Sunday, October 23, 2016

Let's hold off on doing the Time Warp again for a bit


Where the remake went wrong:

Well, first and possibly most important, it was too polished.  The original had a feel of, "OK this is good but it needs something more, hey here's a severed moose head I found in Wardrobe, let's put that somewhere" kind of thing going.  Maybe that's not how it was, but it was how it felt, and that was what was appealing.

And trying to one-up the original is wrong.  You won't match Tim Curry's Frank, don't try to (this is just an example and not a criticism, as I don't think Ms. Cox tried to match or even emulate, she just did her own interpretation, and I really had no problem with that).  One thing I would point to as an example is the Rocky Horror Punk Rock Show, a CD I came across many years ago, and while not a shining example (punk rock shouldn't ever be that anyway, except for Return of the Living Dead, whiich is), was the feel I was hoping to get from this.  Instead... polish polish polish.

Also... should today's Rocky (the creature) be less chiseled than the one from 1975?  Did nobody on the crew know about anabolic steroids, or did they really want a Rocky that looked like he occasionally went to Carl Jr's for lunch?

But the main problem was that there was no interaction with the audience.  When we go to the theatre and see RHPS, we are part of the experience.  Who ever forgets that first time you shouted out a riff that nobody had ever thought of, and got laughs?  It wouldn't have been easy, admittedly... whether they hosted servers for people to log into to riff live, or just a text crawl like MST3K used to occasionally do.  There was simply nothing to invest in as an audience except just WATCHING, and I'm sorry but I've downloaded the new Black Mirror and would rather watch that.

Columbia's hair was fun though, and I thought the new take on fishnets was quite a cool idea.