Same house, same family, but what other similarities are there between the original Full House and the reboot, Fuller House? We break it down.
Full House premiered in 1987. Cell phones, if you were lucky to have one, looked like a brick. Harry Potter was still four years from starting at Hogwarts —- though it’d be another ten until Muggles learned his name. All Barbie dolls were built from the same, limiting mold. Taylor Swift is just a twinkle in her father’s eye. Fast forward 29 years, the world looks to be a completely different place.
But oh, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nearly thirty years later, in a part of San Francisco, the same house that the widowed Danny Tanner occupied with his three girls — a pre-teen, a child and an infant — his eldest D.J. now still lives in. Widowed as well, she is faced with raising her three sons — a pre-teen, a child and an infant — alone. But! As parallelism dictates, when Danny’s brother-in-law and best friend, Jesse and Joey, move in, so too does D.J.’s sister and best friend, Stephanie and Kimmy.
Watching the series, we noticed some similarities and differences between the original ABC comedy and the new Netflix comedy.
Related: Read Hypable’s official review of Fuller House
The Similarities:
• It’s the same house. The same furniture. That being said, the look and feel of every scene is a bit different, considering the computer screen you’re watching the show on is a better resolution than the television sets of the 90s, but it’s all there.
• It’s easy to forget that the premises of these shows are terribly sad: a parent is left widowed and to raise his/her three young children without their spouse.
•There still a lesson to be learned. The oldest sibling needs to learn how to make sacrifices for the good of the family and sometimes, it’s okay to ask for help. The musical overture doesn’t have the same poignancy in Fuller House as it did in Full House, but that’s because the idea of a Lesson in Every Episode died somewhere around the mid-00’s, when family-friendly shows started to turn more towards secret pop stars and secret wizards that live on Waverly Place.
Differences
• Frankly, reader, the differences outweigh the similarities significantly. But that’s not too surprisingly, since everything has changed in twenty-nine years. Though, (most) of the actors still look phenomenal.
• The show feels less… earnest? The child actors are all polished and try to nail their lines, but there’s not an ease to watching the show that there was with the original. They’re too aware that they’re on television to make us love them.
• One of the most obvious differences is one that’s already been widely reported: The Olsen twins aren’t a part of the show. The cast have said in interviews that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were invited to Fuller House but did not accept offers to reprise Michelle Tanner. If you read some reviews of Fuller House, you may think they smartly dodged a bullet.
As you might have guessed by now, Fuller House is not Full House. I was thinking about this, and realized a show that did successfully have a “reboot” was not billed as such: Girl Meets World. It is able to maintain the integrity of the first show — including every 90s kid’s OTP: Topanga and Cory — while still growing and becoming its own beast. Fuller House plays more like fan service that everyone was asking for, but no one really wanted.
Fuller House is available for streaming on Netflix beginning Friday, February 26.
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