Wolf Gnards

Alan writes:

Dear Wolf Gnards,
I began to think about things in movies that happen that we're supposed to just ignore.
Examples I can show are in the new terrible vampire movie that has raged across America (I shan't utter its name), one of the new red headed evil vampire's returns somewhere to do something that I didn't care about but amazingly she was played by a different actress. I used to wonder at what time did she have her full face transplant and why wasn't it mentioned in the movie?

Yes, yes, we mustn’t mention vampire movies by name unless they involve monsters and/or squads. The problem is full face transplants are usually pretty hard to work into a script (though not impossible... God bless you, Mr. Travolta).  It happens a lot more in sitcoms: Rosanne's two Beckys or the ever classic Darrin/Darrin debacle of Bewitched. I always tend to think of it in studio terms, meaning there must be some sort of formula that decides whether you replace the actor or simply kill them off. The way I see it is if the actor is not particularly iconic in the role, but the role is important to the show, you replace them.  If the actor is iconic, but unimportant then you kill.

Let's take a look at Valerie's Family. The star of the show was Valerie Harper, the show was created for Valerie Harper, and obviously named after her as well. The show was a hit, however, it had a new star: young Jason Bateman. And the producers wanted two things: more Bateman and more slapstick; two things Valerie Harper was not a fan of. Valerie being both iconic (the show was named after her) and unimportant (The Bateman Returns), they killed her off before season three and then shortly thereafter renamed the show, The Hogan Family.

The Dick York/ Dick Sargent switcheroo demonstrates the other way around. Samantha's mortal husband was extremely important to the premise of the show, while the actual actor playing Darrin was actually not particularly important. The great thing about Bewitched was that Dick York and Dick Sargent were similar enough, bland enough, and both named Dick enough that a lot of people didn't even notice the switch. Even less important characters can usually be written off with the least amount of explanation such as Chuck on Happy Days or Judy on Family Matters. So, Becky on Rosanne could probably have just never been talked about again without having to even switch the character out.

Today's film and TV producers use a simple spreadsheet to make these sort of decisions...

But Alan has a better explanation.

It's all about alternate dimensions.

When we move from one movie to the next, were not necessarily looking at the exact reality as before.  So we, the audience are disengaged viewers, so much so that we are not looking at just one world, but multiple ones.

In their world in That Vampire movie, the red headed bad girl always looked like that, it's just to us, the viewer that she appears any different.

Soap Operas actually replace a lot of actors with an announcer saying something like “The part of Brock Handsomeman will now be played by Sir Richard Grieco.” It might be nice in a movie if there was a similar announcement, “You are now entering a dimension where James Rhodes is less like that pimp from Hustle & Flow and more like that dude from Ocean's Eleven. No, not Brad Pitt, the other guy, the one who's specifically not Matt Damon, the 'black' dude. He was also in Swordfish... not Hugh Jackman. Oh, I should have just said Hotel Rwanda.”

The alternate dimension theory though might work best with director's like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who are actively trying to alter your childhood memories. These guys are not just changing actors but re-editing their movies until it becomes impossible to ever see it the way you remembered it. Like when Lucas put Ian McDiarmid in The Empire Strikes Back. This is interesting because I never had any problem with the original continuity error, and I hate that he went back and corrected it. That's a true alternate universe because McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine now exists in the movie he wasn't in to begin with.

Though the only problem with this sort of universe altering is they make the original film universe impossible to get a hold of. This mean our children and our children's children and our children's children's robots (this is when I'm predicting the robot invasion will occur) will never learn the life lessons we learned. For instance, when my kid rescues an alien being from the government, he won't have the good sense to be scared of guns. His last breath will probably be something like, “But a walkie-talkie can't shoot!”

But, of course, in this universe they can.