In our recent interview with Ken and Roberta Williams, the duo explained that they chose to remake Colossal Cave because the core design was already in place, so they assumed everything else would be relatively simple. Scott Derrickson’s 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still updates the reason for Klaatu’s visit from the Cold War-era concerns of total war to the more recent issue of environmental destruction. ![]() In Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story from 2021, Anybodys is a trans man instead of the tomboy of earlier incarnations. Such smaller ideological shifts also make their way into remakes. It can be as small as people being more likely to wear masks when ill now than they were in 2019. It’s important to keep in mind that culture doesn’t just mean the differences between Sengoku-era Japan and the Wild West of America. I wrote “culture” just a moment ago with intention. Those are both examples of complete transformations powered by the movement of narratives across time and space. Likewise, West Side Story remakes Romeo and Juliet as a tale of youth gangs in 1950s New York. An extreme version of that is the remake of Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, which saw Akira Kurosawa’s distinctly Japanese tale transformed into an archetypal Western. And remakes move them from one culture to another. Translations move them from one language to another. ![]() Adaptations move a piece of work from one media format to another. Remakes exist on the same continuum as adaptations and translations.
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