Scrooged and Modernizing a Classic
The moral case for a modern classic at Christmas.
Author’s Note: If you’d like to have a little extra Christmas cheer, check out the Christmas Issue of Buckethead that got released today.
It's really hard to improve on a classic.
There's a reason why it's a classic. Largely because there's very little on which to improve about it. People go back to it in order to remember what they love about the story and the different aspects of the story which they might not have noticed the first time. This becomes like a tradition that you return to on a regular basis. Either on your own or with friends and family. Creating this tradition is part of what makes it a classic for you and the people around you. So finding anything to improve upon and change will often cause people to get angry or frustrated that someone tried to change what they love about the classic which means so much to them.
You really have to do something incredible to either improve or replace what is great about the old to make it new again. Maybe the best thing you can do in order to get people to create a new tradition in a modern way is to love the original so much that you are very dedicated to making sure that the core remains the same. Then it's just about giving it the classic feel which everyone has for the original. Hopefully in doing so you integrate the reality of the modern into the original. If it's set in the far past, you give the world the technology of the day and find a way to make it important to the story. As a result, you feel like it is more relatable to who people are at the time.
Balancing these parts of things isn't easy by any means. Almost no one can really do it, which is part of the reason why so many attempts end up not working out. When it does finally work out though, it's very hard to argue about what's so great. Enough that people look back on it and want to make it a whole new tradition for not only them but for their children and grandchildren to come.
Scrooged really embraces this fact about itself. Frank Cross, as played brilliantly by Bill Murray, is a modern day Scrooge. He's as selfish and mean to the people around him as the traditional Ebenezer Scrooge. He couldn't care less about what other people want, focusing more on his own needs and desires to the point that his employees hate him. The whole thing goes as far as he's well aware of the story of A Christmas Carol and wants to share it with as wide an audience as possible. Yet he can't see how much his own life mirrors that of Scrooge himself. He's too wrapped up in himself to learn the important lessons it has for people about the way he lives his life.
That is until he ends up becoming the subject of A Christmas Carol himself. Yet because he knows the story and the lesson, you can't just show him the error of his ways how Scrooge experienced it. There has to be something more to it and push things further than they ever were before.
Which is what makes it a modern classic.
Do yourself a favour and explore the power of modernizing a classic by checking out Scrooged as soon as you can.
"You really have to do something incredible to either improve or replace what is great about the old to make it new again."
Exactly. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were based on Bocaccio's Decameron in format, and Shakespeare used existing sources as the source of some of his plays. And I do it often with the animation I know and love...