Recycled TV shows fizzle on big screen

The movie box-office slump is entering its fifth month now and Hollywood remains clueless as to why.

A month's worth of mediocre-to-bad film offerings around the start of the year didn't exactly inspire confidence in what 2005 would have to offer.

A finger can also be pointed at the studios for using television as source material. After all, who wants to pay top dollar to see something you can watch at home for free? And if you're using either a VCR or digital recorder to record shows, you can actually skip the ads, unlike the barrage of pre-movie ads at movie theaters.

That hasn't stopped the studios from releasing botched adaptations of such beloved television institutions as "Bewitched" and "The Honeymooners," which are not exactly setting the box office on fire.

Huge surprise, right?

Really, what can we expect from a genre that counts among its highlights "Starsky & Hutch" and "The Brady Bunch?" (While I enjoyed those films, they're certainly not what I'd consider high-quality cinema.)

Unfortunately, there's more to come.

Coming in August is "The Dukes of Hazzard," starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson. (As one of the comic commentators on VH-1's "Best Week Ever" noted, the original television series "was perfect . . . ly awful!")

What's frustrating is that there are some television "properties" out there that would make good feature films. I'd gladly pay to see remakes of or spin-offs from:

• "Freaks and Geeks," the short-lived NBC series based on creator Paul Feig's painfully real reminiscences of high school life. It would make an ideal premise for a low-budget "indie" drama.

• "Scrubs." Why not? The show's star, Zach Braff, has become a star, and NBC is clearly too dumb to give the clever medical sitcom the support it deserves (the network has relegated it to a mid-season replacement slot).

• "Star Wars: Clone Wars," Cartoon Network's exciting animated series, which was better than any of George Lucas's prequels (including "Revenge of the Sith").

• "The Tick." With all the superhero movies in development, a comedy featuring the dim-witted, blue-suited lunk, played on TV by Patrick Warburton, would be most welcome.