TVSquad

There should be a moratorium on remakes. They rarely work, and in some cases, they are just ill-conceived from step one. That's how I feel about this news: they're remaking Ben-Hur as a television mini-series. I'm not saying this because actor Charlton Heston has just died and this was his movie and, therefore, it should be sacrosanct. No, not at all. If someone has the urge to remake almost any other Heston film -- Soylent Green, Diamond Head, The Pigeon That Took Rome -- go for it. But leave Ben-Hur alone. You'd think the disastrous remake of The Ten Commandments on ABC last year would have been a lesson. I guess not.

He was Moses, Michaelangelo, Ben-Hur and a dozen other famous historical figures on the big screen, and on television he was as famous appearing as Charlton Heston the movie star he was for the TV roles he played, but he was born John Charles Carter on October 4th 1924 in Evanston, Illinois. Today, "Chuck" Heston is dead. He was 84 years old; he had Alzheimer's disease.

This season, Law and Order was looking for a way to get some new energy and interest in the long-running NBC Emmy-winning series, so on the judicial end of the show, they promoted Sam Waterson's Jack McCoy to DA and cast Linus Roache as Assistant District Attorney Michael Cutter. Roache is one of those familiar faces that you've seen on other shows, maybe a movie or two, but here on Law and Order he's making you sit up and take notice. At least that's how it is for me. After watching the first two new episodes when the show returned recently, I wanted to know more about this guy. For starters, why did he remind me of a young Bobby Kennedy?

Well, it turns out that Linus Roache played Robert Kennedy in the mini-series, RFK. The Kennedy connection was even alluded to in last week's episode; at the end of the show, after McCoy had to defend his decision to prosecute overzealous New York City cops by taking the stand in open court, Roache's character, Cutter, gives him a tie pin that once belonged to RFK. With the last line of the show, Cutter says, "I found it on EBay."

Apparently, someone had some free time on his or her hands and used it to post various stills from The Simpsons episodes which mimic various famous movie or television scenes. Considering that the show has been around for almost 20 years, it's certainly had time to get such pastiche correct.

These stills seem to originate from earlier episodes, back when the naysayers would say the show was good. I admit I don't recognize every Simpsons episode in the list (or for that matter every movie still in the list), but it's easy to tell that the writers and animators were trying to reference the original movie or show for satire's sake.