Media Hijinks - Reboots, Geeky Shakespeare and Zombie Education

This week in Media Hijinks, I begin with news of yet another Hollywood reboot!  Yes, I know it’s surprising, but they never seem to run out of old ideas to pillage, and this time around the victim is Stargate.  Even though they already made a ton of TV material for this old flick, the original creator, Ronald Emmerich, wishes to fulfill his initial vision of having the story be a trilogy.  So we should expect not only a Stargate reboot, but a minimum of three movies.  And probably a bunch of TV stuff afterwards, if history repeats itself.

Second up, news on that sequel that everyone has been holding their breath about… yes, they are working on a second

21 Jump Street

film.  This one, in fact, will up the ante and be called

22 Jump Street

.  Wow, I really can’t believe they’re using that name.  Regardless of creative issues, the new

Jump Street

will take the too-old high school cops and put them into college, where their age will at least be somewhat believable.  If only there were some way to stop this madness altogether…

Third up, a strange bit of news that may have geeks salivating.  A modernized adaptation is being made of the classic Shakespeare play, Macbeth.  And who shall be starring in this movie, you ask?  Well, it’s an all-star cast of geeks, including Sean Bean (AKA Boromir) as Macbeth, Charles Dance (AKA Tywin Lannister) as Duncan and Rupert Grint (AKA Ron Weasley) in another role.  There’s also some less-known geeky players, but those are the big three.  I predict that even if this movie is horrible, there will still be a long line of geeks waiting to buy tickets to see this epic combination of geek talent.

And finally, something even stranger.  UC Irvine will be teaching an online course centered around The Walking Dead.  Titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons From AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’”, it will be a cross-disciplinary course that covers such things as the science behind a potential zombie virus, how something like nutrition (or lack thereof) affects human behavior and the processes involved in rebuilding a post-apocalyptic society.  Better yet, the class is a MOOC (or massive open online course), which means that anyone, anywhere can take it.  Naturally, they’re expecting quite a few enrollees for the class - hundreds of thousands, in fact.

That’s it for now.  Until next week, please refrain from being too mean to Ben Affleck.

Photo Credits -

Walking Dead zombie courtesy of collider.com