once and future slayer

[scarfman]

I haven't weighed in yet on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer remake in the works, because I got tired of making the same point over and over again in Star Trek fandom during the run of Enterprise and in the leadup to the latest movie, but for the record here it is.

The King Arthur stories are a millennium and a half old, and (with some lapses over the centuries) are still popular today. I've seen publishing industry insiders complain that they hate to see new Arthurian novels because the market is glutted. Here's the thing, though: these aren't new stories. They're retellings of the same story, often radically revisionist. The same thing goes on all the time with the Greek myths, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, and countless other story cycles.

A legend doesn't survive by having what screen fandoms call "canon". It survives by not having one.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Yup - we call it the folk process at work. (And, hey, I love canon as much as the next geek, but its usefulness only extends so far.)

[palmetto.livejournal.com]

While I understand the point you're making, there's a difference here. Arthurian legend is old. You can't trace it back to a single author, even though certain authors over the centuries have had their own famous takes on it. With Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry was long dead by the time that Enterprise and nuTrek came about.

With Buffy, Joss is still alive and creating. He still has a hand in the comics that continue the story. He's not done with it yet.

[scarfman]

Sorry, I don't buy it. There was an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote during Cervantes' lifetime, back before modern intellectual property law. Enterprise came after Roddenberry was gone but five of the first six Star Trek movies didn't, and were made without him (though he got a credit for "executive consultant" or something like that). When you go and create something with a life of its own, as Whedon set out to do, it's going to get away from you. It may or may not be polite, but it's so.

King Arthur stories are a thousand times as old as Buffy stories now, but in the sixth century you can bet there were bards complaining, "Single-handedly killed nine hundred men at Badon Hill?! He did not. I was there! You don't hear such lies from my ballads."

[palmetto.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I still disagree. This is the Kuzuis making a blatant money grab based on Twilight's current success. I get the fan rage here, and I don't even like Buffy.

[scarfman]

I said in Star Trek fandom that remakes are inevitable, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll all be commercially or critically successful. To that list we can add "admirably motivated". Geoffrey of Monmouth had an agenda too.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Joss? Dude, Joss didn't even create the character in the first place. He's an example of exactly what you're arguing against.

[palmetto.livejournal.com]

Uh. Yes, yes he did.

[scarfman]

Whedon wrote the screenplay for the BVS movie Kristy Swanson was in. Part of the reason he went for the tv show was he didn't like what was done with the movie.

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

Quixote, meet Windmill. Windmill, try not to fall on top of him this time, please. ^_^

The trouble is, in many Circles of Fandom (insert Dante allusions here) being able to quote chapter and verse is much on level with social standing-- or rather, perceived social standing. If I know that This happened This Way, and can prove you wrong in a debate, then I'm higher in the pecking order than you. (Realizing how dumb/pointless this is is one of my "Steps to Fan Maturity". Not to say I don't get sucked back into it semi-regularly... something about the internet draws it out.)

I'm not going to say you're wrong in that canon should not be considerd... uh, "Canon"... but I do feel that A: there's a period of time that re-imaginings are unnecessary, and B: there's metric tons of other things in the slush pile they could try, which could just as easily make them bajillions of dollars. Hollywood is just way to skittish about taking risks, IMHO.

[scarfman]

there's a period of time that re-imaginings are unnecessary

I dunno - I'm not sure how surprised I am that it has happened so soon when I drew this cartoon in 2006:

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

I'm one of the few people in my circle (sic) who actually liked the Abrams movie. It had flaws, yes, but the mechanic of the alternate time line worked for me. And, Star Trek was ready for a re-imagining, IMHO.

In Which Your Obedient Serpent Preaches to the Choir

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The same thing goes on all the time with the Greek myths, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, and countless other story cycles.

Your use of the present tense here might suggest to the uninitiated that you're referring to a comparatively recent phenomenon. I know you didn't mean it that way, but there's no end of people who would quote this out of context and say, "see, that just proves that we've run out of ideas" or some such drivel.

I should underscore that the emergence of alternate versions and revisions and, hell, even crossovers and universe-building was happening all through the history of these stories. This is how myth, folklore, and legend work.

Working at a comic book store, I have a variation of this conversation at least every other week, including the perennial favorites, "why do they always have to change things?" and "why can't they just come up with new characters?"

(Sometimes, the very same people will ask questions like "aren't there any new Tintin books?" *facepalm*)

I try to explain to people that the modern assumption that a story only has one "real" author and one "real" form is the anomaly, and the only real peculiarity of the shared-universe continually-revised superhero genre is that most of us outside the "fanfic" community permit a single central body to govern the telling of those tales.

"See this?" I ask, spreading my arms to encompass the rows and rows of comics and graphic novels, reprinting seven-plus decades of retold tales. "This is the mythology of the Modern Era. This is our Robin Hood, our Arthur, our Beowulf and Perseus and Gilgamesh and Osiris. These gaudy shreds of trash culture hew to a deeper and older storytelling tradition than the arbitrary, artificial conventions of 'respectable' literature we all learned in high school."

... and somewhere in there, I give all due credit to Jack Kirby, who pretty much said all that in his text pages in the Fourth World books.