ABSTRACT
The years around the millennium’s turn were marked in popular culture by a surge in remaking, rethinking, reviving, and revisioning. Popular television shows of previous decades became films, such as The Addams Family (1991), The Brady Bunch (1995), Lost in Space (1998), Miami Vice (2006), and The A-Team (2010); The X-Files (1993–2002) even made a feature film between the fifth and sixth seasons (1998). Popular animated films became Broadway musicals, such as Beauty and the Beast (film 1991, stage 1994), and The Lion King (1994, 1997). Superheroes who had a long history in comics, television, and films experienced a renaissance. Superman returned, both on the small screen in The New Adventures of Lois and Clark (1993–1997) and Smallville (2001–2010) and at the movie theatre (Superman Returns, 2006). Batman was reimagined at least twice (by Tim Burton in 1989, Christopher Nolan in the 2005 version, and arguably Joel Schumacher in 1995’s Batman Forever, which was nominally part of Burton’s cinematic universe). Even a show with a relatively ignominious history could be reborn: 1978’s campy fantasy quest Battlestar Galactica was revisioned as a political allegory of religious/ethnic conflict, genocide, and displacement in 2003, first as a miniseries and then as a continuing serial (2004–2009). This last was part of a trend in American television also emerging from the ensemble dramas and nighttime soap operas of the 1980s: the growing serialization of series, which was a feature particularly represented in fantasy and science-fiction series with large-scale narrative arcs such as Babylon 5, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Lost.
