ABSTRACT
The BBC television series Life on Mars (2006) is enjoying a prolific afterlife in the form of transcultural remakes in various national contexts: the US, Spain, Russia, the Czech Republic, and South Korea. This geographical mobility provides an apt opportunity to explore the potential for cultural translation and the transnational mobility of media content. Its propensity to be adapted in different national contexts reveals the flexibility and mobility of its narrative form, themes, and characters, which turned out to be translatable and relatable to non-British viewers. This chapter focuses on the Korean remake of the BBC series La-i-peu on Ma-seu (Life on Mars, 2018) to examine how it fits into the Korean media industry’s endeavors to diversify local TV content and to engage in global media flows. I consider similarities and differences between the BBC source material and the Korean remake set in 1988, but my main purpose is not to conduct a comparative analysis between the two. Rather, I focus on the Korean remake to study its position within the local media context and in global and regional media networks. I analyse the Korean remake as a local node in a globally connected network of intersecting media flows and trends. I also discuss the role of popular culture and media to emphasise the mediated connection between past and present. This chapter examines this transcultural remake as a prime example of media content that exhibits both cultural specificity and transnational legibility.
