The 70s Sci Fi gem Logan’s Run is being remade!

Well, you know how it is. Everything old is new again. Unless of course if you’re a human being, or more specifically, if you’re a woman over 35.  Then you’re a cougar, or evil stepmother, or matron, or dowager, or…you see where I’m going with this, don’t you? If you don’t, if you’re not familiar to riding with OldBitey, hang on to the handlebars and eventually we’ll get to the bottom of the hill.

Logan’s Run. It has everything a 1976 Sci-Fi film ought to have. It’s cheesy with semi-decent pre-Lucasfilm ILM Star Wars special effects, and you know how I LOVE cheesy 70s stuff. It’s got Michael York who will forever be D’Artagnan to Racquel Welch’s Constance in 1973’s Oliver Reed/Charlton Heston/Faye Dunaway/Richard Chamberlain version of Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers. Iconic Farrah Fawcett-MAJORS has a part in it too. Some of you might remember the TV series it spawned. I liked Logan’s Run because, unlike the Chuck Heston-fests Soylent Green and the Omega Man or Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run made the 23 Centruy look…clean.

And you know I like clean.

There was just one teensy-weensy problem with all this clean living in Logan’s time. On your thirtieth birthday, you got to trundle yourself off to Carousel. If you weren’t sure about how old you were, the little crystal your were born with, the one embedded in the palm of your hand, turned blood red to remind you to get your ass to Carousel. And once you were there, with everyone else who shared the same birthday (SPOILER ALERT!!), you and all your birthday-sharing spandex-clad buddies stood before a stadium filled with spectators cheering you on as you were swept up into the Heavens…and zapped by a death ray.

In the Remake of Logan’s Run (expected in 2012) the "age of Carousel" has been changed.  It’s no longer an ancient 30. Now your best before date is 21.Twenty-one is now suddenly a lifetime Twenty-one is now old.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry. I was recalling days when I was stupid and knew everything at twenty-one.

Anyhow, romance fiction is a bit like Logan’s Run, and the LR remake, especially when it comes the age of heroines. While the women between the pages of a romance novel don’t have a crystal embedded in the palm of their hand, nothing turns red the day they turn thirty, apparently they do have a ‘best before’ or as they say here in Oz, a ‘use by’ date. The list of romance novels featuring heroines over 40 would barely fill two pages. Don’t worry I’m not about to go on another tirade about ageism in romance novels. I’m simply curious about something. 

If remakes are the continuing rage in Hollywood movies, if 70s movies and 80s TV shows are being recycled and revamped into new versions (I can’t WAIT for The Golden Girls Movie!), into new movies, into something that deserves a second look, isn’t it about the hour to rethink the romance heroine? If Logan’s Run 2012 is making 30 elderly, in this time of Carousel, in this time of Renewal, isn’t it about hour to make the romance heroine a ripe, life-experienced 15?