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Fact-or-Fake Friday: Remake Madness

July 11, 2014

Here are three recent news items pop culture products currently being remade. Well, that’s sort of true—two of the stories are real, and one of them we made up. Can you guess which one is just too weird to be true? (The answer is at the end of the post.)

A.

Cats is one of the most popular musicals of all time, running for 20 years on both Broadway and on London’s West End. Off the boards for more than a decade now, author Andrew Lloyd Webber is preparing the first major revival of the show about homeless street cats that sing, dance, and now…rap. As rap was a relatively new style when Cats debuted in the early 1980s, Webber believes that the time is now right for the character of Rum Tum Tugger to be rewritten as “a contemporary street cat” who “has to do hip-hop.” Webber claims that the poems of T.S. Eliot, upon which he based Cats, give precedence, claiming that Eliot’s “The Rum Tum Tugger” was “possibly the first rap.

B.

How I Met Your Mother ended a nine-season run on CBS last spring with a highly-anticipated and controversial, fan-hated final episode. (Spoilers: After years of build-up to the meeting and happy ending of Ted and “the mother,” the mother dies off-screen and Ted gets together with Robin, the ex-girlfriend he could never quite get over.) The show’s cast, creators, and network got so much flack—but high ratings—that they worked out a solution. How I Met Your Mother will reboot and begin airing on CBS again this winter with a new cast but roughly the same episode stories, as well as a promise that the show will end “happily.”

C.

TV shows are often remade for different countries around the world. Particularly successful have been localized versions of Married…With Children, Who’s the Boss?, and The Office across Europe and Asia. This summer an unauthorized remake of Modern Family began airing in Iran. Haft Sang (“Seven Stories”) recreated on an almost shot-for-shot basis the ABC family comedy, except for a couple of very big differences. Promiscuous college-age daughter Haley is now a chaste teenage boy, and the gay couple Cam and Mitchell don’t appear in Haft Sang at all.

Want more fake facts? Then check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)