One of the prompts for today is "What band or TV show would you like to see reunite?" That’s not an easy question to answer, because it would be practically impossible for it ever to happen. Face it, it would involve bringing people back from the dead in either case.
Many of the bands I remember from my younger days have either disbanded, and many of the members have passed on. Take The Beatles, for example: only Paul and Ringo are still living, John having been murdered in 1980 and George having died in 2001. The closest they got to a reunion was in 1994, when Yoko Ono found a cassette of John playing the piano with three songs he had been working on, and the remaining members of the band got together and turned two of them into Beatles songs, "Free As A Bird" (released on Anthology 1) and "Real Love" (released on Anthology 2). But that’s as far as it went: there was no tour, no full album, and there’s been nothing since.
Or take the band Chicago: three of the original members are no longer with the band, guitarist Terry Kath (died in a firearms accident the week we got married), bassist Pete Cetera (left the band and evidently wants nothing to do with them), and drummer Danny Seraphine (was fired). A fourth, saxophonist Walt Parazaider, has had to retire for health reasons. Frankly, if I want to hear Chicago, I’d just as soon listen to Leonid & Friends, from Russia and Ukraine, who made a name for themselves by doing dead-nuts-on arrangements of Chicago songs and have expanded their repertoire.
As far as TV is concerned, most of the shows whose reunions I would like to see were made back in the ’60’s, and in most cases the actors have passed on. Ron Howard is the only remaining cast member from The Andy Griffith Show, Robert Clary and Kenneth Washington the only ones left from Hogan’s Heroes, Dick Van Dyke and possibly Larry Matthews from The Dick Van Dyke Show, etc. Even if they were to re-cast any of those shows, I and all the other fans of the original shows would be subconsciously comparing the replacement actors to the originals, and the new scripts to the old ones, and finding them wanting.
It occurs to me that we still have the original shows from TV and the music from the original bands. Who needs reunions?
