Leave our classic movies alone

A photograph from George Lucas' 1977 cult favourite Star Wars. Photo / Getty Images

Hollywood seems to have set out to make remakes and reboots of everything from Greg Dixon’s youth, and he isn’t happy.

Welcome to my second childhood.

And before you ask: no, I haven't started making models planes again, broken out in spots or taken to listening to Joy Division on headphones alone in my bedroom - things aren't quite that bad. Well, not yet.

I'm talking about the disturbing business of discovering that important pop cultural bits of my childhood, teenage years and early adulthood are turning up again in new and unwelcome forms at cinemas and on television. It's an outrage! It's an agony! It is (cough) like deja vu all over again!

Already this year we have had remakes, reboots or rebastardisations - or whatever the current nomenclature is - of Mad Max, Jurassic Park and The Terminator.

There's more, much, much more, to come. In the works are new versions of pop cinema classics Ghostbusters (for some unfathomable reason with a female cast), Wargames, Poltergeist, Commando, Point Break, Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure, An American Werewolf in London, Logan's Run, Drop Dead Fred (with Russell bloody Brand standing in for poor dead Rik Mayall!), The X Files and Stephen King's It. All are reportedly set to turn up at cinemas or on television in the next year or two. Lord help us, Hollywood is even said to be remaking execrable 80s and 90s movies and TV like Three Men and a Baby, Full House, Porkys, Police Academy and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

And then, of course, there is this year's big one. On December 17, Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens, a film I really want to see but also really don't want to see in case it's awful, like parts I-III.

Quite what we Generation Xers have done to deserve having so many of our cherished (and hated for that matter) cultural memories turned into zombie entertainment I'm not quite sure. Perhaps it is just our turn to have stuff messed with - after all the films that wallpapered Gen X's youth are now around three decades old. Millenials and Generation Z probably think they're exciting and brand new.

For me, however, and quite possibly I share this with everyone who was born sometime in the 60s or 70s and has a more-or-less functioning memory, all this deja vu has become very boring indeed.

2011: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Photo / Supplied

I get it: modern Hollywood is paralysed by risk, so it's stuck in a cycle of making superhero movies, rebooting old favourites, adapting best-selling books and top-rating TV shows because they all come with built-in viewers or readers many of whom want, but more importantly are happy to pay for, familiarity. This would be why Spiderman, for example, has been remade and rebooted approximately 451 times in the last decade.

All of which makes modern popular cinema a very dull and frankly irritating place for anyone craving something that they didn't see back in 1979 - no matter how good the remake might be.

And Mad Max: Fury Road is pretty good, or so I was told. But tempted though I was, I didn't go. The original trio of Mad Max films, even Thunderdome, are doing just fine as they are in my long-term memory.

A scene from Mad Max: Fury Road from earlier this year. Photo / Supplied

Besides, going to a Mad Max remake would have broken my Planet of the Apes rule, something I try never to do.

The 1968 film, starring Charlton Heston in a leather loin cloth and a large cast in monkey suits, is one of the most gloriously scary and exciting things I ever watched as a kid (about a decade after it was made) on TV in a slot called "The Sunday Horrors" (other great Sunday Horrors fodder included John Boorman and Sean Connery's completely bonkers Zardoz, which is, my view, completely impossible to reboot). Like Mad Max, Planet of the Apes, too, was doing just fine in my memory. Well, until I made the mistake of going to Tim Burton's 2001 remake, that is. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter, the reboot certainly looked the business with the whizzy special effects and flash design and all. But it was stinker. Indeed, it was such an utter, utter stinker that it almost ruined the original for me. I curse all involved to this day.

A scene from the classic 1984 Ghostbusters film. Photo / Supplied

Apparently, however, I learned nothing from this experience because when Rise of the Planet of the Apes turned up at cinemas a decade later, I went to that, too. It wasn't a stinker, it was just really boring in a kind of way-too-many-special effects-meets-lots-of-dreary-acting sort of way. So I made a pact with myself: on no account see remakes or reboots of films you hold dear. This was amended, after I finally saw J.J. Abram's Star Trek picture, to: "on no account see remakes or reboots of films you hold dear, unless in a moment of weakness you see it anyway and find it was good enough not to kill your childhood memories, in which case you forgive yourself and promise not to do it again even if you're overwhelmed by self-loathing for backsliding."

I have a feeling I may be rebooting this particular "unless" come December 17.

- Canvas