What's next? Smurfs: the Movie?

Little by little, Hollywood is destroying my childhood.
Not all of it, obviously. So far as I know no producer has proposed a sitcom exploring my brief careers in 4-H or Cub Scouts. And there will probably never be an inspirational sports movie about the time my indoor soccer team won its league championship (Although there totally should be; we were awesome!).
No, mostly our nation’s entertainment industry has limited itself to producing mildly soul-killing updates on the television shows and movies that brought me so much joy when I was younger.
This isn't a new trend, I realize, but it seems to be picking up speed. Writers and producers don't have time to wait for their audience to actually become nostalgic about something. They have to create the nostalgia out of bailing wire, papier mache and the tears of tiny infants.
It was just a few years ago, remember, that the viewing public was subjected to remakes of before-my-time material like The Mod Squad, The Avengers and Bewitched. And while I'm not sure it's fair to say anyone was truly nostalgic for a show about the hilarious consequences of a human marrying a witch, at least enough time had passed that it was possible.
Now, the window between original and remake keeps shrinking. The past 12 months alone has brought newfangled versions of at least four television programs I enjoyed in my youth which, I swear, wasn’t all that long ago.
The adaptations met with varying levels of success. Transformers, which took its inspiration from a series of half-hour commercials for a line of toy robots, was big and stupid but ultimately kind of fun. I could have done without the scene where a robot relieved itself, but I’m willing to let it go.
I didn’t see either Underdog, about a super-powered canine, or The Chipmunks, but I saw trailers for both and feel confident when I say the would have made me weep for the lost innocence of youth and the death of creativity. Or maybe they just would have made me nauseous.
The movies share some characteristics. Both bring live action into what was once entirely a cartoon world, and both feature Jason Lee, who seemed pretty cool back when he was making movies like Mallrats and Chasing Amy but who now apparently sees nothing wrong with scenes in which he eats chipmunk poop.
I don’t know what the deal is with remakes and bodily function-related humor, but it makes me really nervous about any potential MacGuyver remakes.
Just a few weeks ago, NBC relaunched American Gladiators, the long lost and little mourned competition in which ordinary folks went up against steroid-crazed “Gladiators” with names like Thunder and Tower and Bulkyguy in events that involved whacking each other with padded sticks and rolling around in oversized metal balls. Watching the remake, which somehow managed to bump the crazy level of the gladiators up about three notches and which features Hulk Hogan and Mohammed Ali’s daughter as hosts, I had a hard time remembering what I ever found appealing about the original.
There are more remakes coming, too. A live-action version of G.I. Joe, perhaps the finest cartoon of my childhood, is due soon. So is a remake of Knight Rider, which promises to be awful, but in a completely different way than the David Hasselhoff-filled original.
I imagine the trend will only pick up steam. The window between original and remake will only get shorter.
I, for one, can’t wait for the theatrical release of Saved by the Bell: The Movie.