The kids that grew up with Goosebumps (originally) are now adults, tho.
I liked it, but I’m not surprised.
I watched season 1. It was a direct young adult audience target. it was pop and pulp while taking it self seriously enough to be finished to the end.
I’m a bit of two minds on this.You shouldn’t try to change something to appeal to groups that weren’t fans before. Or you end up putting everyone off. But at the same time, the fans are adults now.
Yeah, if you want to lean on nostalgia by reviving an old intellectual property, you need it to be entertaining for all the reasons people originally liked it. That means appealing to the original fans, but as they are now.
I was too old for Goosebumps when the books were popular, but for me a good example was the Willow revival. Willow was like an off-brand Hobbit movie with a bit of claymation and body horror. The charm came from the contrast between the sincerity of Willow with the irreverence of Mad Martigan. The revival had none of the sincerity or charm, and tried really hard to modernize the vernacular because that’s how kids talk now. It alienated people who loved the original, and did nothing to appeal to new fans.
I wanted to like it. I wanted to introduce it to my kids. But I hated it and they would have hated it.
Yep Val brought a bit of charisma and irreverence to something that would have been a bit too dry and dense for many. He was always good as the rougish sort. Without him, even if they’d made no other changes. It would have been a hard sell.
Val was amazing, but the problem with the new series wasn’t the actors, it was the writing. It could have worked if they had better writers. In fact, I feel like you could tell when different writers and directors were responsible for the episodes or scenes. It was occasionally good, but the shitty parts ruined the show.
It didn’t help that bigots were predisposed to hate the diversity and LGBTQ+ inclusiveness. I’m not one to ever complain about a show being “woke,” but the terrible writing made it impossible to defend the choices made with the characters.
the show was awful overall but probably the best part was Amar Chadha-Patel’s character which was essentially the mad martigan replacement.
You really do need to consider the target audience… take the live action Cowboy Bebop for example.
“Lets just change a bunch of shit I’m sure middle-aged anime fans will be completely reasonable about this online.”
As a fan of the anime from from decades ago. If they’d just written their own thing entirely, that was a live action homage to bebop. I’d have been all over it. Their sin was doing already done bebop wrong. Other than that it was well shot, the actors did a decent job. In this case it was definitely the mangling of the storylines they shot themselves in the foot with.
I enjoyed it, I went in expecting hot garbage and I got “Westernised-Marvel Cowboy Bebop” it wasnt a 10/10 but it was fun and entertaining, even if I felt they did leave a fair bit on the table.
