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What are some concepts/themes that wouldn't work too well anymore in TV and Film?


Thinking about the recent Charlie's Angels flop it occurred to me that when the original series came out it was somewhat radical or groundbreaking. Three attractive women being chosen to conduct special operations. Of course it helped that they were attractive but the show was fun.

This isn't a groundbreaking theme anymore. There are plenty of female cops, firefighters etc.

Another show Three's Company or the original British version being Man About the House. A single man living platonically with 2 women.

I'm not sure there would be anything noteworthy about that anymore to warrant a show.

Any other themes or topics that you don't think would work anymore?

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Not really a theme but one weird relic of the past is the man grabbing the woman's hand when they are fleeing from danger...that doesn't make anyone faster, in fact I'd bet it would slow them down

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There was a show called "Paranormal Lockdown" a ghost hunting show where they try and find evidence of ghosts. Anyway, it was pretty average. They did an episode where they spend some time walking around outside the place which is in a rural area. The team is made up of a man and a woman, they hear coyotes in the distance and the man just takes off! Leaves her for dead. Hilarious!

It probably would slow people down but then in those times the man was bound by a sense of honour and if he didn't make some attempt to keep the woman safe it would not go down well.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb7abpgwkiE

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That looks rather amusing. I was hoping he would let out a loud Homer scream as he ran though!

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Murder She Wrote. The show is too cosy and clean and the protaganist too old and unattractive.

It Happened One Night. It's a cute movie, but extremely old-fashioned.

Pillow Talk. With today's technology, the plot would be entirely different.

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You don't see much of older people at all in shows anymore. In True Blood most if not all of the older characters are gone by the second season from memory.

I agree with About One Night, not a big deal to hook up anymore so no need to try and attempt to salvage a relationship out of it in some quest to not appear slutty.

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“to try TO” “And” is a conjunction. “To” is part of a verb.

To be. To run. To grow. To learn.

“And” is not part of any verb, but it has been adopted by our lazy and dimwitted vernacular.

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"to try to attempt to" sounds wrong.

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Well consider what year it was made, 1934! This is one of my favorite all time films.

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You won't see an Archie Bunker character in a sitcom.

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Sad but true

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PC Police would never accept him these days.

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Surely not
A pitiful state of affairs we are in!

Archie WAS the punchline of every episode, his obstinate stupidity and ridiculous prejudices made him something special to behold...we laughed at Archie because I'd bet we all knew an Archie

All in the Family goes onto the shelf alongside Blazing Saddles and other great comedies they can't make anymore...We MUST protect the delicate after all:/

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In England there was a show called "Love Thy Neighbour" about a white couple (who are working class socialists) who have a black Jamaican couple move in next door. The slanging matches the two men would have at each other would make a SJW keel over now! "Nig Nog! Sambo!" "Honky" among many others.

The (not so odd) thing is they would go down to the pub and drink together. Gee, perhaps humour helps people cope with shit and men weren't such pansies back then?

In Australia we had "Kingswood Country" where one of the catchphrases of the main character was "Leave the money on the fridge wog!" when someone would grab one of his beers.

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Not the bloody Kingswood!!

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Would have loved to have heard Ted's opinion on Adam Goodes, his opinion on AFL is hilarious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhzUPxRMyPQ

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What about Eric Cartman in South Park?

South Park is a sitcom still on the air and I recall the shows creators saying they based Cartman on Archie Bunker, which makes sense what with all the antisemitic and racist views that character has lol.

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Computer going berserk and decide to kill all human.

When they made 2001: A Space Odyssey, computers and A.I. were not well understood by the masses. And they were big box machines with blinking lights that look imposing and somewhat creepy.

Today people bring very advanced computers everyday in their pockets. The idea that a box of electronics suddenly comes alive and starting killing people isn't convincing enough now.

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Let's invest heavily in Skynet and see if we live long enough to collect

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Same with Wargames a defence computer being unintentionally hacked by a teenager on a home computer via modem and Electric Dreams about a computer doing things that only now computers are just starting to do all because it's owner spills some coke over it.

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both of those films kick ass!
and have aged really well.
obviously we dont use modems etc , but gloss over things like that and the sories are probly moree relevent than ever - with ai and dat shit goin on

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I do love both those films but I do wonder if they could be done now. I think they would have to be made a lot more plausible perhaps. And that is another problem, people expect films to be very realistic now or very unrealistic, not much room in between.

The 80's was also just a fun decade which helped make those films awesome.

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You couldn't be more wrong. The danger of AI is more real today than ever before. Did you never hear what experts like Elon Musk have to say on the subject? Besides there has been plenty of films recently about AI going rogue, which directly refutes your argument.

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I know. I said it's just not convincing enough. What works on movies doesn't always correlate to real world. Superheroes are obviously not real, but it works for movies.

Give me your plenty of recent succesful movies about computer going rogue and killing people. Terminator didn't count, it's an old franchise and the recent ones are flops.

People nowadays are just TOO accustomed to computers to the point of imagining them to go berserk feels... old fashioned thinking. An ok boomer moment. Why would they want to annihilate humanity, they're just phones, dad.

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Don't you understand the concept of AI? Your smartphone, despite having "smart" in its name isn't really smart. HAL9000, Skynet, etc. are super advanced systems that surpassed human intelligence in every way, even arguably, in some cases gained self-awareness.

To name some recent films about AI:
Terminator movies - yes, I said it because they were flops due to 100 different reasons but the concept of killing machines isn't one of them.

Ex Machina

Alien Covenant featured an android going rogue

I Am Your Mother, didn't see it but trailer implies robot is the villain

Westworld (TV show)

Age of Ultron

Your problem is that you don't seem to understand what makes the concept scary. It's not "holly molly my darn TV is becoming alive" irrational fear of tech that maybe existed until the 90s. It's the potential threat of a machine posessing superior intelligence but no feelings or morals and it being in charge of nuclear armament like Skynet for example. There's also the creepy factor, the uncanny valley of robots imitating and manipulating humans.
Stuff like that doesn't get old.

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HAL9000, Skynet, etc. are fictional. Real AI are Siri, OK Google, Alexa, etc. That's the state of AI today. Far far far away from going berserk and killing people. The idea that it will in the near future is wishful thinking at best and laughable at worst.

I don't know how AI will be in hundreds of years in the future, it probably will annihilate human, but not now or in the near future like what's depicted in the movies. HAL9000 was supposed to be in the year 2001 lol. That's almost two decades ago. Filmmakers were just too optimistic with their guesstimation.

Ex Machina, too, was a flop.

Alien Covenant is about aliens.

Age of Ultron is a superhero movie. And it's one of the worst. But yeah it's financially succesful I'll give you that. However Avengers movies are succesful because they are Avengers movie, whatever the villain is. It could have the most ridiculous and illogical story and would still break box office records.

Anyway, like I said... It's not about that AI will or won't go rogue and kill people. It's about that this very premise is old fashioned and not going to sell a movie today unlike in the old times when computers are huge and blinking and chirping and mysterious.

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I agree with actionkamen, maybe because I've thought this very same thing while watching various rogue A.I films.

Technology is so ingrained into our everyday lives, I can't see humans and A.I not working together even if the latter did come to life. And I don't think A.I going rogue would equate to A.I killing humans or forming some kind of anti-human vigilante group - to my mind, A.I going rogue would look a lot different to how we imagine it now.

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The OP didn't even mention anything about AI. It's was me, Mario!

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Any instances where a person of one ethnicity is trying to pass themselves off as someone from another.

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Soul Man (86)...certainly not getting a reboot lol

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White Chicks
Tropic Thunder

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White Chicks was unwatchable imo, I could not finish it

Tropic Thunder...Great movie, it's going to be watched by people with a sense of humor in 30 years...I suspect those will be rare souls

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No way could you do Tropic Thunder anymore that was made just on the cusp of SJW full blown madness. White Chicks was terrible but I reckon they could still make it now.

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I remember Soul Man being controversial for '86 as well, now it would spark riots.

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We live in the land of the sensitive...try not to step on toes or You'll be front page news tomorrow!

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There is a movie “Black Like Me” from 1961 where James Whitmore plays a real life white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who disguises himself as a black man in the South to see what life was like. In the movie Whitmore wears makeup so it is obvious but the real journalist actually darkened his skin by taking large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug methoxsalen, and spending up to 15 hours daily under an ultraviolet lamps.

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I mentioned this movie recently in another thread and read the book as a teenager. I remember it as being very controversial and maybe even having been banned at one time.

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Yeah, like a white guy playing an Indian guy from South Asia. They did that in "Short Circuit."

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They also did Hawaiian Chinese as a South Asian in The Jungle Book live action.

Disney was like, meh, Asians look the same anyway.

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I'm surprised I haven't seen another Blazing Saddles reference by now.

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I had not read this but I just made a Blazing Saddles reference...that classic would never be green-lit today

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Home Alone type situations

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Forgetting to take your kid on vacation = Negligent parents? Of course it is, but in context of the movie it was meant to be a comedy which I don't think snowflakes would realize now. And I'm not even a fan of the film.

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More the not being able to contact him situation I was meaning. He'd be all over Twitter and Facebook these days.

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True. Technology has made a lot of concepts impossible if set in our era.

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You won't see movies like Gandhi or Ben Hur with a large number of extras anymore because of CGI.

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Speaking of which I thought the battle scenes both on ground and in space in the Star Wars prequels were just over the top. The size of the armies just looked like a mess and I was surprised there weren't more collisions in the space battles.

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Space battles are over the top by premise. Space is basically very very vast emptiness.

A space battle would be fought using extreme long range weapons only. It's like naval warfare but one ship in USA and the other in China.

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True instead even in the original Star Wars film we get a WW2 dogfight scenario. Close in and blast them.

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