A good idea at the time? Eric Johnson in Flash Gordon. Photograph: Jeff Weddell
If you're of a perverse and masochistic temperament, you may wish to spend an hour you'll never get back by heading over to the Sci Fi Channel's website, where you can watch the first episode of their latest "re-imagining" of Flash Gordon, which premieres on Monday.
It's difficult to know where to begin with the new Flash Gordon, although the acting, the scripts and the direction are all handy jumping-off points. Perhaps with the art direction, which seems to take its cue from a 1980s computer game or teen drama Saved by the Bell. Or with the fact that, since budgetary restraints put paid to any chance of starships or space battles, transport between Earth and the planet Mongo (Mongo!) takes place through cost-cutting wormholes. Or with the only obvious difference between Earth and Mongo being that the same part of Vancouver takes on an orange tint. And word is that beyond episode one, things become much, much worse.
Flash Gordon must have seemed such a good idea after Battlestar Galactica, which set the gold standard not just for sci-fi but for drama in general. BSG, however, had the benefit of a visionary writing team, who noticed a modern-day resonance in that dusty old story of the consequences of military genocide.
A more imaginative Flash Gordon team might have found an allegorical spine in a story about a despotic leader (Ming the Merciless) controlling a society's water supply for political leverage, but no. It's just a dim dimension-hopping boy and his prickly ex-girlfriend. And slave women in gowns. It's convincing neither as a comic-book pastiche nor as an engaging stand-alone story.
It's becoming a worrying trend. Post-BSG, cult producers are returning to iconic franchises and rebooting them with little care. Flash Gordon is a far lower-profile disaster than Bionic Woman, which should have been brilliant but was undone by appalling scripts and a roaring identity crisis.
Is it time to call time on these re-imaginings? There are reboots of Knight Rider and The Wizard of Oz in the offing, and plenty more to come. Heroes has proved that people can and will take to new ideas and formats. Why can't we have more of those?
