retro-fitted

As any Californian will know, if a house ad says the property has been retro-fitted, it means that after it was built anti-earthquake reinforcements were added in the basement - a necessary move for many older houses put up before anti-earthquake technology developed to its present level (how good that is we won't know until it is too late, but that's another story).
This summer, the whole of Southern Californian culture seems to be retro-fitted - not earthquake-proof, but with a distinctly rear-view perspective. Comic-con, a San Diego get-together for addicts of everything from Batman to Star Wars, is attracting thousands. Movie retrospectives are on virtually year-round in Hollywood, culminating in Cinecon at the Egyptian next month. The Delorean car is making such a comeback that there are plans to restart production now John Delorean is conveniently in the great driving seat in the sky, and there will be a Delorean car convention at Universal Studios this week to publicise the fact that the Back to the Future ride is about to close ('Positively your last chance') after, ooh, 25 years of shaking the punters around. And I reckon that movies such as Transformers, Harry Potter and The Simpsons all have a retro feel about them. Potter is set in the 1950s, the Simpsons in the 1980s and Transformers - well, HG Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1896 (but don't tell Tom Cruise - and, oh yes, the WW film has been the excuse for one of the more spectacular new set recreations on the Universal back lot tour, just behind the Psycho house). And that's without the current mania for anything by the Bronte sisters. 'Ee, chook, it's reet nippy up eer in Howarth wi'out the movie royalties to keep us warm. Reckon we was allus born too early and now we're out of copyright, dammit.' 'Hush thy mouth, yoong Charlotte, or I'll 'ave that JK Rowling coom down from Edinburgh and belt you with her bank balance.'
I know that depicting the past is creatively more bankable than trying anything new, and the media seems to be going through one of its cautious phases at the moment, maybe because it is trying to assess the impact of the internet and things like blogs, but this business of looking backwards has been taken a little too far: I mean, even Berries and Cream....