Film Land - 10 Series that should be Rebooted

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As we continue to burn our way through one of the most disappointing summers in recent memory (seriously 2016, get your act together) the subject of reboots has re-entered the popular forum of discussion.  At this point asking “the reboot question” has become something of a yearly tradition, with volleys of think pieces and lists fired off seemingly ever year with each new triumph or tragedy.  This year the reboot question is much more on the back burner, with most of the summer’s big hits and big failures being sequels. 

We’re still getting a few major reboots this year like WB’s disastrous Legend of Tarzan and the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot that inspired me to write this article.  We’ve had enough reboots over the last six years to know that sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t and there’s no easy way to know which, so I decided I’d throw together my top 10 series that should be rebooted.  Before we dive in, I’ll just clarify that this is only drawn from TV and movies and that by “reboot” I mean “an attempt to restart the franchise while actively distancing itself from the source material through modernization.”  With that said, here are my top 10 series that should be rebooted.

Week of Review - Birds of Prey

Edited by Robert Beach

Yesterday, I talked about one of DC/WB’s more successful endeavors to preserve their television presence into the 21^st century; today, I’m focusing on a less successful example. Before we discuss Birds of Prey and what I think of it, we’ve got to go back and talk about a little show from 1997 known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the world by storm in 1997 with its winning combination of genre tropes and aesthetics and girl power. Buffy was the last of the popular genre trinity that had started with Star Trek: The Next Generation in ’89 and been cemented by The X-Files in ’93. 

There had been plenty of genre shows before like the original Star Trek in the ‘60s, 6 Million Dollar Man in the ‘70s, and V in the ‘80s, but these three shows demonstrated there was a chance for widespread, mainstream appeal within previously geek genre markets. When DC decided to re-enter the realm of TV after the conclusion of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in 1997, they decided to stick with the Buffy aesthetic, which is how we got Smallville. With Smallville’s success, WB wanted to create a sister show that was more female centric as they’d had a lot of success from that mold with Charmed. In 2002, they created The Birds of Prey, one of my all time favorite superhero shows.