90s Movie Remakes

With all this current talk of remaking such recent films as The Neverending Story and The Karate Kid, you've got to wonder if Hollywood's just plain running out of ideas. Remakes are a tricky thing. If done in the right way they can come off as a clever reimagination of the original, but veer too far from or even to close to the original story and you've got a potential disaster on your hands.

Seriously, you don't have to tell me twice. My friends and I in a bout of uncharacteristic (okay, characteristic) laziness decided to rent the movie Great Expectations in lieu of reading the no-doubt worthy if undeniably lengthy Charles Dickens classic in high school. No one told us, however, just how many times this film had been remade. In our bad luck my friend picked up the 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle instead of the admittedly more boring and less sexy of any of the three previous incarnations. It was amusing, no doubt, to see Paltrow's character all dressed up in some ridiculous outfit and asserting flippantly, "But Mother, it's the 90s!" Unfortunately for us, it had really very little to do with the actual book itself. Suffice it to say none of our movie-watching gang performed too wonderfully on the exam.

But perhaps I digress. What exactly is the point here? Great cinema may be timeless, but choosing to remake a great film is a treacherous road. Succeed and you achieve the goal of exposing a new generation to a worthy classic. Bonus points if you remake a foreign film, as most of us ethnocentrites here wouldn't have a clue it wasn't an original. After all, that was pretty much the only thing I learned from watching the 1998 version of Great Expectations. Much to the chagrin of my English teacher, of course. She was all-too-quick to inform me that there was no character in the novel named Finn. Damn you remakes and your insidious name-changing. I suppose it didn't help my cause that for a paragraph or two in my essay, I accidentally referred to him as "Ethan Hawke". Subtlety isn't my fine point.

These 90s movies may not have been originals and some are far from classics, but they generally did pretty well in holding our attention. And if at the end of the day, it gave us a common notion to discuss with our parents who so loved the original, then all the better.


Little Rascals


If you can believe it, the Little Rascals (or "Our Gang") comedic shorts featuring cute and rambunctious child actors date all the way back to the 1920s.



While the popularity of the originals waned sometime around the 1940s, the brand was reinvigorated when it was picked up for syndication television in the 50s. Just a few decades later, however, the Gang was all but forgotten. In 1994, Universal Pictures put out a loosely defined remake of the shorts. The new film borrowed heavily on gags and themes from the originals, and retained many of the same characters. Oh, and in case you're wondering, here's my favorite part:



Fans of the originals were less than thrilled with the remake, but the film did reasonably well and a new generation of kids were rather taken with these miniature rascals. It may not have lived up to the standards of the original gang, but they were admittedly pretty cute.




The Parent Trap

The original was released in 1961, featuring Hayley Mills as both Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick. This was, no doubt, pretty sharp technology for the time. The film was well-received and was even nominated for two Oscars. Though, let's be real here, they were for Sound and Editing respectively. Oh well, they're still Oscar nods, right? You can still put that on your home video case.

You know you're a real 90s kid when you hear Hayley Mills' voice even as a teenager and your mind immediately jumps to Good Morning, Miss Bliss

In 1998, Disney remade the film and introduced the world to a then-adorable Lindsay Lohan. The film was appropriately updated to entertain 90s children, giving them something over which to bond with their parents who had grown up with the original.





Romeo and Juliet

There have been quite a few releases of Romeo and Juliet, but perhaps the most widely seen was the 1968 version. I know we were forced to sit through it in 9th grade Language Arts.



Probably completely unfairly to the perfectly fine '68 version, my classmates and I had been spoiled by the 90s-ified remake and thus referred to the older film as "The Boring One". Hey, it's tough to compete with Leonardo DiCaprio, gunfights, and songs by The Cardigans. Sorry, 1968 version. We never gave you a chance.





101 Dalmations

The 1961 Disney animated version was spectacularly successful and well-received by audiences. It was so successful, in fact, that the film was actually re-released to theaters a staggering four times before they finally just came out with it and did a remake.

Sorry, guys, according to this commercial it looks like this baby may already be back in the Disney vault. Looks like you missed your chance.

While Glenn Close was pretty spectacular and terrifying in her role as Cruella DeVil, the film wasn't quite as critically acclaimed as the original. It was a financial success, however, and a pretty wise move by Disney overall.

If only the world's dalmatian puppy population had fared as well. Following the release of the '96 version, demand for adorable dalmatians skyrocketed. No one at Disney ever told us that they weren't all that great with kids. I mean, they looked so cuddly in the movie. Soon thereafter rescue shelters with bursting at the seams with returns and exchanges of dalmatians. Whoops. Maybe the film should have come with some sort of caveat.





Angels in the Outfield

The1951 picture was not nearly as family-oriented a film as its subsequent reincarnation. The first didn't have much in the way of child-age characters, and come on, the team in this version was the Pirates. Where's the pun in that? Come on.

I have to say, this original trailer is awesome. It's completely ridiculous.

The 1994 release was much more of a family movie. A sad little foster kid played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt is told by his deadbeat dad that they'll be reunited when the Angels win the pennant. See, the Angels. Clever update, right? Plus we get Christopher Lloyd as our lead angel. What's not to like?

Oh my god, how cute is little Joseph Gordon-Levitt? The correct answer is, incredibly, unbelievably, heartstring-tuggingly cute.

Little Women

I guess great stories really are timeless. Either that, or people have terrible memories. There have been five big-screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, although the first two were in the era of silent films. We had our 1933 release with Katharine Hepburn as Jo:



The 1949 adaptation with over-the-top theatrics, featuring Elizabeth Taylor as Amy:

I love the way the trailer claims it to be Romantic as Springtime! Merry as Christmas! Sparkling as Winter!

And finally, our 1994 feature chock full of big names as Winona Rider, Christian Bale, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon:


For a movie that's been remade so many times, you've got to admire the 1994 version for getting it right. Yes, it's sappy and sentimental, but so is the novel. It's pretty hard to make selling your hair and dying of scarlet fever into slapstick comedy.




The Nutty Professor

I'm sure this news is going to shock you, so I'm going to try to break it to you gently: the original Nutty Professor contained infinitely fewer fart jokes. It also did not spurn any insufferable fart-joke filled sequels featuring its star playing every member of his family. Here's the trailer to the Jerry Lewis original, released in 1963:



The Eddy Murphy vehicle somehow, God knows how, morphed into, well, this:


Some things are better left unexplained.



As you can see, remakes run the gamut from a welcome reinterpretation to inexplicable excuse for cross-dressing and flatulence jokes. We can only hope the forthcoming remakes of 80s and 90s films can do any bit as much justice to the movies we grew up with. After all, I don't know how I'll ever explain to my kids that no, that flying luckdragon thing from The Neverending Story is not supposed to be computer animated, it's supposed to be real and fuzzy and absolutely terrifying.

Clueless

All of us have that movie for which we know every line of dialogue word-for-word. The movie that makes us abrasively irritating to friends and neighbors who just want to watch the damn movie and less-than-kindly demand for us to shut up already. The movie we can watch again and again without becoming bored, reveling in noticing delightful little touches we may have missed in our previous 364 viewings.

For me, Clueless is that movie.

I'll let you in on a little secret, just between us. Even though I loved this movie unconditionally from the first viewing, I will be forthcoming in my admission that I had no clue whatsoever what was going on. You might say, in fact, that I myself was clueless when it came to Clueless. Well, I might say that. You probably would spare yourself the embarrassment of making such a lame, hackneyed attempt of a joke. I, on the other hand, will shamelessly go for it.

The movie came out when I was in fourth grade, and I immediately and devoutly worshiped Cher Horowitz with ever fiber of my being. In the mid-90s, we were all about voyeurism in observing how the other half lived. Or, perhaps more accurately, how the media portrayed the wildly wealthy. Shows like Beverly Hills 90210 ruled the airwaves, with preteens and adolescents desperately coveting the undeniable coolness their privileged lifestyle commanded.



How can you not smile at that delivery? In the debate scene, Alicia Silverstone unintentionally pronounced Haitians as Haiti-ans, but it was so perfect for the role of Cher that no one bothered to correct her. Really, could she have been a more perfect casting choice?

That trailer is filled with some seriously credible 90s nostalgic goodness. That scene at the end in gym class, where Amber claims to be excused because her plastic surgeon doesn't want her doing anything where balls fly at her nose? And Dionne says, "There goes your social life"? That line alone took me about 5 years until I had my "ohhhhhh" moment of facepalming realization and retrospective blushing that I'd watched the move so many times with my parents.

Amy Heckerling, the teen-genre genius behind 80s classic Fast Times at Ridgemount High, took a smarter route to exposing and humanizing the teenage children of the rich and the famous. Clueless's dialogue may have sounded vapid and substance free, but beneath the veneer of superficiality and teenage drama lay a truly smart, well-conceived film. Heckerling loosely based the screenplay on Jane Austen's Emma, updating both the setting and characters to star the gum-snapping, credit-card wielding teens of Beverly Hills.

Like her Austen counterpart, Cher is utterly self-absorbed and spoiled but with generally good intentions to her scheming. She is undeniably likable as a character. She's sweet, she's funny, and she singlehandedly managed to bring knee-high socks back into vogue. What's not to like?




The film opens with The Muff's song "Kids in America" blaring, as well-groomed attractive teenagers cruise carefreely down the streets of Beverly Hills, go shopping, party, and frolic by a waterfall-type pool that would make the Playboy Mansion's grotto blush.

Cher is quick to cut the moment, though. Her voice-over muses, "So okay, you're probably thinking, is this, like a Noxema commercial, or what? But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl. I mean I get up, I brush my teeth, and I pick out my school clothes." For Cher, however, picking out her school clothes entails using an enviable and no doubt advanced for its time wardrobe matching computer program and the best remote controlled scrolling closet this side of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.


In a seriously condensed period of time, we learn a lot about Cher Horowitz and her lavish lifestyle. We meet her best friend Dionne, to whom she relates because a) they both know what it's like to have people be jealous of them and b) they were both named for singing superstars of the past who now do late-night infomercials. At school, we get to see a veritable range of 90s social groups, though of course grungy flannel is a popular theme. Cher learns she got a C in debate, dragging down her academic average. We also meet Josh, the ever-hunky Paul Rudd as Cher's ex-step brother and initial pain-in-the-ass granola-munching housemate.


Cher and her gang have a fabulous way of coining their entire own system of teen-centric terminology. Indeed, after the movie's sleeper hit status was confirmed, you could hardly enter the hallowed halls of any high school without hearing at least an occasional "Whatever!" or "As if!" Alicia Silverstone nails the doe-eyed tongue-in-cheek delivery of her airhead lines. She plays the part to perfection, letting us as the audience know that no, she's not really an airhead, she just plays one in high school. In actuality, Cher's no dummy. She manages to successfully trail in her father's litigator (the scariest kind of lawyer) footsteps by renegotiating most of her undesirable grades. Talk about results.

Dionne and Cher are well-meaning meddlers, as we see them trying to fix up two lonely single teachers at their school early in the movie. They also come upon an ugly duckling of a fish-out-of-water new student (sorry, I ran out of pond creature idioms) Tai, whose less-than-stellar appearance prompts them to do a major overhauling makeover to secure Tai's social standing at school.

Tai initially is warm to the form of slacker skateboarder Travis, but Cher vetoes that route as she's certain that if Tai starts dating the social climbing cretin Elton she'll no doubt claim a place in the A-crowd. This plan, however, goes awry when Elton expresses his feelings for Cher, to which she responds by storming out of his car in the middle of God knows where. She not only gets robbed, but is forced to lay on the ground in an Alaia for heaven's sake. An Alaia! I can't even fathom.*

I have distinct memories of seriously coveting that outfit of Tai's to biblical proportions. Now, well, not so much.

Cher, meanwhile, has fallen for new student Christian in a big way. She sends herself chocolate and flowers and wears revealing clothing in an attempt to win his affection. Her efforts, unfortunately, seem to be for naught as she's completely oblivious to the otherwise obvious fact that Christian is gay. If that weren't enough, Tai's supposedly traumatizing near-death experience at the mall suddenly makes her the toast of the school's social scene, leaving Cher to contemplate if she's perhaps created a well-coiffed monster. On top of it all, Cher also fails her driving test in the one moment of her life she can't seem to talk or charm her way out of.

In an effort to clear her head, she heads out shopping and comes to the Celine Dion and lit-fountain punctuated moment of realization that she is actually in love with her step-brother Josh. Okay, ex-step brother, but still. I mean, yeah, they're not blood related, but their parents were once matrimonially bound. It's a bit on the skeevy side.

It gets a little awkward around home as she suddenly is unsure of how to act in his once-maligned presence. Cher throws herself into the goal of becoming a better person in her attempt to distract herself from her crumbling personal life. It's all really kind of sweet in a completely out-of-touch with reality way. Like donating your expensive skis to a disaster relief aid collection? Probably not at the top of their list. Oh well. It's the thought that counts.

All's well that ends well, luckily, as Cher and Josh eventually confess their mutual if awkwardly familial feelings toward one another, and the two lonelyhearts teachers from the initial set-up are wed in a sweet concluding ceremony. Tai and Travis finally get together, Dionne makes at least temporary peace with her boyfriend Murray, and Josh and Cher are finally together after a long and painfully tense period of anticipation.



Alright, so maybe it's not real life. But that's the real fun of it. Clueless was more than just a modern reuptake on a classic. It was a film that briefly defined a fledgling generation teetering on the brink of a shift from grunge flannel and heroin chic to mainstream preppy teenybopperyism.** It was better than real life. The people were better looking and better attired, the setting was covetable, and the money was free flowing. It was a well-grounded fantasy that spurned a thousand Cher wannabes.

And of course, I just can't give you a full in-depth post on Clueless without posting (well, reposting) one of my personal faves: a Golden Girls Clueless spoof from the 1996 MTV Video Awards. I just can't in good conscience let you off the hook without enjoying some good old fashioned satire with jokes at the expense of some very comically talented elderly ladies. Enjoy responsibly.






*For those of you who don't know, she's like a totally important designer
**This is not a word. Just deal with it.

Alanis Morissette

Some career transformations are subtle as artists gradually and organically transition from one style to another over an extended period of time. Others are, let's say, not so nuanced. Such was the case of Alanis Morissette, whose career began as a Canadian mall-haired teen queen a la Tiffany or Debbie Gibson. At one point she was actually opening for Vanilla Ice, for heaven's sake. It's a pretty far cry from the Alanis the rest of the world met in the mid-90s, but for a stretch of time in the first half of the decade Alanis reigned as a cheesy dance-beat pop artist in America's hat.*

At 12, Alanis debuted as a regular cast member on one season of the the Nickelodeon tween sketch comedy show You Can't Do That on Television. It's not exactly the thing that angry-chick musicians are made of, I'll give you that. She started her career as a squeaky-clean, happy preteen in this slime-splattered comedy spot. Well, clean other than her very convincing fake vomiting at the end of this clip:



In 1990 at age 14 she moved on to show her, er, pop potential on the original America's Got Talent, Star Search. Be warned, for those of you familiar with a different, darker, more ironic Alanis, this may be quite the shock. While I do admire her general boppiness and the confidence it no doubt took to don that polka-dotted puffy sleeved midriff baring jacket, it's a far cry from the Alanis the rest of the world met a few years later.



Just one year later and released under her original Cher slash Madonna-esque stage name of Alanis, her first single "Too Hot" performed relatively well in the Canadian market. In this awesomely bad 90s music video, Alanis demonstrates a both surprising command of snappy dance moves and a serious lead finger on her can of Aquanet. The album was not released internationally, but from what I've been told it was pretty big in Canada. Take a look at this video and you can definitely see where the Tiffany comparisons come in.



A year later, yearning to show her more substantial side, Alanis released a more ballad-heavy album. The Canadian teen sensation's star seemed to be on the wane, as sales numbers fell off significantly from her first album. I guess they liked the Tiffany Alanis better. No one, however, or at least no Canadians, would likely have foreseen what was to come next for Alanis Morissette.

Flash forward just a few short years to the release of her angst-ridden album Jagged Little Pill, her first record to be released outside of Canada, and I'm sure you'll see why her musical transformation can be classified as less than subtle. Much less than subtle. Really, not subtle at all. Is there such a word as unsubtlest? If not, I move to add it on the basis of Alanis's incredible career 180.

On sort of a fluke, her single "You Outta Know" started getting some serious radio airtime following the lead of an LA DJ's broadcast of the song. For most of us, this was all well and good and we had little prior knowledge of bubble-gum pop Alanis, but I can only imagine what those poor Canadians were thinking about their coiffured pop princess when they heard this:

Alanis Morissette - New Music - More Music Videos

I apologize for making you sit through the preceding ad, but hey, this comes from MTV. We have to deal with what we're dealt here. Thanks for your understanding.

Well, that's a little, um, different, wouldn't you say? "Too Hot" to this? Is that really any form of logical leap? I guess if you want to shake the Debbie Gibson and Tiffany comparisons, this is probably the safest route. This was pretty edgy stuff for mainstream music, after all. It did fit in nicely with the mid-90s flannel wearing coming of age of a cynical Generation X. Assuming, that is, that they'd never seen any of Alanis's previous work. I can't imagine that widespread international knowledge of that "Too Hot" video would bolster her bitter 90s angst street credibility much.

The best part about this song, however, was in the speculation on the subject matter. Just who was this guy who inspired Alanis to spew such angry vocals? There were a lot of different names thrown into the mix, but by far the most prevalent prognosis was that this song's mysterious Mr. Wrong was none other than Full House's Dave Coulier. Yep, Uncle Joey of the Hawaiian Shirts, the "Cut. It. Out." hand motions, and insufferable woodchuck impressions. I'm sorry, what? That guy? Geez, Alanis, pull yourself together. Our jury at Snopes are still out on the verdict, but as far as rumors go this one has got to be one of the strangest. And, let's be honest, most embarrassing.

Jagged Little Pill gave Alanis a number of mid-level singles like "Hand in My Pocket", but her next big moment came in the form of the release of her single for "Ironic":



This song had to be by far one of the primary leading contributors to middle school students' collective misunderstanding of the literary notion of irony. According to the song, it seems irony is nothing more than a series of unfortunate inconveniences. While her examples certainly aren't welcome life circumstances ("10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife"), the are not ironic by any stretch of definition of the term. If nothing else, the real irony was that she managed to release a song entitled "Ironic" that claimed to showcase numerous incidences of irony while in reality none were ironic in the least. Now that's a bit ironic. Don't you think?

The album enjoyed a pretty substantial shelf-life, giving her two additional Billboard-worthy singles in "Head Over Feet" and "You Learn". "You Learn" contained the album's eponymous line, "swallow it down, what a jagged little pill/ It feels so good swimming in your stomach". It's a pretty far cry from "Too Hot", I must say.

Alanis Morissette - You Learn
Uploaded by magik-man2. - Explore more music videos.

This was, of course, not the last we heard from Alanis Morissette. I'm sure any die-hard fans can tell you not only of her 90s trailblazing ways for angry female singers, but of her subsequent album releases that I'm sure were also worth listening to despite the fact that I have yet to do so. There were happier, less angst-ridden incarnations of Alanis in the earlier part of this decade, but she will undoubtedly be most remembered for her mid-90s reign as a strong, bitter female talent. Which is probably for the best, really. I mean, would you want to be remembered for "Too Hot"? That's what I thought.




*I'm sorry, some of you may know this territory as Canada.