If It Ain't Broke...

I just saw the trailer for the remake of Footloose. One word:

Why?

And now some more words about it;

I don’t get it. At the time that Footloose came out, musicals had made a bit of a resurgence and soundtracks for films dominated the music charts and our lives. Saturday Night Fever, Annie, Fame, Stayin’ Alive, Grease, The Wiz, Tommy…just to name a few.

My soundtrack to junior high school included Purple Rain and Footloose. Good times. I can remember making up dance routines to songs with friends and buying those lyric magazines (remember those, J?) and learning the words to every pop song on the radio.

It was a musical time that was becoming visual. MTV still played music videos all the time and the marriage of miniature stories with music was ideal. The videos weren’t always even that good, but you got to see the band, a little of their attitude and hear some good songs. It stood to reason that a movie jammed with pop music worked - it was like seeing an hour and a half long music video.

And of course, the story of Wren McCormick just trying to have a little fun in a repressed, sleepy, danceless town was enough to get teenagers into the theaters and out buying Footloose cassettes. (yeah, I think I still have mine…) It did not hurt that Kevin Bacon was terribly cute and a great dancer. All of the elements of the classic, perfect musical were right there – song, love, rebellion, conflict and a happy ending.

So…28 years later, Hollywood thinks it can remake this story and it will resonate with today’s teens? Kids today do pretty much whatever they want to do! They wouldn’t go through the trouble of organizing a secret dance across county lines. They wouldn’t care so much about what their parents thought. Kids grew out of rules and lying about secret dances in the 90s when Raves were all the rage.

Today, kids would hop online, find out where the party’s at and just go. They may or may not tell their parents where they were going. I’m not bashing kids of today, but they are WAY more independent (this is good and bad) than they were in the 80s when this movie was created.

My point – today’s kids don’t need to be encouraged to think independently or to rebel...they do it naturally. I don’t mean to sound like an old fogey, and I haven’t seen the whole movie obviously, but unless there are some major twists to the rest of the plot, I’m not getting how it’s relevant today.

Also, not to blast…Julianne Hough is lovely, but she looks like she could be Kenny Wormald’s (who?) very young-former-teenaged-mom or way older sister in a family where Kenny was a menopause baby. Kinda creepy. I know she's only 23, but dang.

The only thing worse than this remake is if they’d done a sequel where Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer are now adults with children who are rebellious in some other scenario, or if they portrayed parents trying to convince the PTA in some other small town to have a dance.

Let’s stop with the remakes, ‘kay?