Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Selleck

Selleck is defending the remake with a craftsman’s logic, but he does it in a way that quietly flatters the genre while lowering the emotional stakes. The key move is that polite hedge - “not that they were bad” - which signals he knows the usual complaint (remakes are cynical, disrespectful) and wants to preempt it without picking a fight. He’s not attacking old westerns; he’s reclassifying them.

The subtext is a distinction between stories that are “indelible” because they’re fused to a particular performance, and stories that are durable precisely because they aren’t. That’s an actor talking like a producer: if the plot is strong and archetypal enough to survive a new cast, it becomes renewable cultural capital. Westerns, in his framing, are a kind of narrative public domain even when the copyrights aren’t. The genre’s building blocks - the stranger, the town, the moral test, the showdown - are meant to be re-staged, like a standard in jazz.

Context matters: Selleck comes from an era when the western was both mass entertainment and a TV factory. Many were competently made, widely watched, and then filed away in collective memory as “a western,” not “that one irreplaceable film.” He’s leveraging that reality to argue remakes aren’t evidence of creative bankruptcy; they’re evidence of a genre built on myth, repetition, and variation.

There’s also a subtle self-interest. If the cast isn’t “indelible,” then a new cast can become it. The line sells opportunity: the western as a space where actors can inherit a role without being crushed by it.