Hello all formerly relevant high-profile franchise entertainment properties.  (Yeah, I’m talking to you, Jaws and Jurassic Park.)  Looking for some strategies for getting back on top.  Well, go no further.  Unsolicited advice follows.

I saw Star Trek last night.  It got me thinking about rebooting franchises.  I was never a huge Trek fan, but I’m pretty familiar with the outlines of it.  I remember watching the original show in reruns as a kid.  Of course, I saw the first few movies in the theater when they came out.  The Next Generation was often on the TV at my eating club at Princeton.  (And this is not exactly part of the pantheon, but one of my favorite comedies of all-time is Galaxy Quest.)

So I was primed on the cultural literacy front for the new Star Trek and it didn’t disappoint.  A fun kernal of summer movie popcorn.  But more importantly, it is a perfect example of one method of reinvigorating an aging franchise.  This film is really a do-over, but it is a respectful and well-made do-over.  (Other recent examples include Batman and James Bond.)

Actually, it is a brilliant do-over.  Through a twisty time travel plotline (that honestly in the best Star Trek tradition only sort of makes sense) this movie manages to have its cake and eat it to.  Everything is the same and everything can also be different.  The past history of the show is acknowledged and then made irrelevant.  The original characters are all there — and the casting is perfect — so we already know every single quirk and flaw and yet they seem to all be brand new.  Old fans have plenty of inside nods to enjoy and new fans don’t feel alienated.

But back to my original reason for this post.  This was not just a reimagining of a creaky franchise.  It is a wholesale handing of the reins to a new creative team, many of whom were not Trekkies in the first place.  The distance seems to have served them well and given them the freedom to make this movie.  So let’s call that method one — new blood.

Contrast that to Star Wars.  This franchise has never been passed to a new team.  Lucas is, and will always be, Star Wars.  And yet an odd thing has happened.  A new generation of kids has become completely obsessed with it.  Trust me — I have personal experience with this.

I was seven years old when I saw the first Star Wars movie.  Of course, like every other kid, I became totally devoted to it.  I had the card and the toys.  I was in line for every sequel on opening day.  Now, I have a seven-year-old son.  Somehow I assumed that Star Wars was my generation’s event.  That he and his friends would think it was outdated and boring.

And yet, as I’ve discovered over the last few weeks, the exact opposite is true.  Even though he has never seen any of the live-action movies, he knows everything about the series.  Well, almost everything.  He has been peppering me with questions about how the clones became stormtroopers and what happened to the Jedi after the Empire took over and who is General Grevious and so on.  I’m racking my brain to remember and I’ll admit I’m enjoying sharing the experience with him (and my four-year-old daughter who is being pulled along on this ride).

But how did this happen?

Unlike Star Trek, which was completely rebuilt, Star Wars appears to have been successfully repackaged.  Or at least reintroduced (since as I’ve already pointed out it always has appealed to kids).  My son watches the Clone Wars cartoon.  We now own the Legos Star Wars videogame.  There is a whole series of DK Reader books designed to explain the whole universe to him in countless different ways (and which I might add has been an extremely useful resource for me as I try to answer his questions).

This is method two — new audience.  Rather than changing the creative team, target a new demographic.  And the brilliance of it is an understanding that these new fans are having a completely different experience than the old fans.  There is no concern about protecting the twists of the original movies.  I was reading one of these books to my kids and it came right out and said, “Luke Skywalker who is Darth Vader’s son.”  I remember being 11 years old and seeing the end of Empire Strikes Back and having my mind literally blown out of my skull when Vader utters the famous words, “Luke, I am your father.”  But all of that is such a part of the cultural landscape now that there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.  So why bother.  Anakin is Luke’s father.  Leia is Luke’s sister.  Anakin is Darth Vader.  And so on.

And it turns out that it doesn’t matter that the secrets are all out already.  Kids still love Star Wars.  And so do their parents.  That’s a heckuva lucrative combination.

So how does Green Day fit into all this. OK, maybe it is a stretch to call Green Day a franchise, but they have been a fixture on the music scene since their album, Dookie fifteen years ago.  This pop punk masterpiece still defines much of the rock that’s on the radio today and spawned countless wannabes.  Pick any track off the album and you’ll get three minutes of pure sonic bliss.  And some of the tracks transcend the rest — She, Basket Case, Longview, When I Come Around.  But then a series of lesser albums followed and Green Day’s stock fell (with the exception of one mega-hit with Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)).

Then, they came out with American Idiot, a stunning collection of songs that actually form rarity in our downloadable world - a cohesive album.  Seriously, they put out a rock opera, thirty years after the form died.  It’s not like the songs themselves are a significant departure from Green Day’s past.  We’re still talking the same sound, though in interesting variations.   It’s the same three people that played in the original lineup.  And I would argue that they are still targeting more or less the same audience.

With American Idiot (and the follow up album, 21st Century Breakdown, which is also great and could easily have been called American Idiot II), they clearly just started making the music that they always wanted to make — and it sounds like they didn’t care about what anyone else thinks.  So I guess that is the third method of reinvention — the passion project that actually works.

So there you have it.  My advice to formerly relevant major franchise properties.  Either get some outside ideas, look for a new audience or just do the thing you always wanted to do but were afraid to when you actually had something to lose.  Best of luck.