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Cashing in on the classics

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-04 07:19

Though it is still unknown whether remaking the four Chinese classical masterpieces will be a profanity on their essence or not, initial propaganda by television crews and other interested parties have already boiled over, says an article in Jiefang Daily. The following is an excerpt:

Since the beginning of the year, plans and preparatory works for remaking those masterpieces have provoked wide and growing criticism because the public does not allow their cultural classics being turned into potboilers.

A repetition of the trend has been rampant in China's TV industry, which is disgustingly hell-bent on remaking masterpieces time and again.

True, recreating the great masters' classic works on the screen can help popularize the country's millenniums-old traditional culture. But if every TV crew tends to do so and thus remake them again and again, then it is not about culture, it is about money.

In fact, the 1987 version of the TV play of the Dream of Red Mansion, one of the four, has been played more than 700 times. Another one of the Journey to the West produced in 1985 is still hot on screen for the leisure of the vacationing youth. Both the situation shows that the classics cannot be replaced by advanced screen technologies.

However, business propaganda of remaking these classical works in this year has been running with the greatest frenzy.

No doubt the crew members know how to earn big money in the eye-catching industry as everything classical becomes a publicity stunt in their hands.

In a word, we must warn that all those irresponsible and casual remakes would only harm masterpieces by blowing a cultural bubble ceaselessly.

(China Daily 08/04/2008 page4)