Just as we’d prefer for Hollywood to remake bad films rather than beloved classics, we’d also like to see more TV adaptations of obscure and failed series — as long as there’s going to be such a giant void of creativity anyway, why not go for the forgotten titles and at least make it seem like you’ve got fresh ideas?

Unfortunately, Hollywood continues to ignore our logic and is instead adapting the popular 80s cop show T.J. Hooker for the big screen. It may not be the most familiar or beloved series of all time, but it has enough name recognition to make it a success, a la the S.W.A.T. and Starsky & Hutch movies before it.

We have no interest in yet another veteran/rookie team-up, though, especially a blatantly recycled one. So we decided to mine deeper into our TV Guide issues from the 80s and pick out some lesser-known high-concept shows that would make awesome movies if only they had more of a built-in, nostalgic audience to justify a green light.

Check out our pitches after the jump, and thank us when Hollywood gets wise to the ideas.
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Late last month, Nike unleashed the latest movie-themed sneaker, a yellow shoe with brown fur coming out of the top inspired by Teen Wolf (never mind that in the film the title character wears Adidas). Between this and the recent Back to the Future Part II tie-ins, Michael J. Fox seems to be a big influence on the world of sneaker collecting, and so it may only be a matter of time before we see Nike unveil a Doc Hollywood design.

Actually, it may only be a matter of time before we see a lot of film-inspired shoes we wouldn’t expect. Already, Nike has sneakers tied to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Goodfellas, The Empire Strikes Back and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Add to these Adidas’ Tron shoes, Puma’s The Goonies and Japanese Monster shoes and Slip-Off’s custom-designed Vans inspired by Fight Club, Star Wars, Napoleon Dynamite, Anchorman, E.T. and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou .

So, in order to beat the shoe companies to the punch, SpoutBlog has picked ten movies that deserve their own sneaker design. Most of these are quite literal and obvious, but it’s just a starting point. What other movies would you like to see make their way to your feet?
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• Tron 2.0, described as a “next chapter” kind of sequel, has cast two actresses, Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett, both of whom were in Turistas. The production, which is to start filming in the Spring and to be released in 2011, is still looking for a male lead. Wait, you ask, isn’t the male lead split between young and old versions of Jeff Bridges? Apparently that “trailer” we saw back at Comic-Con was only test footage.
• Speaking of things that were cool in the early 80s, James L. Brooks is finally making a sixth film, tentatively titled How Do You Know?, and has just cast Reese Witherspoon as one of three leads.
• If you’ve seen the new trailer for Dragonball: Evolution, you may fear more live-action anime adaptations, so ignore this announcement from Universal about bringing TV and toy sensation Bakugan Battle Brawlers to the big screen.
• I can’t wait to see the look on parents’ faces when they realize they shouldn’t have brought their kids to see Cheech and Chong’s Smokin’ Animated Movie.
• If you want to know anything about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, there are a few good documentaries to check out, but if you want a fictional love story involving the architect, you may look forward to the adaptation of Nancy Horan’s historical novel Loving Frank.
• Catherine Hardwicke is actually better off not directing Twilight: New Moon, which Summit has set for a November 20, 2009, release. Rush jobs like this are rarely good, yet the two subsequent sequels are also tentatively slated for the same timeframe in 2010 and 2011. I guess if you think the Saw movies kept getting better, you could be hopeful.

I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.

That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.

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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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Every week or so you’ll hear about a video game being adapted for the big screen, especially with the gaming industry raking it in hand over fist these days. In the past year alone studios have touted the announcements of deals for game-based movies like World of Warcraft, Halo, and Metal Gear Solid. But what about the movies that already seem like video games? There are a fair share of flicks that feature everything from gimmicky camera styles to plotlines that seem like they were ripped right out of the latest console bestseller and plunked into multiplexes. Check out the list below and watch these video game movies that aren’t video game movies.

1. Elephant (2003): This Gus Van Sant film was inspired by the Columbine school shooters, who were in turn supposedly inspired by video games Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. The movie is made up of extremely long tracking shots, filmed just behind the character the story is currently following. By design, this makes the film look like a thirdperson game like Grand Theft Auto, except without all the hookers and drug-running.
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People are starting to say smart things about Speed Racer, sight unseen. The film has been screened for journalists who attended junkets, but those journalists have so far stuck to stuck to the studio’s review embargo––all of the really interesting stuff is being written by bloggers who are basing their critiques solely on promo materials like stills, trailers, and now clips.

It’s these seven new clips posted by Colider.com that prompted iO9’s Annalee Newitz to start spouting sci-fi philosophy. “In this scene, where Speed and his pals race through a geometrically-impossible “ice mountain,” it’s clear we’re inside an artificial world where humans and machines have become interchangeable,” she writes. “Watching Speed and his car is like seeing the movie Tron from the point of view of one of the programs.” Tron references are always sexy.

You can watch the clips at either Colider or iO9, but they don’t seem to be easily embeddable. Colider’s are crisp and HD sparkly; it looks like Newitz’ crack Gawker Media tech team scraped the clips in order to re-post them on their own site, but I kind of prefer the lower resolution. Especially with that ice cave clip, the pixelation causes the image to blur into a wild four-dimensional abstract expressionist canvas. It made my eyes cross, but in a good way.

According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewed Tron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:

Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.

“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.

[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)

In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”