Reboots In Disguise

Hey pop culture fans! Academy Award winning director Guilermo del Toro will be directing a new film version of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion. He promises that his "will be scary and fun at the same time." This may come as a great relief for the eight of you out there who may have paid to see Eddie Murphy's turn as workaholic dad Jim Evers in the original 2003 version.
Original? Is it appropriate to say that the first attempt at trying to make a movie about an amusement park ride is original? Especially in the rather frothy wake of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl," released four months before. It used to be that Disney built rides based on their movies, not the other way 'round.
This gets me wondering just what inspirations we have left for our entertainment, since we continue to chase our collective tails when it comes to influences: based on the best-selling novelization of the TV series inspired by a breakfast cereal modeled on an action figure. The fact that the board game "Battleship" is on its way to the big screen should no longer seem surprising. I am fully expecting the movie adaptation of this week's Target circular will soon be a major motion picture.
It also speaks volumes about our attention span. Remember just eight years ago when Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man? Not anymore. He's so early twenty-first century. The new millennium is all about Andrew Garfield. We need to be reminded, one more time, that with great power comes great responsibility. Radioactive spiders and all that. "Avatar" was really "Ferngully" and "Inception" already made the rounds as "Dreamscape."
Come to think of it, maybe it's not so strange at all, since all of this really could be a dream after all, and if it's taking place in my head that would make perfectly good sense. Though most of my dreams are based on "Caddyshack."