Scene it, done it.

I’ve often said to my teenage son that you have to live long enough to appreciate some of the amazing changes that can happen in the world. This elicits the typical teen response of a blank look with the hint of a nod that has more to do with the song being blared into his skull, via earphones rammed deep in his ear canals, performed by a band named Death Blood War, featuring the lyrics “don’t listen to your parents, they’re all insane.”

Of course, I can’t expect much of a response from such a statement, as I am sure I would've had the same reaction when I was his age, except perhaps I would have added a yawn.

There have been some incredible things that have happened in my lifetime. The falling of the Berlin wall, peace in Ireland, the end of Apartheid. True, there have been some equally terrible events, but unfortunately tragedy is an all too familiar and inevitable reality of life. It is those joyously unexpected and history-altering moments of positive change that seem to transcend the muck and mire of the human experience.

There are also some trivial, but no less cool innovations that have come along over the years that still amaze me. Computers, ATMs, Google, iPods, microwaves, cell phones, YouTube, the list goes on and on. These are all things that either did not exist or were not in common use when I was young (back when the earth’s crust was cooling).

The downside to bearing witness to decades of social and political change, as well as technical innovation, is the realization that as a species we’re about as original as moss. Case in point, during the Super-dee-duper-bowl television bombast on Sunday we were treated to three movie trailer commercials, two of which were do-overs of stories that have been told, in one form or another, a modest googa-trillion times.

Robin Hood stars Russel Crowe as the famous green-tights-wearing rogue in the latest iteration of the ancient legend. I suspect he’ll have a better go of the English accent than the myopic choice of Kevin Costner in the last Hollywood adaptation, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. The only thievery in that bucket of rotten clams was the cost of admission. The Wolfman, another not very original story, features Benicio del Toro as an American in Victorian England who, due to some unfortunate and mysterious incident, is destined to be transformed into the infamous rabid man/labradoodle. In yet another odd piece of casting del Toro, a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican, is required to fake an American accent...in England. Go figure.

Is it me, or has the movie business finally run out of ideas? Robin Hood and The Wolfman (which would be a cool movie idea right there) come on the heels of a string of Hollywood franchise resuscitations: Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, not to mention the inexplicable and ironically undying obsession with vampires and zombies. You’d think by now that the viewing public would've had enough of these juvenile, asinine rip-offs, but audiences just eat is up like zombies chowing down on a fresh spleen.

So who’s to blame here? Is it us for willingly forking out our fun-money for this regurgitated pabulum, or the entertainment industry, so terrified of embracing new ideas, that they creatively phone-it-in, then leave it to the CGI folks to make it look new and interesting. It’s hard to know, but I can say this much, there are more than a few of us who have been around long enough to say read it, seen it, bought the DVD, now show me something new.

I just hope they get the message before they cast Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as King Arthur.