THE MONSTER SQUAD Could Have Been Adapted Into a TV Series But The Director Turned Down The Opportunity
When Stranger Things became a hit, producers wanted to tap into that 80s nostalgia that has become very popular today in the Radcore movement. Turns out, one property that producers were interested in adapting as a TV series was the classic 80s hit The Monster Squad!
The film’s director Fred Dekker recently revealed that in an interview with Moviefone, he was approached to bring Monster Squad to the small screen. The is certainly something that I would have been interested in seeing! I love the concept of a group of kids coming together to face off with a team of legendary monsters. It had such a cool and perfect blend of comedy and horror.
While it would have been pretty rad to see the franchise revived, Dekker ended up turning down the opportunity. He explained:
"I'll be completely honest, Shane Black and I have both been approached about adapting The Monster Squad for television. Was it my first choice? No. But I'm a big fan now of long-form television. I think Breaking Bad was a seminal viewing experience for me that I equated with The Godfather. I think it's the modern version of The Godfather. It just happens to be 62 hours long instead of, you know, two-and-a-half to three-hours long. So I'm a big fan of that. And figuring out a way to take Monster Squad and turn it into a long-form series was very exciting to me. But when we were approached, it was right after Stranger Things.”
He went on to talk about why they ended up turning it down, explaining that they didn’t want to rip off of what they did:
"Hollywood has, as you must know, a monkey see, monkey do a business where, 'Oh, well that's successful, so let's just rip that off.’ So Shane and I had a meeting at Paramount. I said, 'Let me just clarify -- you guys want us to do a rip off of a rip off of us?' And they all sort of laughed. But that's basically what it came down to. And my other thought was on The Monster Squad was to show us the squad as they are now, because the fans that discovered the movie when they were very young, the age of the kids in the film, they may not have seen in the movie theater. They may have seen it on HBO or on video, but they grew up with it in the same way that the characters in that movie would have grown up."
One of the other reasons that they didn’t pursue it is because of the similarities it had with Stephen King’s IT. Dekker went on to say:
"I thought, well, let's make this movie for the people who fell in love when they were kids and say, 'Where is the squad as adults?' And Shane said to me, 'Well that's it.' I said, 'Yeah, it's a great idea.' And he goes, 'No, that's Stephen King's IT. The first part of the book and the first movie is them as kids fighting monsters and the second movie is them as adults fighting monsters.' So as a fan of the genre, there is nothing to me remotely interesting or new about Monster Squad as a movie or a TV show. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 15 years. But right now it's like, well everybody's already doing it."
I completely understand why Dekker and Black turned down the opportunity, but at the same time as someone who loved the original movie, I would’ve absolutely loved to see it revived as a TV series or a movie with the original characters!
Would you have liked to see a Monster Squad TV series?