Balls of Fury (2007) and Repurposed Stories

Originality does not come from a story itself, but from how a story is told.  The basic building blocks of a story will always be the same.  Someone will conflict with someone or something.  It might be another person doing something they don’t agree with.  It could be a corporation or society that doesn’t care about people and puts them in harm’s way.  It could be nature.  Or it could even be the person in conflict with themselves.  These building blocks can be the basis for something original, but they don’t bring about anything original.

There are many factors create originality.  A writer will build their own characters to go through what is essentially a story told many times before.  In the case of movies, a director will add their own stylistic flourishes to the script while bringing it to life.  A cinematographer will find their own shots and create a look that suits them.  Sound designers put together their own original world through the aural atmosphere they create.  And then there are the actors who bring the characters to life.  Editors assemble it all.  Thus, something more original is created than the basic building blocks of the storyline.

This originality doesn’t always come through in Hollywood.  So much of the output from the major studios has a similar look and feel.  They aren’t identical.  There are some differences to every film.  But there’s a certain Hollywood style that must be adhered to if a movie is being made for one of the major studios.  Smaller studios and independent productions end up feeling more original because the people behind them have more freedom.

Look at the output of any major studio in a given year of the past decade.  Sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and reboots have become most of the release schedule.  Franchise filmmaking has taken over.  Audiences tend to want something familiar when they go to the cinema.  They want a sort of comfort food to take them away from their daily lives.  Seeing something that they know they liked in the past is appealing.  This mentality makes franchises excel.  Just look at what Disney has put out so far this year.  Three Marvel movies (one of them was distributed by Sony, but still), and three live action remakes of their animated classics.  They had a Pixar sequel come out.  And there are still three more Disney sequels to come out later in the year.  Nearly their entire slate is remakes, spin-offs and sequels.

There is a middle ground between the original and unoriginal work.  Aside from the remakes, reboots, spin-offs, and sequels, there is one more way that studios have been bringing old, familiar stories to audiences.  Let’s call these the repurposed stories.  This involves a story that is shared between two movies, with numerous similarities, but a different setting or key element.

Balls of Fury was one such repurposed story.  The 2007 movie followed Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler), a disgraced former ping-pong champion.  He was one of the best in the world as a child.  He lost a big match and never recovered.  In the present day, he had become a novelty performer in Reno.  One day, Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) from the FBI recruited Randy to play in a secret tournament held by Feng (Christopher Walken).  Randy Daytona trained under Wong (James Hong) and Maggie (Maggie Q) before going to the tournament, which he discovered was deadly to anyone who lost.

The story behind Balls of Fury was familiar.  Most tournament fighting movies have similar storylines.  This one, however, felt much closer to Enter the Dragon than most.  The difference was that instead of martial arts, table tennis was the name of the game.  This could be boiled down to Balls of Fury basically being a spoof of Enter the Dragon.  It took the story that Enter the Dragon told and turned it into a farce.  The main character meeting a special agent and being brought into a secret tournament on a private island was the same.  The guy running the island heading a criminal organization was the same.  One of the main characters being offered a job in the organization was the same.  There were even female prostitutes or male concubines sent to the rooms of the competitors in each movie.  But it was a spoof, so that connection was expected.

Except, it wasn’t.  Balls of Fury was never promoted as an Enter the Dragon spoof.  It was sold as its own thing.  It was a tournament fighting movie, in the same vein as Enter the Dragon, but with ping pong.  The trailers didn’t show how close the story kept to the Enter the Dragon storyline.  The fact that it directly spoofed that movie, rather than the general fighting tournament archetype was a surprise.

Balls of Fury is only scratching the surface of repurposed stories coming out of Hollywood.  Other, more notable movies have done the same sort of thing.  They tell what is essentially the same story as what came before, with new packaging.  Sometimes the audience eats it up.  That’s what the studios would like them to do.  But sometimes audiences reject the repurposing, pointing out that it was the same as what came before without any effort being put in to change things up.

R.I.P.D. came out in 2013 and people raged about it.  It was Men in Black in a new package, done not nearly as well.  Ryan Reynolds was the surrogate for Will Smith.  He was the new guy on the force, being brought into this world that he didn’t know existed.  Jeff Bridges was the Tommy Lee Jones character, an experienced crime fighter in their field.  They had the person in charge of their law enforcement.  Their captain.  Mary-Louise Parker filled the role that Rip Torn established in Men in Black.  The big repurposing was to change their enforcement agency’s target.  Men in Black had the duo patrolling extra-terrestrials.  R.I.P.D. had them going up against ghosts.

The response was not good.  R.I.P.D. was a failure critically.  It was pointed out how it shared so many similarities with Men in Black without adding anything new to the premise.  R.I.P.D. made $78.3 million on a budget of at least $130 million.  There was no good will going its way.  It didn’t gain a cult following.  At least, not yet.  The studio couldn’t build the franchise that they were clearly hoping to because their attempt at repurposing fell more on the unoriginal side.

The same critical and commercial failure befell Jem and the Holograms, though not for the repurposing reasons.  The film was released in 2015 and was based on an animated television show from 1985.  That’s already not too original a property.  Then some repurposing was done.  Jem and the Holograms shared some major story developments with the cult 2001 film, based on an animated series as well as a comic, Josie and the Pussycats.  Few people noticed the repurposing.

Jem and the Holograms and Josie and the Pussycats were about a group of teenage girls who were in a band together.  A producer discovered them and took them to the big city so that they could become famous and make money.  The producer urged the singer to push away the band that she had been family with for so long in order to pursue a solo career.  After a little bit of a solo run, the performer realized she was happier before she went solo, and went back to her original band.  This ruined any of the plans that the producer had.

There were a couple major differences between the two films, which is where the repurposing came into play.  Josie and the Pussycats was tied up in the commercialization of the early 2000s.  One of the big things in the film was subliminal messaging that influenced teenagers into buying whatever the new trend was, trends that were decided by the production label.  It was an anti-commercialism message wrapped up in a bubblegum girl band movie.  Jem and the Holograms didn’t have any major message like that, but instead touched upon how big of a marketing tool YouTube has become over the past decade.  The band was discovered through YouTube.  They were popular because of their online presence and ability to go viral.  It didn’t get deep into what the bad aspects of YouTube popularity were, which made the film much less of a statement than what it repurposed.

Other repurposed films have fared better in their second (or third or more) coming.  They took something that people enjoyed but didn’t think was great and improved on it by changing the setting and tightening up the writing.  Or, if they weren’t better than the movie they repurposed, stood on their own as an entertaining, well told story.  Some solid modern movies have come from the art of repurposing.  It all comes down to finding the right story to tell in a new way.

The most famous example of repurposing might be Seven Samurai.  Many different movies have placed that storyline in different settings and each have found their loyal audience.  It began as a samurai movie directed by Akira Kurosawa.  A group of villagers was being terrorized by bandits.  A couple of them sought out a samurai to protect the town.  He recruited six other samurai and they took down the bandits to save the town.  It was repurposed as a western in The Magnificent Seven in 1960 (remade as a television series in 1998 and a film in 2006).  There were cowboys instead of samurai.  Then it got repurposed into Battle Beyond the Stars, where a farming planet hired some space cowboys to protect them from space bandits.  A Bug’s Life was a comedic repurposing where the bandits were grasshoppers and the villagers were ants.  The samurai were a circus troupe that ended up not being the warriors they were thought to be.  That’s a lot of repurposed versions of one story, each respected in their own way.

A modern repurposing that isn’t quite as noticed is Magic Mike.  The film came out in 2012 and was about a male stripper in the last stages of his stripping career.  Mike was looking forward to opening up his own business and leaving the stripper world behind him.  Adam, a young stripper, joined the troupe Mike was in and Mike immediately took on a mentor role.  This was much like the film Hooper in which Burt Reynolds played an aging stuntman looking to put his career behind him.  A new stuntman joined the crew and the experienced stuntman took on a mentor role.

There were many specifics of the two films that made the repurposing more apparent.  The new member of the team in each film was nicknamed “The Kid.”  There was a major brawl involving the mentor and The Kid going up against a bunch of other people.  The Kid was getting so good at his craft that the mentor felt the need to push himself to even higher limits with his biggest performance yet.  And then there was the boss, who cared more about themselves than anything.  The mentor walked out on them and the job in the end.  The major differences were the tone and setting, with Magic Mike being a little darker, and the professions being different.  Other than that, the movies had the same trajectory.

People know about Magic Mike.  It was a success when it came out, leading to a sequel, Magic Mike XXL.  It was part of the rise of Channing Tatum into a respectable actor.  People had been writing him off for years.  It was part of Matthew McConaughey’s comeback.  It gave some good roles to other actors.  Hooper, on the other hand, has been mostly forgotten.  It was one of the great collaborations between Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham but has been recently ignored because of the enduring popularity of Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run.  People tend to pass this one over.  And fewer people notice how similar Hooper and Magic Mike are.

There’s one other unexpected repurposing that should be noted here.  Real Steel came out in 2011.  Hugh Jackman played a man who was reunited with a son he fathered many years before.  The child’s mother had recently died.  The father and son didn’t get along too well.  They grew to love each other during a road trip in a truck by bonding over robot boxing.  The father ended up in a robot boxing match that his son would get to watch.

If that sounded familiar, it was because the story was repurposed from the Sylvester Stallone 1987 film Over the Top.  A father went on a road trip with his estranged son after the mother fell ill.  They didn’t like each other but would bond with a road trip in a truck and some arm wrestling.  The father competed in an arm wrestling tournament that his son would watch.  They were essentially the same story told twenty-four years apart.

Many instances of repurposed stories exist throughout film history.  The whole trend of Die Hard in a… movies weren’t brought up.  That’s because, though they were labelled as Die Hard in a… movies, there tend to be some major differences between them.  Then there are the multiple movies sharing concepts coming out at once.  That’s a completely different interesting idea to look at.  It isn’t the retelling the same story years later in a different way that the repurposing is.

Balls of Fury was a comedic repurposing of Enter the Dragon in the same way that Magic Mike was a serious repurposing of Hooper.  Real Steel was a futuristic repurposing of Over the Top in the same way that Battle Beyond the Stars was a science fiction repurposing of The Magnificent Seven which was a western repurposing of Seven Samurai.  All throughout film history, repurposing has happened.  There are only so many stories to tell, so what gets built around the story must change to keep things fresh.

Originality doesn’t come from a story.  It comes from how a story is told.  Repurposing is only one way to change how a story is told.  Changing the setting so that the same story can be told with similar characters through a different location, time, or action will help make the story feel fresh.  The motivations might be the same.  The characters might have the same arc.  But when they’re doing their thing in a different time and place, it makes things feel fresh.  It brings an air of originality to a story that has been told time and time again.  It’s only a part of what brings originality, but it is an important one.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• Jem and the Holograms (week 238) got a mention in this post.
• Balls of Fury featured George Lopez.  He was in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 70), Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (week 70), and Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Fiesta (week 70).  He also showed up in Valentine’s Day (week 168).
• Terry Crews showed up in Balls of Fury, after being in The Single Moms Club (week 179), Norbit (week 227), Sandy Wexler (week 231), and The Ridiculous 6 (week 344).
• Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa made an appearance in Balls of Fury.  He could previously be seen in Mortal Kombat (week 140), Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (week 140), and Skin Trade (week 146).
• Balls of Fury was the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Christopher Walken, who was in Gigli (week 225) and Nine Lives (week 228).
• Robert Patrick made his return to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week after previously being in The Marine (week 30).
• This week also saw the return of David Koechner, who was in A Haunted House (week 34).
• Jerome Villaluz was in Balls of Fury as well as Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 70).
• The great Toby Huss had a small role in Balls of Fury.  He also had a role in Furry Vengeance (week 162).
• The star of Balls of Fury was Dan Fogler.  He did some voicework for Free Birds (week 209).
• Diedrich Bader made his second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Balls of Fury, after first showing up in Space Buddies (week 270).
• David Kim was in both Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (week 300) and Balls of Fury.
• Finally, Balls of Fury brought Thomas Lennon back to the Sunday “Bad” Movies after he first showed up in Pottersville (week 316).
• Have you seen Balls of Fury?  What are your thoughts about the repurposing of movie stories?  Do you like any of the movies I mentioned?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• If you have any suggestions for what movies I should be checking out, you can leave those for me on Twitter or in the comments below.  I’m always on the look out for bad movies I might not know.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Check it out.
• Next week is week 350 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There will be two posts coming out.  One of them will be my ten favourite movies of the sixth year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It’s a little bit belated, but I’m doing it.  Then there will be the regular post.  I’ll be watching Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Rappin’.  Come back next week for the week 350 festivities.  See you then.