I’ve never missed a holiday season without watching some version of “Scrooge: A Christmas Carol.” To date there are 39-different theater productions, 22-different film versions, 27-different “made for TV” adaptions, 3-opera’s, 7-record albums, 14-different radio productions, 6-parody productions and 63 “plot” adaptions—making it one of the most remade, rehashed, reinvented, rewritten scripts in history. The original story was a “novella” written by Charles Dickens in 1843.
Look at hoodies: We called them sweatshirts back in the day. However the rap bad-boy culture of the 90’s made them hip & cool for everyone to wear-which created an opportunity for the fashion industry to create multiple versions of that one simple design. Then when one of the richest bad-boys in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, continued to wear his Harvard hoodie to his Facebook office, sales went to the moon!
Perhaps it’s time to revisit your art or products or the services you offer and examine the success you’ve had in the past and your most popular works to date. How many versions, rewrites, remakes, alterations, redesigns, re-recordings and refried beans could you create out of your best work? Who knows, maybe there’s a hidden income stream there. After all, it’s still your “original” work, right?
In an exclusive interview with Music Connection, John Mellencamp said: “I consider myself a singer songwriter, but I’ve only written about five songs. The rest are just unique, rehashed variations of one of those five.”