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10 Disney Classics That Need to Be Remade

By Christopher Campbell posted 8 months ago

Even if you love the original Escape to Witch Mountain, you have to welcome a remake. The 1975 sci-fi Disney film has some very dated special effects — though the visible wires used to “levitate” a handgun and a harmonica give it a campy charm — and it’s not exactly the well-respected classic that The Black Hole or Old Yeller is, anyway. So, better a remake (or “modern re-imagining”) of a slightly beloved movie, which has already been redone once, to give The Rock another fulfillment of his Disney contract and utilize all the “perfect” digital effects now available.

While it seems that eventually all Disney live-action classics will be remade, potentially rendering obsolete the careers of Dean Jones, Kevin Corcoran and those ugly kids from Mary Poppins, there are some that may, like Witch Mountain, deserve to be recycled. Disney has previously erred in reworking films like The Absent-Minded Professor (Robin Williams is no Fred MacMurray) and The Shaggy Dog (Tim Allen is no MacMurray, either, nor even is he Tommy Kirk), and it’s mistakenly producing new versions of Swiss Family Robinson and 20,000 Leauges Under the Sea. But there are so many other films, most forgotten, that would better lend themselves to remakes.

Here we’ve selected 10 such classics, all but one live-action features, and we welcome you to suggest any others you may wish to see updated and/or re-imagined.
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Classics, Lists

Trade Roughage 02/20/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Oscar producers are worried that the alleged inaccessibility of this year’s major nominees will have a negative impact on the telecast’s ratings. But how could that be, when the Best Picture nominees are so full of memorable catchprases? “I drink your milkshake!” “Homeskillet doodle blog!” “I am putting my scruples aside in order to blackmail you in the name of the greater good,” or whatever George Clooney says at the end of Michael Clayton!
Speaking of bad means and good ends, the Juno phenomena is spilling over to benefit an actual indie film. Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, which played the Berlin, Toronto and Denver film festivals last year, and which stars Ellen Page, has secured U.S. theatrical distribution via ThinkFilm. Page’s current hotness notwithstanding, the pick-up is something of a surprise, considering that it’s coming three months after McDonald posted raw footage of the film online as part of a contest for its DVD release.
Owen Wilson will start shooting his first film since his recent breakdown on March 10. Marley and Me, co-starring Jennifer Aniston, is an apparent science fiction film set in an alternate universe in which 40 year-old women can procreate on demand, but chose to purchase dogs instead.