Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots

Multiplicities in Film and Television

Amanda Ann Klein, R. Barton Palmer

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781477308172
  9781477309001
• eBook ISBN:
  9781477308196
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture.

The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Kissing Cycle, Mashers, and (White) Women in the American City
• 3. Descended from Hercules: Masculine Anxiety in the Peplum
• 4. The American Postwar Semidocumentary Cycle: Factual Dramatizations
• 5. Cycle Consciousness and the White Audience in Black Film Writing: The 1949–1950 “Race Problem” Cycle and the African American Press
• 6. Vicious Cycle: Jaws and Revenge-of-Nature Films of the 1970s
• 7. Familiar Otherness: On the Contemporary Cross-Cultural Remake
• 8. Anime’s Dangerous Innocents: Millennial Anxieties, Gender Crises, and the Shōjo Body as a Weapon
• 9. It’s Only a Film, Isn’t It? Policy Paranoia Thrillers of the War on Terror
• 10. Doing Dumbledore: Actor-Character Bonding and Accretionary Performance
• 11. A Lagosian Lady Gaga: Cross-Cultural Identification in Nollywood’s Anti-Biopic Cycle
• 12. Re-solving Crimes: A Cycle of TV Detective Partnerships
• 13. Smart TV: Showtime’s “Bad Mommies” Cycle
• 14. My Generation(s): Cycles, Branding, and Renewal in E4’s Skins
• 15. Extended Attractions: Recut Trailers, Film Promotion, and Audience Desire
• 16. Retro-Remaking: The 1980s Film Cycle in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
• 17. I Can’t Lead This Vacation Anymore: Mumblecore’s American Man
• 18. Serialized Killers: Prebooting Horror in Bates Motel and Hannibal
• List of Contributors
• Index