The common theme in today’s entertainment has been remakes, reimagines, and reboots. From a full female casted Ghostbusters in 2016 to the coming summer remake of Baywatch with Zac Efron and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – this day and age, nostalgia proves to bring people to TV screens and box offices.
Ultimately, there are some movies that, I believe, should not be remade because the first was so well-received and successful – so much to the point that it considerably defined an entire era.
Most recently ABC decided to make a musical special of Dirty Dancing with Abigail Breslin as “Baby” and Colt Prattes as (the legendary) “Johnny Castle.”
Due to the fact that I am a huge Dirty Dancing fan, and have been ever since my sister showed me the movie when I was a child, this special automatically made me nervous.
In my eyes, the 1987 movie was created perfectly. Between the original cast that included Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayzee as the famous couple, the classic soundtrack, and the general storyline, the movie had no flaws in my eyes. Yes, this could mean that I am obsessed, but the main point is that Dirty Dancing is a classic, and it’s really difficult to recreate gracefully.
To begin, the one issue I had with the reimagined version was the fact that they changed the ending. I’m completely okay with using creative freedom and expression to differentiate the original from the remake, but in this case, the ending was not satisfying and it did not make sense with plot in general.
I never saw Johnny Castle choreographing a Broadway show – in my mind, he’s way too rebellious and talented for something that mainstream. Also, this could just be me being a hopeless romantic, but I thought that it was insinuated that Baby and Johnny ended up together. In general, that’s an assumption on my part, but I think every fan thinks that and really expected the remake to follow through with the original ending.
Another issue I had was with the musical interpretation of Dirty Dancing. As I said before, the soundtrack is BY FAR one of the most loved qualities of the original and to add modernized qualities to the songs didn’t seem right. One song specifically hit me hard, and that was the recreation of Swayzee’s “She’s Like the Wind.” It was turned into a duet – which wasn’t a terrible idea, but it wasn’t even comparable to the original version, which is disappointing and probably made Swayzee roll in his grave a little bit.
Although I found a lot of issues with this movie event, one thing I actually didn’t mind was some of the casting, especially Nicole Scherzinger as “Penny.” I think Scherzinger is so talented and her acting as one of the main, troubled characters while doing it justice was pretty remarkable.
Overall, the Dirty Dancing remake was a disappointment and although society is going through a phase of nostalgia based creations recently, some classics shouldn’t be remade.
