Movies: Flash Gordon Remake INC!!

Ah-ahhh! But why? Some things are just better left alone. Like spoiled pork, or anything with green stuff growing on it that isn't a plant.

But the scariest thing is that if you read a little ways down, there's the possibility of a "Red Dawn"!! Head for ze hills!

#1 FLASH, AHH-AHH, HE'LL SAVE EVERYONE OF US!

With Iron Man showing that a movie can prominently feature a man being propelled into the heavens on a rocket, and make a bajillion dollars, it's apparently okay again to show a man inside a rocket being propelled into the heavens as well. As the winners of a studio bidding war, Sony Pictures announced this week their plans to revive Flash Gordon as a feature film franchise, bringing back the football star who travels to the planet Mongo, and helps a variety of exotic races fight against the evil Ming the Merciless. Flash Gordon started off in the 1930s as the star of comic strips and a series of extremely popular serials (basically a movie broken up into parts, shown before other movies back then), and was then being remade as a flamboyantly campy Queen-soundtrack-driven adventure (and box office flop) in 1980.

This time around, Breck Eisner (director of Sahara; and son of Disney's famous former boss), who is also remaking The Creature from the Black Lagoon and George A. Romero's The Crazies, has been given the enviable challenge of bringing Flash's fantastic adventures to life. I'm not terribly excited by just how rampant the current remake trend is becoming, but Flash Gordon is definitely a pretty awesome candidate, I think. More interesting than Flash himself, I think, is the prospect of seeing Ming the Merciless return as a movie icon. Absence from popular culture for 25+ years has hurt his legacy a bit, but Ming easily deserves a place on any top 10 list of the most classic movie villains ever. "Pathetic Earthlings!"