Eddie Murphy says he wants to do a remake of my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It appears he doesn't yet have a studio ready to put up the zillions of dollars it would take to make such a picture and I'm wondering if he's saying this just to see if any such backer comes forward. It would probably take zillions for two reasons, one being that Mr. Murphy is, probably deservedly, a very highly-paid movie star…and if you were to pack the film with other stars of that caliber, they'd want Favored Nations with him or something close to it.
You'd also have to spend a lot of money to make the chases and stunts and action scenes pretty damned spectacular…and I wonder if it would be anywhere near as effective. Here's the thing: When my fave film was released in 1963, there was no such thing as CGI and audiences didn't know very much about camera trickery. Along with Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers and the rest, there was another kind of star in the movie: The stuntpeople. Audiences didn't think Buddy Hackett had actually flown an airplane through a billboard but they knew that someone did — for real.
Today, it would be done with CGI. Or if you had someone actually do it, moviegoers would just assume it was CGI. Nobody today believes any stunts in any movies are real unless it's well-publicized that (for example) a Tom Cruise actually did some of his himself. (And you can find plenty of people on the Internet who think that's a lie. By the way, the man who flew the plane through the billboard — for real — was named Frank Tallman.)
So I'm not sure the action stuff would be as thrilling as it was in 1963 Cinerama and I'm not sure you could afford a comparable all-star lineup. Also, there are a lot of funny people around but with a few exceptions, they're not known for or experienced in physical comedy and they aren't "types." The moment Phil Silvers appeared on the screen in the original film, audiences knew instantly the kind of person he was. He had decades of experience playing avaricious con men and so brought loads of characterization to the screen with him.
Name a star today who has that kind of history. Or name one whose very appearance instantly denotes "prey" like when Don Knotts appears or "ineptness" when we see the Three Stooges dressed up as firefighters. Mad World had a cast of comic actors who went back to the days of silent pictures. A remake today would probably reach back as far as stars whose films came out on VHS.
This is not me thinking that a remake denotes some kind of disrespect for the original. A few years ago when they announced a new Three Stooges movie, some folks who for some reason thought the original Stooges could possibly be disgraced, denounced the whole idea. Well, the movie came and went and I didn't notice any lowering of reverence for Larry, Moe and the third Stooge of your choice. They were those loud knuckleheads then, they're those loud knuckleheads now. Their films are as popular as ever.
I'm not saying that someone with the deepest of pockets couldn't assemble an all-star cast. I'm just saying it wouldn't be easy and it would only be a remake of my favorite flick in the slimmest of ways. And there's one more problem that I probably should mention: If they do make it and I go see it, I'm unlikely to be eleven years old. Then again, others might be.