Maybe I’m an old person, but I feel like one of the weakest ideas for a show or movie is a remake. It’s like, you can’t find anything new to do? The reasons to do remakes I can see (outside of just money chasing):
-
It’s been like 60 years and no one remembers. This is the weakest.
-
You do a interesting twist or change(The various Sherlock Holmes in modern day, redoing in a different language, doing a live action version).
-
The previous adaptation was completely off the rails and considered bad.
-
There were shots that you just couldn’t do in the past due to less technology.
For the recent Trigun, and now Spice and Wolf and Rurouni Kenshin - were the previous anime’s way off the source material? I don’t think Spice and Wolf was, I haven’t read the source for Trigun or Kenshin. If not, I’m struggling to see why anyone who was interested in these would wait to see the “new” version versus just watching the existing one RIGHT NOW.
For those of us who watched the existing version, why would we want to waste time on re-watching the same story when there’s other shows that are new, either to everyone or at least to us? I guess in my limited time to watch a firehose of entertainment (heck, just in Anime, forget about shows like The Witcher, various Star Trek, books etc), tell me what I’m missing by just skipping these and remembering the stuff I watched 15-20 years ago?
Heck, I even tried to watch the live action movies of Kenshin, and while the first was interesting enough, I was also kind of just like, oh yea - this scene now. And never watched the rest because I know the story.
OTOH, I recall these being enjoyable enough that I watched Trigun and Kenshin several times, bought the translated light novels for Spice and Wolf (though I did peter out around book 11).
I can’t speak of the other remakes and animes. As a hardcore sci-fi fan and fan of the original Trigun, the new Trigun Stampede is an amazing experience. Not only does it provide so much lore and world building as a prequel to the original anime, it’s also just a really different take to the original Trigun. The story is more bleak and darker, the characters feel so much more realistic, and the whole thing really takes time to flesh out how they became the way they are. It’s an amazing experience and it’s quite clear from the interviews of the team (particularly the Trash Taste episode with the producer) showed that they really put a lot of care and attention to the world before making this remake. I completely believe that this is how remakes should be done and how they can contribute to an already existing material.