Rebooting old cartoons/shows is very popular these days, cashing in on people's nostalgia. Even this very forum is about a reboot of an old cartoon. I see it as a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a built-in audience of people's nostalgia, and a chance to bring an IP to a new generation. On the other, people who grew up with the show/cartoon often complain about how different the reboot is from the original. What do you think? Is it good, or should they focus on making new ideas?
If done right, I see it as a really good idea! It gives old but popular shows a chance to shine again, while the less popular ones get to start over and show a new front to the audience. So yeah, good, but only if done properly!
If it's done well, you can end up with something as good as, or even better than, the original. Scooby Doo Mystery Inc. and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are two examples of reboots done right. When they're done wrong, however...
Reboots can be meh. One's opinion of a reboot would really have a lot to do with one's opinion of the original show. Some shows go through some decent reboots; look at MLP, I think most of us would say it's only gotten better. On the other hand, I really don't care much for the reboots of Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (shows whose first series started around the same time and who have had a similar number of iterations), but that might have something to do with the fact that I wasn't a huge fan of those shows to begin with. Generally speaking, I would rather see a reboot done if I think it can bring a whole new perspective to the work in question; for example, you can watch Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoped The Lord of the Rings, and you can watch Peter Jackson's live-action The Lord of the Rings trilogy and get completely different interpretations of the source text out of both of those; characters, concepts and locations look, sound and feel different. In spite of the fact that neither of those is a reboot, the comparison stands; reboots should be like that. Otherwise, I'd rather just re-watch the old stuff. If you think about it, that's kind of a funny thing to say; it's not as if they'd be good if they were done "improperly."
I was a huge fan of The X Files when it first aired. They're bringing it back with the original cast members-it's got me interested again. The other one is the whole Star Wars thing-I was 7 years old in 1977 when the original came out, and the magic's still there for me. I know the cast are not going to look anything like they did in the first one, but the magic remains and I can't wait to see it. the new Star Trek movies included a lot of references that the old fanbase would instantly recognize-I think that there's value in including that instead of trying to re-build the whole thing from the ground up.
I realize that-however the point I was trying to make was that there have been other movies in the long stretch of time between ROTJ and now which haven't included any of the original cast. Although they were prequels, they included enough difference from the original 3 to make them unrecognizable to me-and hence I thought of those 3 as a reboot. This is the first time I've been interested in the series since I went to see The Phantom Menace and walked out half way through.
Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker and Anthony Daniels were all in the prequels. Their plot was made to be a lead-in to the original plot, and are all considered to be canon officially, regardless of what your personal head-canon is. There is a large difference between sequels/prequels and a reboot, almost enough that they're near opposites.
