by Eric Lendrum
Disney has announced that the beloved “National Treasure” film franchise will be rebooted into a TV series that will feature a young female DREAMer as its main character, as reported by Breitbart.
The new series will premiere on Disney’s exclusive streaming platform Disney+, with the show’s description declaring that the story will be told “from the point of view of Jess Morales, a twenty-year-old DREAMer who, with her diverse group of friends, sets off on the adventure of a lifetime to uncover her mysterious family history and recover lost treasure.”
“DREAMer” refers to the failed amnesty bill known as the DREAM Act, which Barack Obama tried to get passed through Congress while he was in office. When the bill could not garner bipartisan support to pass, he took the highly unconstitutional action of implementing most of the DREAM Act via executive order, which came to be known as the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” or DACA order. This order pledged to give blanket amnesty to illegal aliens who arrived in the United States as minors, and since the signing of the executive order, has become a legal and political football that has bounced from one court to another trying to determine its legality.
The National Treasure series of films first launched in 2004, with the first installment becoming a box office hit and earning over $100 million. Starring Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger, and Jon Voight, the film features a group of treasure hunters (led by Cage’s Benjamin Gates) trying to find a hidden stash of ancient treasure collected by the Freemasons, with the map to the treasure’s location being on the back of the Declaration of Independence, in invisible ink. In a race against a rival group of treasure hunters (led by Sean Bean), Gates and his allies must steal the Declaration and follow the clues across various historical landmarks in the United States in order to retrieve the treasure.
The sequel, “Book of Secrets,” was released in 2007 and features much of the same cast. In this installment, Gates and his friends must race against another team of rival treasure hunters (this time led by Ed Harris) and find the alleged “President’s Book,” written only by and for presidents of the United States, for a clue to the location of a lost city of gold similar to the legend of El Dorado.
The series was widely praised for its action and pacing, as well as its tendency to cleverly insert educational history lessons about American figures, locations, monuments, and past eras into the treasure-hunting aspects of the story. But the description of the planned reboot for the series seems to indicate that the broader focus on American history will be tossed aside in favor of a more specific focus on the main character’s individual history, even though her family does not come from the United States and thus would not be a part of American history.
The inclusion of the word “diverse” to describe her “group of friends” also demonstrates that the series is following the current Hollywood trend to forcefully insert token minority characters into the story, even at the cost of replacing previously-established White characters, just so it can claim to be a “diverse” series.
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
