Just home from spending the evening working on a project with a fellow geek, which wound down with lively discussion of the various incarnations of the Star Trek franchise. Not surprisingly, at some point the deviations from the original series' "canon" came up. I know some folks who are purists that way, but a fictional universe that's over 40 years old can be expected to show a few inconsistencies.
Granted, there can sometimes be a fine line between re-imagining and re-hashing. Okay, maybe not so fine after all. Yet, when a fiction enters not just the zeitgeist, but the cultural psyche besides, re-imagining for each generation is just the price of doing business. Mae West quipped that it's better to be looked over than overlooked, and to be looked over over and over is not something to sneer at if you're a writer.
And, seriously, it's not just hack writers and directors who do this. George Lucas freely admits to pilfering elements of Star Wars from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. And speaking of Kurosawa, he had no qualms whatsoever about transporting Shakespeare's King Lear to feudal Japan in Ran. Just as Shakespeare himself had no problem lifting Lear's basic storyline of from the [cough] "research challenged" History of the Kings of Britain penned by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century.
But such refittings and re-trimmings pale when compared to the richness that is the tale of King Arthur. From the Romano-Celtic warlord of the late 5th or early 6th centuries through the Age of Chivalry (and Courtly Love) through Pre-Raphaelite wistfulness through the anti-war protest of The Once and Future King even down to the absurdist slapstick of Monty Python and (unfortunately) the kludgey kitchiness of Hollywood thereafter. But for a story that's stayed relevant to our cultural self-image for some fifteen hundred years, even travesties like First Knight are an homage of sorts.
So although I grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek (not so long after the five year mission was scrapped two seasons in), I find it hard to get my pointy ears bent out of shape over "canon." If the retelling is confident enough to know when to color inside the lines and when to venture outside them to draw new meaning from time-honored memes, well, that's just another day in the life of literature.
