Popular Film, a movie. A film from the past. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first decent remake. Popular Film will be that remake. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Remakes. Love them. Hate them. It doesn’t matter. They’re inevitable. As long as there has been cinema, remakes have been a part of the process. Hollywood, as Fark.com is so fond of saying, is out of ideas. Your favorite film may have already been remade. And if it hasn’t been, it may well be one day.

Sometimes remakes are a wonderful thing. Witness 1959’s Ben-Hur, a remake of a 1925 film by the same name (though some might argue it’s actually a different adaptation of the book of the same name by Gen. Lew Wallace). The latter is widely considered one of the most dynamic film’s ever created, while the former has been all but forgotten to time. Then there was 1939’s Love Affair, which became the 1957 classic An Affair To Remember, which became the forgettable 1994 dud Love Affair. We all remember the remake, but not the remake of the remake.

Some remakes don’t stray too far from their original turf – Gus Van Sant’s 1998 take on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho was a shot-for-shot remake, for instance – while others are related in name only, such as 1954’s post-atomic bomb Japanese apocalypse film Gojira (better know to U.S. audiences as Godzilla) and the 1998 b-monster movie Godzilla, starring Ferris Bueller. They each had giant monsters. And that’s all they had in common.

So yeah. Remakes. There sure are a lot of them.

Here at , we like film. All sorts of film. Even film that has been done before. That’s why this week we are launching “I Swear I’ve Seen This Before!”, a special series devoted to just one thing: comparing remakes to originals, originals to remakes, remakes of originals to original remakes, and sorting out the mysteries of what is what, what is better, and what is worth watching.

Kicking off this special series is Notoriousaurus’ look into The Ring, a remake of the Japanese horror film Ringu. (Hah! Bet you didn’t even know it was a remake). Which is most worth seeing? Read on.