TV, Music & Fashion That Was Heaps Better The Second Time Around

Like a pizza reheated and eaten for breakfast the next morning, some things are better the second time around. A remake, reinvention or comeback can do wonders for a TV show, movie, song or, um, even a pair of jeans.

Here are a few pop-cultural artefacts that prove that not everything is nailed on the first attempt.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In 1992, a horror-comedy flick called Buffy The Vampire Slayer hit cinema screens and promptly sunk like a rock. Critics weren’t impressed, the film only did okay-ish at the box office and, for a time, it seemed like we’d seen the last of that stake-wielding high-school superhero. Then, five years later, a writer called Joss Whedon stepped up and rebooted the concept for TV.

Buffy had always been his baby. Whedon actually wrote the script for the original movie and had an advisory role early in the production, but quit when he didn’t like the direction the film was taking. Film executives had removed many of his jokes and the “darker” elements of the script – they wanted something light and fun, he wanted something clever and sarcastic.

One telling of the story was forgotten as soon as it arrived, the other went on to become one of the best-loved TV shows of all time.

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A Star is Born

There are lots of reasons why 2018’s remake of A Star Is Born tops the two versions that came before it, but most of it is down to chemistry. Lady Gaga (sorry, Stefani Germanotta) and Bradley Cooper sizzle through this story’s third iteration, making their tragic love story look so damn real it’s hard not to believe the rumours.

I mean…

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Carly Rae Jepsen’s career

Carly Rae Jepsen’s second album was… fine. It was run-of-the-mill, Top 40 pop that gave her one very big platinum record in ‘Call Me Maybe’ and then mostly disappeared off the charts.

Then a few years later, once her brief moment in the sun seemed to have passed, Carly Rae returned with Emotion and found herself transformed from a dorky one-hit-wonder into a music industry darling adored by Pitchfork and everyone on Twitter. ‘Call Me Maybe’ was ubiquitous, but Emotion will go down as one of the greatest pop albums of all time.

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The Song ‘Torn’

Some news that may shock and upset you: ‘Torn’ is a cover. Natalie Imbruglia did not actually lie bound and broken on the floor, all out of faith, after a break-up. She was not the first person to record the song — hell, she wasn’t even the second.

Australia’s perfect pop song was actually the work of a Danish singer called Lis Sørensen, who released the song under the name ‘Brændt’ (which means “burnt”) in 1993. Then, a rock band called Ednaswap covered and renamed the track in 1995, before Imbruglia finally made it in a hit in 1997.

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Queer Eye

The old Queer Eye: fabulous, but also a bit mean, heavy handed with the stereotypes, blindingly white and cis. The new Queer Eye: still fabulous, nicer, much more inclusive, a profound deconstruction of toxic masculinity, has JVN in the cast. No contest.

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Mom Jeans

For most of their time on earth, those sky-high, slightly baggy, almost universally unflattering pants known as “mom jeans” were the subject of ridicule. The youth spurned them, SNL lampooned them and, true to their nickname, by the late-‘90s suburban women of a certain age were the only ones left with a pair in their wardrobe.

But then, sometime around 2015, the denim style nobody was rooting for came back to rehabilitate its image. Mom jeans returned a little sleeker, a little slimmer, and a whole lot trendier than they’d ever been before. First, they appeared on the racks of American Apparel (RIP), then trickled down to Topshop and Kendall Jenner, ready to assume their true destiny: the clothing choice of people tall and skinny enough to look good in anything.

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IT (And Basically All Other Horror Movies)

Old horror movies, man. The posters were cool but most of the actual films just weren’t any good. Everything was grainy and low-res, special effects didn’t really exist yet and nothing was actually scary, just gratuitously violent or really cheesy. A lot of good story ideas got wasted on an era (the ‘80s, mostly) that didn’t have the technical skills to pull off a good fright.

That’s why I’m very here for Hollywood remaking basically every slasher flick released before 1995. The Hills Have Eyes, Pet Semetary, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Last House on the Left (two of those even saw Wes Craven remake his own movies) have all been given a fresh coat of paint recently, but the best horror remake of all is the IT, the adaptation of Stephen King’s killer clown novel that first came out almost three decades ago.

Because, really, the original clown just was not scary.

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(Lead image: A Star Is Born / Warner Bros. Pictures)