roundshort said:
Should of would have could have
Remember 1990 was a totally different time. Harrison Ford was bound to put this action stuff behind him and try and play more round charatcers, well that didn't work. We all see that Lucas is a Crazy little midget who let his passion for being a single father and making crap for his kids kill SW I, II, III, and Steven, well who the hell knows what he will pull next, And lets face it a lot of us saw the Original Indy movies when we were kids, and there was not a lot of really good movies for kids in the 80's, the real question is would Star Wars be as great was it was if it came out in the 90's? Doubt it.
That's a very good way of putting it, and it encapsulates my feelings about this issue, for the most part, though I would disagree about a lack of really good movies for kids in the 80s.. there were tons of them. Goonies, the Explorers, the Neverending Story, Time Bandits... I could go on. Have had this conversation before.
It's simply that, when most of us were in our younger years, PG meant an entirely different thing, as did the term "kids movie". I have a friend who works in the industry, and she tells me that this all changed beginning in the early 90s for two at least reasons, take it with a grain of salt:
1) Parents from a new generation, the so called "yuppies" (like my older siblings), decided that the way their parents had raised them wasn't good enough, so they tended more toward a "new approach" at parenting. Insert your own opinions here...
2) Children have changed. She told me that they have tested films like the Neverending Story on children of the 90s and the early 21st century. Most of them "don't get it". She says, initially, that this was a great shock, as these films had done so well with that demographic in the 1980s. Apparently the big difference is attention span - kids just don't like movies as much as they used to, and they'd rather see sugar-coated crap like 'Spykids 3D'.
My wife has pointed out that most directors have also learned a third lesson - that it's very easy to make a kid's movie with minimum plot and lots of bright, happy things at a reasonable budget; children will drag their parents, or the parents will drag them, and they'll still make a profit at the end of the day, as opposed to the fact that many of the films we had in the 80s were expensive for the time, and would be even more expensive now...
Then, there's this whole political correctness thing (and both conservatives and liberals are equally guilty of this), and that's taken a chunk out of creativity. And of course, never should forget that many of what we call "kids films" were marketed at adults, too, in those days. Star Wars was never supposed to be for children, and I can remember George Lucas walking off at least one talk show when that suggestion was made.
Anyway...
To get back to the question at hand. No, I wouldn't want another triology set in the 1950s. That isn't in the spirit of the pulps, and it isn't in the spirit of this kind of film. I am not the only one who thinks setting an Indy film in the 1950s is a bad idea.
Yes, I would watch a trilogy set in the same time frame as the first three films... But I love that genre. I loved Sky Captain, I loved the Phantom, I loved the Mummy Films (proof that this time frame in films can still be a blockbuster) and I collect 1930s pulps. The recent news that they've been talking about doing a modern Doc Savage just kills me, so I doubt I'd enjoy any modernisation of Indy...
Off my soapbox and back to the dig,
Fed