Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about why Mockingbird Lane is the right way to do a reboot.

One final piece of unfinished business from last week's column (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Barnabas Collins Lives!") was a piece that appeared in the First Look section of the Summer Movie Preview special double issue of Entertainment Weekly.  Titled "NBC Revisits The Munsters" it focused on Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller's reboot of the 60's monster sitcom which has almost nothing to do with the 60's monster sitcom.  To begin within it's called Mockingbird Lane, and from the artist renderings of the costumes and The Munsters house (both of which kind of made it look more than a little like The Addams Family) it's apparent this version will not be a goofy sitcom.  Which is pretty much confirmed when Fuller is quoted as saying "We want this to be an American Harry Potter."

This is usually the point where I would ask in slightly exasperated seriousness, "What's the point of reviving a decades old franchise if you’re going to to change almost absolutely everything about it?"  But of course the origins of the project appear to have had nothing to do with The Munsters; apparently Bryan Fuller had a vague notion about doing a show about a family of monsters, Universal Studios just happened to already have such a franchise, so instead of starting from scratch why not put the two together?

Mockingbird Lane actually begins to make sense when you stop thinking of it as a Munsters reboot but rather as a stealth reboot of the Universal Monsters (which is why they're talking about making The Creature From The Black Langoon and the Invisible Man members of the family).  Like a lot of classic characters they've had a tough time adapting to today's audience (neither 2004's Van Helsing or the 2010 remake of The Wolfman exactly performed the way Universal Studios would have liked).  And while we (and by "we" I of course mean "me") don’t usually think of The Munsters being analogs of the classic monsters the series did feature a family with a 'Dracula,' 'Frankenstein' and 'Wolfman' (well, Wolfboy anyway) in it.

Purists may well be outraged but I can live with that because the older I get the smarter the Mockingbird Lane approach to reboots seems.  Because it's so difficult for a new version of something old to be true to the original material and appeal to a modern audience, though we do have a couple of recent examples that proves it’s possible.

I have to admit I was startled by just how good the recent Dynamite Entertainment's version of The Shadow by Garth Ennis and Aaron Campbell was.  Those familiar with the pulp hero (like me; I couldn’t help but hear Lamont Cranston's dialogue in the voice of Orson Wells) will be well pleased because all of the elements (the supporting players, the ring, the guns, the profile, slouch hat and cloak, etc.) are in place.  I assumed going in Ennis would be able to provide the proceedings with the necessary level of violence, but the remarkable thing is just how much restraint his Shadow shows.  That, and he finally reveals that The Shadow really does know what evil lurks in the hearts of man--and it's more than disturbing than you could imagine.

After the deaths of the comic strips Annie and Brenda Starr I once predicted (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Going and Coming") that Dick Tracy would most likely be the next one to go  but happily I was wrong.  In 2011 Tribune Media Services turned the strip over to writer Mike Curtis and artist Joe Staton who have done a great job of proving that there was nothing really wrong with the strip as is, it only needed talented caretakers to return it to its roots.  Okay, the continuities ("stories" for you non-comic strip fans) do seem a lot shorter than they used to be, which is no doubt to appeal to the short attention spans of today’s newspaper readers.  Otherwise it's business as usual for Detective Tracy and I couldn't be happier.

And course there’s IDW Publishing's Popeye, but I've already commented on that (see "Review: 'Popeye' #1").

I think what all of the above reboots have in common is they managed to suppress any impulse to unnecessarily update the original material.  Because once you start tweaking a franchise to make it "modern" and significantly different from older versions you might just end up with a Lone Ranger movie where Tonto wears a dead bird on his his head (see "Johnny Depp's Full Tonto Costume Revealed"),  I know I've joked about this before but I honestly believe that Depp's fetish for unusual hats has gotten way out of hand.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.