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REMAKE ATTEMPT: 2008:
Back in 2008 before he had died, Cannell announced it was being made into a movie. Financial backing wasn't there and it never happened. Eric Christian Olsen had been contracted to play Ralph Hinkley. Stephen Herek was going to direct it (what a missed chance -- David Newman could have been the composer!). The script for this version may have been by Paul Hernandez (the article I read was confusingly written, so I am not sure).
Cannell died in 2010, a few short months after Robert Culp died (he played Bill Maxwell).
Cannell said that in the end when the new Ralph faces off against a powerful evil and is out-matched and about to be killed off, he's rescued by the combined efforts of other red-suited heroes, that in this remake, the aliens gave a redsuit to other people in other countries, and in this movie idea the Chinese and Russian counterparts come to his rescue. Thank goodness this never happened. The idea there is back-up and the lead is never really in danger is just silly. And the idea itself requires a Twilight Zone level suspension of disbelief that I can't muster; counterparts in authoritarian Communists regimes like China and Russian, would be spending all their time just fighting their own governments. The idea stinks.
REMAKE ATTEMPT: 2014:
In 2014 FOX announced Phil Lord and Chris Miller would created a remake. Presumably one of them would direct.
Who might have scored it? At the time, their composer of choice was Mark Mothersbaugh.
REMAKE ATTEMPT: 2015:
In 2015 FOX stuck with Lord and Miller and a new script was created. This time Rick Famuyiwa was slated to direct (at the time, he had no composer of choice, but had worked twice with Robert Hurst, and in a freaky coincidence, once with the Transcenders -- a name which will pop up again further below).
Now, information is conflicting; some reports say these were to be hour-long pilots, others say feature films. As best I can tell, nothing was filmed.
If Lord and Miller were that easy to get a hold of, I'd ask them myself, but alas...
FOX lost the rights, despite saying they were seriously trying to resuscitate the property.
2018 REMAKE PILOT:
In 2017 ABC acquired the rights and shot a pilot in short order for 2018. Starring Hannah Simone, reports of the script and pilot indicate it was a complete misfire; re-visioned as a half-hour (twenty-two minutes minus commercials) single-cam' comedy, it wisely failed. Apparently ABC and the writers simply didn't "get it".
The score to the pilot was composed by the Transcenders (Brian Lapin, Terence Yoshiaki and Mike Fratantuno). There is no load of the pilot online I could find (not even clips; hell, I couldn't even find images), otherwise I'd have covered it for the hell of it. There is no promo or bootleg of the score that I am aware of. The composer's website has no cues (hell, there is just a home page with a link to IMDb). I have no idea if the theme song or any of the Post/Carpenter themes are used. The Transcenders Tweeted about it, having had a good time and they thought the pilot was funny. Apparently Simone liked their work, as they have scored/are scoring an upcoming untitled project starring her.
NOTE:
The pilot had a tenuous connection to the original series at best. None of the leads had the same name, there was no school teacher or F.B.I. agent -- the only thing it had in common was aliens giving a supersuit to somebody with an identical design. Why they paid for the rights when they ended up making a pilot that barely has anything to do with the original series instead of just coming up with an original idea, is beyond me. Best I can guess is name-nostalgia, trying to draw in fans with the title "Greatest American Hero".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120841/fullcredits
WHERE IT STANDS AS OF 2021:
In early 2020, Shout! Factory got the rights to the series as well as other Cannell series. They've started making their own projects, including a TV series coming called "The Gambler, based off the Kenny Rogers films which they got the rights to. One can only assume that while no announcement has been made, they are probably very interested in the properties they paid for the rights to and will undoubtedly try to revive this show in some form.
It's a foregone conclusion that if any news is made, I will necromance the thread to give a concise update.
Now, you'd think that would be it, but tomorrow, there's still one more thing to bring up -- and you'd never suspect it unless you already knew about it.
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YOUTUBE MINI-SODES:
Goodness gracious, nerds have a lot of free time. So much so one of them made a series of shorts, in their own attempt to keep the idea alive:
Episode 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQEv7KHsRMA
There are six episodes and one seventh video of outtakes. They keep the song from the original series. The guy who plays Ralph, looks surprisingly like Ralph Hinkley. The guy playing Bill, does not. The girl playing Pam is a middle ground in the look-alike contest. And it appears they are ignoring Holly from the 1986 reboot pilot.
Tomorrow I'll post the links to other threads and additional composers section like I usually do, in one last attempt to keep the thread up to get people's attention about the scoring. After that, I got nothing else to add.
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