess to the crime and admit to the appalling truth of the motive. With the exception of one episode, Mason’s client is always found to be innocent of the charge through the confession of another, and at no time are Mason’s clients ever declared guilty.
When asked by a fan why Perry Mason won every case, Burr told her, “But madam, you see only the cases I try on Saturday”.
Geesh, for a “realistic” courtroom drama, that sounds like anything but.
He’s a defense attorney and ALL his clients are completely innocent people who were unfairly framed for a felony they didn’t commit. What luck! And he manages to get them ALL acquitted too, and bring the “real killer” to justice EVERY single time! AND he ALWAYS gets them to break down and ADMIT their crime IN the courtroom! What a great guy!
Sounds like something Barry Scheck would come up with (in his world, every person on death row is an innocent victim). Or, if it were created in the 90s, a REALLY bad John Grisham story (and keep in mind that Grisham’s novels are all crap to begin with)
I sure hope the “original novels” and the HBO series have more depth than the Raymond Burr TV show. Geesh, and people say the “based on a true story” Dragnet episodes deviated from the realism of prosecuting crimes. Perry Mason sounds 20X worse.
Not a fan, and after reading up on the show, definitely not gonna become one...
That change was so ludicrous that it made Ming look like Flash (or his brother). I don't think I watched two minutes of this garbage. I saw the 1980 version in the theater when I was a kid and was blown away. I wish they had made the trilogy. Although Sam J. Jones was the "weak" spot as Flash, the superb supporting cast lifted him and the material up, and Queen's soundtrack was spectacular, too.
As for Perry Mason... Again, I'm not familiar with the original novels and know nothing about the new HBO series. But from reading the summery of the 1950s Raymond Burr TV show, it sounds like hot garbage, even taking into account that most 1950s TV series tended to be very formulaic and played it safe and hit the reset button every week. I mean, Lassie had "Timmy in mortal danger" every week but that sounds better than Raymond Burr having 3,458 "innocent clients unfairly framed for a murder they didn't commit" in a row.
My father is a fan of the old show, not the stuff from the ‘80s, though. But I told him I thought it was ludicrous that his winning rate was almost 100%. Hamilton Burger deserved to win on many occasions, and it should’ve been that each show was a crapshoot as to which side would win. It unfortunately ended up producing a whole generation of defense lawyers with a God complex who’ve probably gotten countless guilty parties off.
At the time of the show, Burr’s Mason made lawyers one of the most respected professions. Now it’s one of the least.
But maybe its just me as a modern viewer being cynical about 1950s storytelling.
In any case, the cliche predictable endings of 50s TV shows is fine for silly lightweight fluff (and especially for fantasy TV series like George Reeves' Superman always catching the bad guys), but not for "realistic" courtroom dramas.
The first Mason book was in 1933, so obviously he was not a World War 2 vet in that one. ;-D
No program in history has not been improved by the addition of an attractive woman’s bare breasts or shapely hiney.
At least not for male viewers.
As for Westworld, someone said it makes sense if you start to think about it, but if you REALLY think about it, it makes absolutely no sense. Watch Preston Jacobs reviews on you tube.
I would say I liked the first season the most. The third season focused on the world outside the park which was interesting.
If he served in the Great War, even at the very end, he would have been at least 41 by the time World War II started. While not impossible for him to have served in both it was not very probable.
And since he served on board a mine sweeper which would be front line duty that would make it even more unlikely. He would have been considered too old.
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