Why Is Everything We Loved Getting Refurbished

I just have one question for you. Why is everything we loved getting refurbished? Let's talk about it, this time on Weiss Thoughts. It's time for a virtual campfire sit-down with Terry Weiss. Welcome to Weiss Thoughts. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Welcome back to Weiss Thoughts. I'm your host, Terry Weiss. And if you enjoy the podcast, if you get something out of it, would you do me a just a small favor? Would you leave us a positive rating and review on your favorite podcast provider? Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And if you want to listen to more episodes of the podcast, you can go to WeissThoughts.com. Just make sure you spell my name right. W-Y-C-E. WeissThoughts.com. There you can listen to each and every episode of this podcast, comment on it, share it with your friends. It's all a good time, all waiting for you at WeissThoughts.com. All right. So let's get into it today, shall we? Let's get the virtual campfire going here. Grab a log, have a seat, grab a marshmallow, and welcome to Weiss Thoughts. the show where we gather around the virtual campfire to talk about the weird, the wonderful, and, well, sometimes the entirely absurd state of pop culture today. Today I want to ask a very simple question. Why is everything we loved as kids currently being dug up, repainted, and sold back to us for 20 bucks a pop? Right? I like to call it the Reboot Pipeline. Look at the movie marquees right now. Just take a look at the movies that are coming out. We've got remakes of cartoons, sequels to 30-year-old action movies, and spinoffs of, well, quite frankly, spinoffs. Studio executives haven't greenlit an original idea since it seems like 2012, I swear. If you pitch a script in Hollywood today, it that isn't based on an existing, let's say, toy line or a 90s sitcom, security escorts you out of the building. That's what it seems like, right? It's nostalgia bait. Plain and simple. They know we're tired, stressed, and desperate to feel five years old again. Watching Saturday morning cartoons without a mortgage payment. Long for those days, huh? Well, when remakes go wrong, okay, here's the kicker. Half of these reboots strip away the exact charm that made them and made the original work. They take a dark, funny, gritty cartoon from, let's say, 1994, run it through a corporate focus group, and output a shiny, sterile CGI mess. Remember when live-action remakes were supposed to be cool? Now every time I see a classic movie getting a modern reimagining, I feel like a parent watching their kid walk toward a muddy puddle in white shoes. Stop! Don't ruin it! That's the first thought that pops into my head. How about you? What remakes do you think that are done very poorly? Do you like any of the remakes that are being done? What's your opinion? Get the conversation going. You can leave it in the show notes or hit me up on Twitter at Terry Weiss or at the Weiss Thoughts page on Facebook. But I want to talk about something now called the sucker factor. I mean, I'm not totally innocent here. I'm part of the problem. I complain about reboots, and then what do I do on Friday night? I buy a large popcorn and go sit in the front row. We are suckers for our own childhoods, aren't we? Just to get that taste back of that feeling... when you had very little responsibility. Your only responsibility was making sure you brushed your teeth the next morning or got a decent grade in school, huh? You know, until we stop buying tickets to Spider-Man 14 and the multiverse strikes back, Hollywood is going to keep giving us the exact same meal wrapped in new paper. Think about that. He refused to just say no. Then they handed him a microphone. You're listening to Wise Thoughts. At your own risk. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the program. Welcome back to Wise Thoughts. I'm Terry Weiss. And today on the program, we're talking about why is everything we love getting refurbished and rebooted? And, you know, I'm asking the question, is Hollywood really out of ideas, or are we just suckers for nostalgia? I don't know. But that's what we're talking about this time on Royce Thoughts. I mean... Think about this, okay? I want you to have an honest thought process here. Do a little bit of, what's the word I'm looking for? Soul searching. Have you seen all the Spider-Mans? I stopped at, I think I saw the first three with, I believe it was Tobey Maguire. Does that sound right? I don't know. I've been lacking in my movie knowledge lately. I used to be a movie fan. I mean, at one time I worked for Blockbuster Video as a manager. And I loved movies, DVDs, everything, VHS. I mean, at one time, at one time, my friends, I tell the truth on this. I had probably upwards of a thousand VHS tapes back in the day. And I know some of you are sitting out there going, what's VHS tapes? Look it up on the Internet if you can't remember. Some of you will know what I'm talking about. Then I went to the LaserDisc. Remember when LaserDisc came out? Everybody was like, wow, LaserDisc. It looked like a big record, for those of you who know what LPs are, record player, LP, one-play albums. But it was LaserDisc, which got even better quality than VHS tape or Betamax tape back in the day. The machines were anywhere from... at the low end, $ 300, $ 400, and the high end up to $ 1, 200 to $ 1, 500. But it was, I guess you could say, the precursor to the DVDs and then Blu-ray. That was Laserdisc. And I started a nice, hearty Laserdisc collection. I went from one format jumping into another. They had me. They had me. All the movies I had purchased on VHS, I started purchasing on Laserdisc. And then, lo and behold, DVDs started coming out. Digital video discs. Oh, my God! And they were releasing the movies then on DVD. You know, better soundtrack, better sound. You know, CD quality sound on the soundtracks. Dolby Digital or W, depending on which side of the pond you're on. And I started then rebuilding my collection, going from Laserdisc to DVD. And then what came after that? Well, Blu-ray. I didn't dive too much into Blu-ray. I had a pretty substantial DVD collection. And I was like, okay, you know, I had a pretty substantial DVD collection. And I'm like, hmm. Hmm. So I decided, yeah, I think I'm going to stick with that. And then Blu-ray started coming along. And then you started seeing digital downloads. And now everything is a digital download for movies and things like that. Even your audio now. Nowadays. Who really has, right? Who has CDs anymore? Not a lot of people don't. Or CD players. Everything is streaming or you know, files streaming from a server or from a streaming service, we're renting our music instead of owning it. And there's a big discussion out there regards to that. And, you know, a lot of people don't like the idea of renting music their music. And I must admit, I subscribed to like some of the streaming music survivors, providers for a while. It's late. It's been a long day as I record this episode of White Slots. And now you're starting to see pushback. You know, there's And here's the thing. I think some of these organizations, these companies, they're getting greedy. They're not only doing it with software. I've done episodes on that where now everything has to be a subscription. Everything you got to pay for continually, monthly or yearly. Pay, pay, pay, pay, pay. Where before you used to buy it and own it. You know, there's a saying going around that you will own nothing and you will be happy. And my friends, it kind of looks like we're heading in that direction. We're basically renting our lives. Before, I had upwards of a few hundred CDs of favorite artists and music and albums that I liked. Same thing with DVDs and that. Well, if you don't now own digital copies of those movies and you're not ripping your CDs, let's say, onto a home server or something like that, You're paying a monthly fee. And those fees, my friends, are going up. It used to be that streaming services were the value. They were a value-added service. Now they're getting to be kind of more expensive than actually just going out and buying your favorite music that you like and sharing with your friends and swapping discs with your friends and what have you. And people are starting to go back to that. And it's not just the older generation that's starting to go back to that. It's the younger generation is starting to go back to that as well. The younger generation is starting to go back to something like that, which I'm like, wow, that's kind of cool. So that's that's kind of amazing in its own right. You know. And it's just but it's the nostalgia thing that Hollywood is really got me going, you know, with the reboot pipeline and. Just, you know, how many incantations of Spider-Man do we need or the Marvel Universe? Now, I know some people are heavily into that. You know, how many Batmans do we need? You know, Avengers. At what point do you say, all right, how about something new? You know, I know some of you out there are going to say, Terry, though, but that's the whole Marvel Universe in it. They're exploring the comic books and the directions that they go, etc. I get that to a certain extent, okay? I can understand that. To a certain extent, I can. But at what point do we, as the consumer, say, how about a new story? There's always new stories to tell, whether it's based on real life, a fantasy story, or just, you know, made-up scenarios. There's got to be stories to tell. Quite frankly, a lot of the remakes I don't care for. You know, I remember watching Stephen King's It with Tim Curry back in the day when it was on television. And then they did the remake movie. Honestly, I didn't care for the remake movies. And that's no disrespect... To those who participated in it, the actor, director, the writers, you know, they're just making a living. I get that. But for me, the original was far more compelling. Maybe because it was, at that time, original. Maybe that's it. You know, one of my favorite sci-fi fantasy slash comedy drama series movies, which only had three films... And I thought all three of them were good in their own right. There wasn't really a weak one in the three films. And it was Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, amongst others. And those three films from Zemeckis and company, I thought were excellent films, compelling, They had an underlying moral, dare I say, lesson or take. But they were entertaining. They were funny. They were imaginative. I saw all three of them in the theater back in the day, and it was an experience. It was a great experience to see them in the movie theater. I remember Back to the Future Part II blew me away as well because I enjoyed Part I, Back to the Future, but man, when I went to go see it in the movie theater, Back to the Future Part II, it just blew me away with the flying DeLorean and how they imagined 2015, which was nothing like, but I mean, we got some stuff, but we don't have flying cars yet. Well, the Weather Service, Weather Channel, I guess, they can't predict the weather anymore today than they could back then. when they made the movie. But it was just, those were entertaining. They were original stories. Yeah, there were three of them. And after that, they stopped. Now, I have read somewhere that the producers of the Back to the Future trilogy and even the actors, they've been asked over the years, hey, would you consider doing a part four, this and that? And they said, nope, nope. And they were approached and offered, from what I've heard, And I could be mistaken. But from what I've heard, they were offered big money, big money to do reboots of those movies. And they said no. And they hold the rights to it. So they can't yank it away from them. You know, certain entities can't yank away their rights and just make it and say the heck with it, you know, because they haven't sold. And they were offered good money to sell those rights. And good for them, I guess, to, dare I say, take a moral stand. And I, like I said, I know some of you like watching the sequel after sequel. It's just like, it just seems like a lot of films and stuff coming out of Hollywood in the past, I don't know, eight or 10 years is all designed to be a sequel. A part two, a part three, a part five, a part 10. Sometimes you just make something and let it stand on its own merit, dare I say. A perfect example were the, back in the 70s, in the late 70s, the Jaws movies. Jaws was iconic. Probably, it was, if not truly, the first summer blockbuster. It was unbelievable. What a fantastic movie it was. And, wow. You know, just an amazing, I mean, it blew me away when I was a youngster. Jaws 2, kind of corny. You know, Roy Scheider, they say, did not want to do it. He was not a fan. And he did it because he was contractually obligated, but didn't really care to do it. And then by the time they hit Jaws 3 with Dennis Quaid and, you know, and the like, That was just a goof. And Jaws 4, oh, my gosh. But I went and saw them all because I was a Jaws. I thought, well, maybe. And, oh, they should have stopped at 2. 2 was enough. But Hollywood saw Moneymaker, and they had the rights, and whomever wanted to produce it had the rights, so they did it. And it's all about that nostalgia, you know, pulling it. Oh, I remember seeing Jaws. Now I'm going to go see Jaws 3 because it's, It's Jaws, and I saw the first one, and I could tell my friends who didn't see Jaws, etc. Same thing with the Star Wars. The Star Wars has been taken in 19 different directions. I saw the original back in 1977. I was blown away. I could remember it to this day. The theater was a rainy, thunderstorming night in the summertime. I went with my sister and my cousin. It was thunderstorming out. The theater was sold out. It was a six-screen theater. And all six screens were showing Star Wars at different times, staggered times. And people still waited in line. And it was iconic. It was life-changing for that summer. And then you had The Empire Strikes Back, just as good, continuing on. And Return of the Jedi, another stellar one. And then we went onward and upward. And I don't know, does it just dilute it? down because they're making, oh, yeah, another Star Wars is coming out. Oh, another Spider-Man's coming out. Oh, another, you know, Marvel movie universe coming. Another Avengers is coming out. Another this is coming. At some point, people will just tire of it. You'll still have a certain segment of your audience that'll go see it because they're into the universe and they want to see everything and talk about it. And that's fine. Hey, man, if that's your thing, that's great. But the fact, you know, refurbishing, remaking, and just going on and on and on and on and on and on at some point it just gets watered down and I think it pop culture has to take a step back and say you know what the nostalgia bait has to stop you know the reboots kind of have to stop And let's get back to original, imaginative, compelling storytelling. I think that's where the true creativity of the human species belongs. Hey, thanks for listening to the program today. I truly appreciate each and every one of you out there. And remember, to see a change in the world, you have to be the change in the world you want to see. It all starts with you, the person looking back at you in the mirror every morning. Remember to be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. If you want to tweet at me on Twitter, it's at Terry Weiss. Stop by the website, weissthoughts.com, just to make sure you spell my name right, W-Y-C-E. WeissThoughts.com. And hey, leave us a positive rating and review on your favorite podcast provider, won't you? Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets about Weiss Thoughts. And I look forward to gathering yet again around the virtual campfire with you real soon. Take care.