Nope, Nope, Nopity Nope! UH-UH!

Shields up, Red Alert! Seriously, go to your men and tell them to get ready for a fight because I'm about to have Worf beam a proton torpedo aboard the bridge of the Death Star while it annihilates Babylon 5 in full view of the TARDIS as it is consumed by a supernova. As someone famous once said "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore." There is no need for this type of bullshit. None whatsoever! AT ALL! DO YOU HEAR ME HOLLYWOOD?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!?!??!??!??!?!?!??!?!?!?!??

Ok, so now we all know I'm mad. Who can tell me why? Oh, that's my job. Oops.

So what set me off is this piece. I found it while innocently checking my Facebook feed. I had some downtime at work and decided to see if I could find something interesting. Well, I found that article interesting in the same sense that Vlad the Impaler found the actions of traitors interesting. Unfortunately, I lack the authority he had and so the guilty are still at large and able to continue killing everything great that came before them. 

I'm going to take a moment and tell you what is wrong with this. I mean, yes, recasting Lando and G'Kar as females is insulting to the fandom, the original cast and J. Michael Straczynksi.Yes, they should be played by different actors. Yes, the uniform pictured is thirty-one flavors of fucked up. But honestly, none of that should matter. Because there is NO FREAKING NEED TO REBOOT EVERY DAMN THING EVER!

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not a big fan of Crude Reviews and their rampant SJWism. I don't recommend their site. I was reading the article before I realized what site it was on.)

I've talked about this before. Listen Hollywood. I get the fact that not every idea is Hollywood caliber. I support not making everything that get suggested because I support quality entertainment and some stuff is just crap. I mean, it doesn't all sink to the depths of gender-swapping Londo and G'kar just to virtue signal in a show that already had females in prominent roles. (Can you say Ivanova, Delenn, Talia and Lyta boys and girls.) Oh, and that includes two women who took command of squadrons of ships in battle. And there is no badder-ass in all of SF/F than Susan Ivanova. Still though, that's not the problem.

The problem is you morons and your absolute obsession with rebooting old content. Let sleeping dogs lie. Listen, I came to a love of B5 late. If not for the love and patience of a good woman (who, for the record, never once looked at me and uttered the words "Just watch the show, dumbass." She's obviously a better person than I am.) I may never have watched it at all. The fact remains that it makes no sense to shit all over a show that millions of people watched and loved. And no, if they're going to gender-swap Londo and G'Kar, they don't have a respect for the original show.

Look, I get the desire to make a profit. Television studios are capitalistic endeavors. I'm good with that. I'm just saying that

A.) There is no need to reboot old stuff just to make a profit.
I am watching an episode of The Walking Dead while writing this piece. When it debuted, the Walking Dead was a brand new show, not a remake. It just finished recording its ninth season. It has an absolutely huge following. It is very obviously profitable, because if it wasn't it would be gone by now. Oh, and the network that created it? American Movie Classics. Reshowing old stuff wasn't good enough I guess. The same with Netflix and Amazon Prime. Odd, that.

B. There is no lack of ideas out there.
The Orville worked. It's not a reboot. It's not a remake. It's just good TV. Remember what that's like?

C.) Gender-swaps have been known to fail.
We all know the records of the Ghostbusters reboot and Oceans 8. Stop flushing your money down the toilet. Those won't aberrations. It's not going to get better next time. If you want to make money with a movie about one or more women, make it with either original content or with content that was originally conceived with female characters. You know, like Wonder Woman? That made more money than any previous super hero origins movie. (It has, admittedly, since been surpassed by Black Panther, but it made over eight hundred million dollars at the box office.) And honestly, if women and/or minorities want to more representation then they need to show some integrity and write their own stories instead of stealing them from someone else.

and

D.) Sometimes it takes some intestinal fortitude to get thing done.

At some point in the not so distant past, somebody pitched a movie about a tornado filled with sharks. It could not have been an easy sell. It has made millions and produced two profitable sequels.  Take some responsibility and make something that hasn't been done before.

I know it's not easy. J.K. Rowling and George Lucas created probably the two most successful science fiction universes in the history of the genre. Hell, they created two of the most successful stories in the history of humanity. Both faced rejection. Rowling was rejected thirty-two times before Harry Potter was accepted for publication and created an entire new market of readers. There was no Young Adult market before someone at Scholastic showed some guts and let J.K. Rowling create one.
So yes, it does make sense to make new content. It makes good money if it's GOOD new content. And no, I'm not suggesting that Hollywood should start making every idea that comes their way. I'm just saying that there is plenty of new ground to explore. Hollywood needs to start looking toward the future instead of the past.

Everything they're rebooting came from something that was once a new product. No matter how far back they pull from that's true. Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving written story. Go back far enough, and somebody told it for the first time. It's time to tell some new stories for the first time. Not new versions of old stories. New stories. Get it together guys. Stop digging up corpses and looting them. Put something new on my TV screen.

(Five of my favorite SF franchises were referenced in the first two sentences of this blog. Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and uhh... what? Two nerd points, exchangeable for major bragging rights, go to whoever can name the last franchise in the comments.)

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