“Sometimes, just leave it alone…”

In a world where entertainment marketing almost entirely relies on nostalgia, there’s perhaps a decent argument for simply leaving things alone. I’m talking about preserving their memories, letting their stories stay finished, affording their characters rest, without surrendering or watering down their original vision with the visions of new creators or a new generation. This is not an old man yelling at a cloud article, I promise! I am not Alan Moore.

It’s revealing how frequently a remake is revealed. Streaming services and Hollywood blockbusters are overcrowded with your favorite ’80s and ’90s properties getting a fresh coat of paint, whether we’re talking Willow, Dark Crystal, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, or watching Uncle Ben and Martha Wayne get shot again haha! Heck, Disney has built an entire film series of live-action remakes based on its animated classics, since they’re evidently not planning to make any more of those. I’m not interested in bashing anybody who likes those things, so don’t bother getting defensive.

Sometimes all this leaves me wondering “who is this for?”, sometimes I’m genuinely excited by the tease of “from the creators of things you liked 20 years ago…”, and still sometimes I’m curious as to why this has to happen. A live-action Cowboy Bebop? Really? If it’s successful, are we looking at a subsequent tv series that’s destined to get canceled after a few episodes?

These thoughts pressed upon me as I played through Cowboy Bebop, the 1998 PS1 game from Bandai in preparation for the upcoming episode of MAGE CAST. One wonders why such a game for such a beloved anime never made it outside of Japan. There are all kinds of possible answers, and we’ll talk about it on the podcast, and most answers just boil down to a single word, money, but the fact of the matter is the game itself isn’t very good, too. So we’re not missing much from this rail shooter that oddly tosses the crew of the Bebop into another dimension.

That premise kind of screams adaptation, remake, reboot, etc. doesn’t it?

When I as a kid, I wanted nothing more than a Calvin & Hobbes video game. I thought it would be a dream come true. I even drew up levels on graph paper. I imagined a series of worlds with several stages each, beginning with Calvin’s backyard and his G.R.O.S.S. club treehouse, then he would take a swan dive into his imagination with levels featuring Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man, the Duplicator box, dinosaurs, and so on. I dreamt up boss fights like Calvin battling a doodle of his teacher Miss Wormwood. The final boss was Susie, of course.

I probably reasonably couldn’t include a section adapted from Calvin’s dreams of blowing up his own school and classmates, for obvious reasons. That’s part of what makes that strip a relic, outside of the relevancy of our time. But trying to make it relevant would change it in many different ways. This is likely the same reason why ’90s cartoon comedy wouldn’t perfectly translate to the 2020s.

Years later, I encountered comments on the matter of adaptations courtesy of the creator of Calvin & Hobbes himself, Bill Watterson. The retired cartoonist’s thoughts influenced me in a more profound way that I could ever imagine. I’m still thinking in his terms about ending on a high note, leaving them wanting more, not less, and most importantly, avoiding licensing and therefore the cheapening of these characters and their universe through mass marketing familiarity and appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Watterson once said:

“If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now “grieving” for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.”

Knowing when things have run their course, when stories are finished, and when characters have said everything they can and should say is a dying art.

At this point in my life, I am glad they never made a Calvin & Hobbes video game. Sure, I would’ve played it. Odds are it probably wouldn’t have been very good. Don’t forget, Batman: The Animated Series was legendary but none of its games were anywhere close to its quality. You remember licensed games? You remember LJN?!

A game featuring Calvin and Hobbes would’ve been especially terrible if it had at all resembled my designs on that old graph paper! Instead, while I could wish for more of Calvin’s sharp humor, bratty behavior, and dreamscapes, and more of Hobbes’ gentle wisdom and kindness, what I’m left with is something more precious and valuable in its original run because of its mortality. No strip or image portraying Calvin all grown up and passing down Hobbes even comes close, and they each rely on nostalgia for the original to function, anyway. And don’t you get any ideas, Netflix!

Coming back to Cowboy Bebop, I don’t think we need another game adaptation. There are two, if you didn’t know. Need is an odd word to use when we’re talking about entertainment. Movies, games, books, characters and stories aren’t needed but they undoubtedly add value to our lives and enrich our experiences, allowing us windows to look through and explore new ideas in the minds of others.

And that brings me to my final point: it’d simply be nice to see new icons, new franchises, and new IPs created that aren’t beholden to the ideas of those that have come before. It’s nowhere near a demand for something truly new, since there’s probably no such thing, but it is a call for creators to express their own ideas rather than recycle those from creators before them. This is where you probably want to say something like “But the Hero’s Journey…”, to which I say there’s plenty of room to tell something fresh, despite the blueprint.

When it comes to reboots, remakes, and the like, I think it’s most interesting when the original creators themselves are involved (how much of what made Calvin & Hobbes great dwelt in Watterson himself?). So evolution and expansion happens, validly. That’s when it does seem like there’s more to be said. When it’s just bringing back an old IP without those creators, it smacks of clickbait. “Hey you liked that 20 years ago, so you’d like this!” You’d be hard pressed to convince me that there aren’t pieces of entertainment being rolled out today which aren’t fundamentally just clickbait. That practice has been around for decades from canned sequels to false promises.

So here’s to new ideas, new characters and stories and universes. Here’s to indie creators and small-time authors battling on the frontlines of creativity. Here’s even to the big studios who are interested in telling new stories. Don’t trust the Man and the grave robbers dredging up dead worlds for a buck.

I mean, just look at that garish header image I made in like 5 minutes. It should be illegal to take characters and transpose them like that.

Plus, it’s a double-edged sword: by citing the illustrious name of some bygone icon for clout, there’s an unspoken invitation for expectations befitting such an icon, and yet it’s clear that they can’t just do a verbatim remake. Final Fantasy VII Remake couldn’t have been like the original game or even included the original story and characters, not exactly, not when a handful of hours in a preliminary segment of a PS1 title is blown up to a complete full-fledged AAA-sized PS4 game. We can’t expect that to be the same anymore than we could if Peter Jackson had created a 3 hour movie just from the first chapter of The Hobbit ending with Bilbo’s conquest of his fourth carrot cake for the morning… and yet we could ask then what is the point of the remake that begs for those expectations? We’re left instead with something that feels like fan fiction, occasionally interesting, often forgettable, often not adding anything meaningful, a gaunt shadow standing in the shadow of its predecessor.

Now is the age of the remake, but maybe stop and ask yourself if this is the kind of entertainment you actually want. And look, I don’t mean that creators new and old shouldn’t be able to make whatever they want. They should! That’s creativity! If somebody wants to crap in a bag and call it a remake of Eek the Cat, Bobby’s World, All That, or Freakazoid, they should have the freedom to do so.

And I have the freedom to not support some crap in a bag by not giving it my click.

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.