Popular Actor Rapes My Childhood

He was inspired to take up acting because of three characters that he wanted to play. One was Thomas Magnum, one was Hannibal Smith, and the last was Danny Ocean. In 2001, he achieved his dream of playing that third character. Now George Clooney has set his sights on two of the most popular television characters from the Eighties.
Unfortunately, he's set himself a difficult task. Magnum is Tom Selleck, and Clooney is going to be hard-pressed to make the role his. If he gets into the spirit of things however and grows a bushy moustache, then he may pull it off.
The A Team will be the most difficult to pull off, however. In that case, you have four actors who made the characters their own, to varying degrees. I can imagine Clooney pulling off a decent Hannibal, since George Peppard always did seem to be the one out of the lot of them who was only there for the money. But even so, can you recast icons like the A Team? Here at Brainsplurge, we had a go!
Assuming we already have Clooney as Hannibal actually makes things a bit easier. Mad Murdock was the easiest to cast as we slotted a loopy Brad Pitt in there. These three films show that Murdock-style lunacy is well within his range. If Pitt is busy, a suitably crazy Michael Keaton would do the job nicely.
Face is a bit trickier to pull off. We want to cast someone younger than the others, but also someone who can pull off smooth and suave. Given the Clooney Connection, it's tempting to cast Mark Wahlberg or Matt Damon, but neither are really suave as such. So we're struggling here. One thing that may aid the casting is that there's no reason that the new team has to be all American. Obviously they can't be Vietnam vets anymore, and the most likely conflict that they took part in is Gulf War I, so we can conceivably cast a British actor in the role. In the end, a desperate search leads us to Matthew Perry, because we're having far too much difficulty.
Hardest of all is BA Baracus, because that was the role that required least acting the first time around. It seems pretty obvious that Mr T just turned up as he was, walked on set and Pitied The Fool. Clearly, no one plays Mr T like Mr T, so the solution is to cast someone who has a similarly strong screen persona. It may not be similar to Mr T's persona, but we're after a strong personality here, rather than an exact match. I'd love to cast Samuel L Jackson here, but even if we are changing the character to suit the actor, the difference between original and new is too different. So, we go for Ving Rhames. A completely different kind of big mean black guy, but he's still a big mean black guy.
As for supporting characters, we can safely dump Mexican Bloke and Robert Vaughn's Man-In-Plane (although if we did keep him, we'd cast Robert Vaughn or Gary Oldman if Vaughn was busy), as they were from the nonsensical end of the show. But we have to cast Female Fith Member Amy, and Hannibal's rival and nemesis Colonel Decker.
Amy is tricky, as most Hollywood women clearly aren't suited to gunplay and building tanks out of spare parts. So, we're going to be unimaginative and cast Salma Hayek or Eva Mendes in the role. Decker has to be seen as very similar to Hannibal, the kind of guy Hannibal would be if he followed the rules. Tommy Lee Jones is probably too old, and Bruce Willis probably wouldn't play a villain, especially one who is largely there for comedy relief. Give Tim Roth an American accent, or get Willem DeFoe in, is what we reckon.

In other news, my brother wants someone to get him one of these, and Neil Gaiman has insulted my home town (at the bottom of Sunday's entry).

Finally for today, Snowball has contributed my favourite name so far for the robot-man down there. Alphonse seems to me to be rather fitting.