The Dukes of Hazzard brings
yet another mediocre television series to the big screen, and there is no
end in sight for the trend. Pop quiz: what was the first television show
adapted into a movie? If you guessed Star Trek you are way off. If your answer is Batman you are still off by one
decade. Only three years after its 1951 TV debut Jack Webb produced and
directed a film version of Dragnet, long before the cop show was considered camp. The next
decade did bring a small flurry of sitcom adaptations, beginning with McHale’s Navy (1964) and McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (1965), and followed by Munster Go
Home (1966) and, of course, Batman (1966).
The modern trend of big-budget adaptations did begin
with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). This is the Star Trek hated by Trekkies (they hate that name, too), but I think it
is the best of the movies. Director Robert Wise broke free of the confines
of the TV show to create a more majestic film, but the subsequent films
were made to please the core audience. The most highly regarded adaptation
is still The Fugitive (1993) with Harrison Ford in the David Janssen role. The
film works best when it sticks close to the series, in which Ford is an
innocent man accused of murdering his wife. He manages to escape custody,
and with a U.S. marshal (Tommy Lee Jones) in pursuit he searches for the
one-armed man who actually committed the murder. Unfortunately, that
wasn’t good enough and the filmmakers felt the need to tack on a lame
twist ending.
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) employed the most interesting concept by actually
using its series as the object for ridicule. The filmmakers understood that
the Brady Family had no logical place in the ’90s, so they
transformed them into society’s outcasts who have no idea how they
are perceived. They became The Munsters without the makeup. Spoofing the original series, however,
didn’t work for Starsky and Hutch (2004). The result is just a dumb comedy with few laughs
and none of the cleverness that distinguished The
Brady Bunch Movie.
The one to watch for this year is the science-fiction
adventure Serenity (a September theatrical release), which is based on the
prematurely canceled Fox series Firefly. A cult following was beginning to develop, but Fox was
too impatient. The TV show is out on DVD, and any video store that
doesn’t stock it is missing the boat. Speaking of missing the boat,
why hasn’t The Rat Patrol been turned into a movie?
DVDs scheduled for release Tuesday (Aug. 23): A Lot Like
Love, Beauty Shop, and The Ring Two.
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2005.
