Starring Meryl Streep as My Mother the Car

Gen-X definitely holds one place in history—we are the first ones to have our pop culture suffused with Boomer nostalgia. Sometimes, this wasn’t a bad thing; the existence of The Addams Family comes from a bunch of Boomers singing the theme song in a van, though a kid apparently got them started singing. Sometimes, it left you with something no one watched or wanted to. More often, it left you with something no one watched or wanted to. I have never seen the Car 54, Where Are You? Movie. No one has seen the Car 54, Where Are You? Movie.

I mean, yes, The Addams Family was a huge hit. So were the Brady Bunch movies, though no one seems to talk about those as much these days. The Fugitive won an actual Oscar for Tommy Lee Jones. So you can see why they made the others, certainly. Heck, arguably even those were spawned at least in part by the cult success of Dragnet, one of the last movies of Tom Hanks, Comic Actor. (I rewatched it recently, and it holds up pretty well!) And of course there’s The Naked Gun, though the series that spawned that one was short-lived and I’m not sure how many people remember it existed.

But the thing is, all of those either had some kind of cultural weight or could be made into more than just “here is the show.” Preferably both. People had been talking about the end of The Fugitive for years, in part because that’s a heck of a storyline. As it was, you know, when Victor Hugo wrote it in Les Miserables. Most of those movies have impressive casts, even if half the fun of The Naked Gun these days is watching OJ Simpson get hurt over and over again. The writers and directors understood the assignment and produced work worth watching, and many of them have aged well enough to become classics.

Then there’s Christopher Lloyd in My Favorite Martian. Matthew Broderick in Inspector Gadget—my first friend at the college where I got my BA knew we were going to get along because of my annoyance about that movie’s existence. With all the love in my heart for both Brendan Fraser and my cousin, who was Young Dudley in it, Dudley Do-Right. (Is there a good movie based on any of the Rocky and Friends bits?) I like Wild Wild West, but it is not actually a good movie. These are movies where someone had a set piece in mind, or someone liked the original but were apparently not content to just let it stay where it was.

There is always the option of having a new take on an old favourite. I like Maverick, for example, which plays around with the tropes of the original movie while going in a new place. (I’m also glad I bought it, possibly used even, before knowing exactly how awful Mel Gibson is.) The Brady Bunch Movie played with putting its characters, unchanged, into the ‘90s. The Fugitive worked at taking its core concept and making it really work as a single action-thriller movie. Many of these movies owe a lot to their predecessor but went further. The Addams Family could be darker and have better special effects and also such a spectacular cast that you find yourself saying, “Wait, Nathan Lane is in this?”

The failures were, by and large, just remaking the original or remaking The Brady Bunch Movie. The Avengers was trying to do something interesting but by all accounts just did something bizarre. The movies go places. Good ones? Eh. Often not. Often we’ll never know, because have you seen Mr. Magoo? And then Mission Impossible was popular and a whole new crop of these things came out, because some people can’t learn from the failures of the past. Hey, remember how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made a Baywatch movie? Because I didn’t!