Recently, a couple of reboots have appeared on the television landscape, some good, some bad. Now keep in mind, I am not a fan of reboots, reimaginings or any of that in general. I think Hollywood needs to be original, not just produce half-assed copies trying to relive past glories, but that’s not the world we live in. So let’s take a look at the good and the bad of late.
First, we’ll start with the good, or at least tolerable. Back in 1977, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (ultimately renamed just The Hardy Boys for season 3) starred Shawn Cassidy and Parker Stevenson as the titular Hardy Boys. It was loosely fashioned after the classic series of children’s books that started in 1927 and ran through 2005, although offshoots exist to this day. The Hardy Boys books, as well as other similar works, are one of the first things I read and what really spurred me to become a writer. The boys were usually portrayed in their mid-to-late teens, usually in the books pre-college age, but when they hit television in the 70s, they were made older so they could be more independent. The new version, airing on Hulu, makes them a bit younger, with Joe Hardy being 12 and Frank Hardy clocking in at 16.
The first 13-episode season covers a single case revolving around the death of their mother. The books and earlier series, obviously, were episodic, with a single case being handled in each episode. However, I didn’t think that the season lagged as there was always something new coming around in every episode. They also set the series in the 1980s, judging by the look, which got rid of the problem of cell phones. Cell phones really screw up a lot of suspense.
The casting was generally excellent, although Joe Hardy, played by Alexander Elliot, absolutely stole the show. While a lot of the material was somewhat predictable, especially the way the relationships shook out, the overall mystery was competently done. My only issue with it, and this is something I have an issue with on a lot of shows, is that they turned to the supernatural and it was completely unnecessary. One of the hallmarks of the original books, at least back in the day, was that all of the mysteries, no matter how odd, it was always a real person committing the crime. The same is true of the original Scooby Doo, if you remember. It was always a guy in a mask. I think they lost a lot when they started encountering actual ghosts and monsters. It was completely unnecessary here in The Hardy Boys as well. They didn’t need to resort to magic to tell a good story.
Otherwise, this is one show that I’m looking forward to coming back for a second season. They had to figure out not only how to solve the mystery, but how to deal with their own limitations as investigators. Putting them a bit younger made getting around town, getting into tight situations and finding clues more challenging and that’s a positive. They can’t just jump on a plane and go somewhere when their investigation requires it as the boys in the 1977 series could, or as happened in a lot of the later books. They were constrained by their ages to figure out different ways to handle the situation. It isn’t a perfect series by any means, but it was one of the better reboots that I’ve seen of late.
Now, let’s contrast that with one of the worst reboots I’ve seen in recent memory, 2020’s Animaniacs. I have always been a fan of Animaniacs, which originally aired in 1997. It was smart, fun with a sharp sense of humor and it wasn’t afraid to lob some jokes way over the heads of the intended young audience. The cast of characters was largely interesting and produced a spinoff: Pinky & the Brain, which I have on DVD, along with the entire series of Animaniacs and Freakazoid, another similar show. It was a golden era of TV animation produced by Steven Spielberg that didn’t pull any punches.
Too bad that era is now gone.
The new series, which I was really looking forward to, was a massive disappointment for numerous reasons. First, while they really played up the nostalgia angle, it was never carried through. They kept saying “we’re a reboot!” but they never captured the magic of the original series. It was a pale imitation, if you can even call it that.
So what went completely wrong? First off, starting with the opening, they let you know that this isn’t going to be good. Sorry, Dot is cute. Not witty, cute. She can be witty too, but they told you right up front that this was going to be a politically correct train wreck and in that, it didn’t disappoint. If that’s what you wanted, that’s what you got. That isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t Animaniacs. This is some far-leftist’s wet dream.
Why? Because they spent a lot of time pushing a far-left political agenda. The show was filled with anti-Trump jokes. The whole thing was just sad. But let’s look at some of the details.
The animation was uneven to say the least. While I think they got the Warners generally accurate and Pinky and the Brain weren’t terrible, everything else was. The whole aesthetic of the original show was animation from the 50s and 60s. All of the human characters looked like that era of animation. Here though, it looks more like the human characters from Freakazoid, but without any of the charm. Ralph the guard was better but not perfect. The rest were grotesqueries that simply didn’t fit the show.
And speaking of the design of the show, where the hell was the rest of the cast? The only things they carried over were the Warners and Pinky & the Brain. Where were the rest? Yes, they did have an episode where Chicken Boo made a cameo, along with a bunch of corpses of old characters, but that isn’t the same. Every episode was two Warner skits and one P&tB sketch and that was it. The one time they did something that “scored well in focus groups”, it was utterly terrible. This isn’t Animaniacs. It simply isn’t. Granted, we didn’t need to get all of the old characters back. Hip Hippos and Katie Kaboom, they could have remained lost. Mindy & Buttons, Rita and Runt and especially Slappy Squirrel needed to come back, but where were they? We gave up about episode 8 so if they showed up afterwards, we missed them, but the format was just boring.
One of the reasons, I think, is because they were trying to be topical but they said in the show several times that they wrote the material in 2018. You can’t be topical and have material that far out of date. The original show didn’t try that, not really. It was just fun. It’s as enjoyable today as it was 20 years ago because they just tried to make a good show, not have a political or social message. Most of the shticks either tried to emulate what had been done in the past for nostalgia value, and they did it badly, or they tried to push a message into the animation, again done very badly. I kept waiting for it to get funny and it never did. This was a complete nightmare, intended for an audience far different than the ones who enjoyed the first show. This is Animaniacs in name only.
I really wish that Hollywood would stop trying to recapture the past and just make something good today. However, if you’re going to go for nostalgia, at least give the project to someone who knew and loved the original material. A lot of this is just “we have this old property that we think we can make money with, go do something with it and mold it to your new agenda!” That’s just dumb but that’s Hollywood for you these days. It’s possible to do it right, with respect for the source material. It’s also possible to do it very wrong. 9 times out of 10, Hollywood gets it completely wrong.
I wish they’d stop that.
