Come Out Of The Shadows

The other night I was flipping around the movie channels when I cam across the film, "Dark Shadows." For those of you who may not have caught it (which I suspect is most of you), the movie stars Johnny Depp as a vampire unearthed after 200 years in 1970s Maine. It was directed by Tim Burton, because at this point I think Depp only does movies by Burton or in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchises (Seriously, when was the last time he was in a movie playing a normal guy? When I heard he was in the "Lone Ranger" movie I thought it would be closer to an average person, but then I discovered he was playing Tonto.) Anyway, I remember when the movie came out last year and I was curious to see if it had been a success or not. (Short answer: kind of. It made money, but not as much as a movie directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp should be making. Hopefully this little stumble will convince them to take a few movies away from one another.) However, it was while I was on the movie's Wikipedia page that I made the more interesting discovery - the movie had actually been based on a TV show in the 70s which had been become somewhat of a cult classic. I had never heard of it before, but I guess not being popular to a lot of people is the first step in being a cult classic. The only good part of this new knowledge is that unlike his takes on "Alice in Wonderland" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" since I was unfamiliar with the subject how poor a job Burton did in honoring the original didn't matter since I didn't have any memories for him to wreck.

I was amazed to learn that the original "Dark Shadows" had been on for five season, which shows you just how much the TV game has changed. I don't care how loyal a following a show might have, these days you never hear of any show with a 'cult' following making it more than two seasons. This is terribly ironic to me considering there are more places for those shows to air these days. Back then I could see cancelling a show which wasn't bringing in enormous ratings because there was far less competition. Network executives didn't have to worry about staying in the top-10 since there were only 5 channels to begin with (they could show a test pattern and it would be in the top-10). Thus, you needed to have millions of people watching for a show to be considered a hit, not the hundreds of thousands which make up a healthy audience today. You would think a lowly network would be desperate for any kind of ratings and a couple million loyal viewers would be enough to save a show from the scrap heap, but not anymore. These days if people want to see their favorite cancelled shows have a second life they either have to start a letter-writing campaign to the network or agree to fund it themselves through a Kickstarter campaign and even then there are no guarantees the movie will ever get made.

Still, the fact this movie even got made in the first place made me wonder if more studios will investigate the "Dark Shadows" route going forward. You see, the way I figure it there are millions of people out there who watched this show growing up not because they loved it but because there was nothing else on. Whatever their motivation, thanks to having fewer options the shows from back then have much more name recognition. [Sidebar: To all the people who contend that the early days of television were so much better than the crap we have on now, I would contend the bulk of those shows were just as awful, maybe even worse than what is getting made today. The problem is today there is just a lot more of it. I'm not saying the stuff on TV today isn't awful and, in some cases, actually making people stupider for having watched it. I'm just saying "Petticoat Junction" wasn't exactly the Shakespeare hour either.] Those people are bound to be curious to see what kind of updates have been done to the story with increased special effects, not to mention a couple new generations of hipsters who are going to be fans of this show just because they were told it was a cult classic back in the day, which means it is like a double-secret cult classic for their generation. (Hipsters love double-secret cult classics.)

Of course, there is one major risk involved in all this and that is people have already rejected this idea once. Like I said, it actually took work to be cancelled in the early days of television and the meager returns on this movie proved that while there are sure to be some people who long for a trip back in time to their childhood there are going to be just as many people who remember thinking this show was dumb the first time around. But, I never said this idea of bringing it to the big screen had to be limited to mildly-popular shows. You could always do hit shows from the early days of television and decrease the odds of people having bad memories of the characters. I mean, Hollywood is currently making movies of shows which were cancelled within the last couple of years and that is only because they already exhausted every slightly-popular show from the 80s, so they are clearly out of good ideas. Even better is that for every person who knows your movie is based on a show, there are two generations (including mine), who will think it was a totally original idea. So I suggest these movie executives stop pouring over yet another "it's 'Die Hard' in the White House" script and start going through the archives of ratings books from the early-60s to locate their new project. But if they do actually find an old show to turn into a movie, do me one favor - don't let Tim Burton direct. I think we've had enough of him ruining stuff we used to have good memories of.