There is quite the trend of turning beloved franchises into rebooted material to try and cash in on nostalgia. The problem I see with all of it is that they forget the core values of what made the original franchise popular, and yes, sometimes it has to do with the time it was made.

As I think on this, I think "What if I was in charge of rebooting a franchise?"

And here is what I came up with.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
This needs no introduction; four turtles and a rat are contaminated with toxic ooze that turns them into anthropomorphic warriors for justice.
Things to keep:
-Splinter MUST come from Japan and come from a Shadow Warrior owner. He needs to have the spiritual clarity and wisdom that comes from the training his master did.
-Raph is the serious and angry one, Leo is the calm and collected one, Donnie is the tech obsessed one, Mikey is the goofball (within reason)
-The bad guys are super serious. They are dangerous, they don't pull punches and injuries to the heroes when they slack off is expected.
My personal twist.
Without delving into the franchise's darker corners, it can be difficult to figure out why Raph is always so mad and so willing to beat the hell out of his siblings. The fact is that Raph is the oldest of the group, and in the Japanese culture, feels that everything falls to him, his performance reflects on the others, and that when Splinter praises Leo instead of him, he feels humiliation beyond just "younger brother did better". To integrate this into the series a bit more clearly, I considered making Raph into a female. In the older Japanese customs, it was frequent that a female "could never live up" to the legacy of a man or share his title. Raph, having been raised by Splinter's "old japanese customs" and being familiar with it, would be trying to outshine her siblings, but trying TOO hard, leading to her being injured and nearly killed on several occasions. She would be able to beat Leo, Mikey, and Donnie in combat (as Raph frequently does), but mostly due to tapping into rage at how they tend to "be better" on the field. Thus, Raph pushes herself harder, Raph injures herself more, and is less effective in the field. This only finally pulls away when Splinter confesses one on one with Raph that the "old Japanese custom" was never in effect, and Splinter was "humiliating her" by praising Leo instead due to Raph simply being so eager to prove hat she was better that she was destroying herself and forgetting what teamwork was all about.

Granted, that falls apart a bit and isn't needed with Venus, but as I said, dark corners.

Dinosaucers.


Aliens from the planet Reptillon end up on earth, make friends with some humans, and have petty squabbles with the evil Tyrannos. This show was odd in that ,for once, there was almost never some grand earth destroying scheme, it was often petty squabbles. Things like making a camera that turns your clothes inside out and trying to take some humiliating pictures. In fact, the Tyrannos were, at best, a gang of thugs and rejects, one even being an ex-game show host (Quackpot).
Things to Keep:
-The conflicts still need to be minimal. The Tyrannos are just a group of thugs, the Dinosaucers are just interested in exploring and learning.
-The basic "incorrect" look of their selves. They are aliens, not earth dinosaurs.
-NO DEATHS. It's very common for reboots to suddenly start slaughtering characters to show how "real" and "edgy" this reboot is, but this show's "violent conflicts", while neat, were rarely above practical jokes and "ruin your day" moments between them.
My personal twist
Have it be that the Dinosaucers were investigating earth because of various reports of signals coming from it. Finding a possible worthwhile haul of expensive medical and research equipment, the Tyrranos, a group of thugs and misfits who formed a fairly strong mafia of sorts, decide to attack them, disabling their ship. This forces the Dinosaucers to land and are somewhat stranded on Earth. The crew quickly attune their immune systems (medical supplies, I mentioned that) and become privy to human languages through our rather open information super highways. Allo, being the leader (though little more than the ships captain of a research crew), decides to visit a few places (wearing a cloak) and ends up at a museum. There, he gets a better idea of our planet's history and is very puzzled by the dinosaur fossils and the depictions made as they somewhat resemble reptillon ancestors. His "cover" is blown when the museum showcases a few of those elaborate suits and a kid points out that"he's also wearing one". He hides in plain sight and plays along with it, the older students having reasonable conversations with him before he shakes their hands and parts ways, leaving them with the communicator rings.
Meanwhile the Tyrannos wanted to swoop in and start ransacking the crippled ship, but as they start to, they pick up the communications from the planet and quickly find out we have a rather aggressive information spiderweb and rather dangerous military applications. Thus the Tyrannos also go underground, their goal to get to the Dinosaucer ship and leave without alerting the natives too much.
This culminates in the Dinosaucers researching earth and eventually communicating with the secret scouts on aspects of a "secret project", which is the true source the Tyrannos want. The project is the Dinovolver, a genetic tool that was to regress a being into a primordial ancestor, but the gene sequences were broken and missing and any attempts to use it often resulted in crippling the one who performed it. Allo, researching earth fossils and our "science fiction jurassic park" experiment concepts, finds that there IS some sort of overlap in the genetic coding and that they are able to sequence. During this time, the Tyrannos eventually find the Dinosaucers and good old fisticuffs break out. This leads to the one sequence where Ghengis Rex is more savage than normal as he gets Allo one on one and, in his bravado, claims he will beat Allo and when he does, he'll claim what he wants from the ship, but if Allo somehow wins, Rex will back off. Allo agrees to it and Rex basically beats him senseless and without mercy, since he's a thug and Allo is just a researcher. This culminates in Allo activating the Dinovolver on his person as himself as a test subject, but the gene sequencing actually works and he turns into his ancestral creature, which somewhat resembles our old depictions of Allosaurus, and after only a few strikes, Rex is bested, though not before he swears he'll get the Dinovolver technology.

I have more plots of franchises I generally think up, and I'll be willing to share them if you found this enjoyable.