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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Director Andy Fickman and stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Carla Gugino discuss the “reimagining” of the Witch Mountain movies — this one is called Race to Witch Mountain. But really, all I remember is the new footage from Tron 2, which actually stars Jeff Bridges.
Highlights:
- Umm, Tron 2!!!
- Jeff Bridges in Tron 2!!!
- New footage of light cycles in Tron 2!!!
- Race to Witch Mountain is like 48 Hours meets the Bourne movies, but is also a lot like the originals.
- Also Whitley Strieber was involved with its production.
Read the liveblogging after the jump.
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It’s bad enough that Hollywood has to remake all of my childhood memories (yes, I admit my childhood memories are mostly TV shows and movies from the ’70s and ’80s). But when they go and use CGI rather than actors and completely alter the way I remember things (man, that sucked how the Who’s the Boss movie featured a computer generated Mona), I just get so upset I could rant on a blog. So, imagine my relief when I saw this official photo from the set of Universal’s Land of the Lost in today’s USA Today.
Yes, those Sleestak look just as you remember. Only darker, more detailed, and a little (just a little) less like a costume with a human inside. But as much as I’d like to salute director Brad Silberling both for respecting my childhood and for shitting on CGI (which is still just too lazy a tool these days), the choice seems mostly to do with retaining the show’s cheesiness. Anthony Breznican writes for USA Today:
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