Get back in your hutch
Here we go again. In the middle of a golden age in American television, film-makers are still obsessed with the medium's dark ages, the 1970s. Only this week, Ben Stiller signed on to star in the big-screen remake of Starsky and Hutch, to be directed by Todd Phillips, who brought us the unedifying Road Trip. Meanwhile, over at Universal, the classier (or middle-classier) Ang Lee has been brought in to spruce up the studio's rehash of The Incredible Hulk.
Lee will probably associate himself more closely with the Marvel Comics original than the 1970s TV series starring Bill Bixby and dim-bulb iron-pumper Lou Ferrigno, but I think we can safely assume the latter was the reason the movie got greenlighted. Phillips should be better suited to adapting Starsky and Hutch. That show was so confused in its responses to the 1970s - honky salt-n-pepper plainclothes cutie-cops playing at blaxploitation in the age of gay liberation - that it offers endless satirical possibilities for a cheeky director today. How many more rehashes do we need? We've already been subjected to The Brady Bunch, The Mod Squad and Charlie's Angels. Watergate-era game-show host Chuck Barris, who made millions from trash, will soon be memorialised in Confessions of a Dan gerous Mind. What can we expect next? Rockford on the big screen? Sacrilege! The Love Boat? I'd envy the dead.
I propose a global embargo on 1970s TV remakes, though I'm willing to make an exception for Fox TV's That 70s Show, which satirises present-day 1970s nostalgia by modelling itself quite explicitly on Happy Days.
It has the same enthusiastic studio audience, the laugh-track, its own Fonzie, a Ralph and Potsie, and a Mr and Mrs C, but it also has wit, a dirty mind and lots of drug humour. A single 22-minute episode offers more pleasure than all the recent 1970s movie rehashes combined.