Remember that time they remade Starsky & Hutch as a comedy movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson?

It was a long time ago now: 2004. Hollywood was going through a phase of retooling popular 1970s TV shows for the big screen.

The film faithfully replicated all the superficial trappings of the series: the tomato-red Gran Torino with the white stripe, the wah-wah guitar theme music, the hairstyles and, of course, the clothes: Starsky’s big chunky cardigan, ball-crusher jeans and Adidas trainers; Hutch’s wide-lapelled leather jacket and polo-neck sweaters.

It also had Snoop Dogg pretending to be Huggy Bear. I say “pretending to be” rather than “playing”, because Snoop Dogg only ever plays one role, Snoop Dogg.

Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul — the real David Starsky and Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson — turned up in jokey, passing-the-torch cameos near the end, which only made you wish you’d been watching them for the previous 90 minutes instead of Stiller and Wilson.

Starsky & Hutch was arguably infinitely less terrible than the movie exhumations of Charlie’s Angels, S.W.A.T, The A-Team and The Dukes of Hazzard. Admittedly, that’s a bar lower than the one in the pub where the seven dwarfs used to drink. But I still hated the film. It was a lazy, empty, wink-at-the-audience parody-cum-piss-take that denied the original its basic self-respect.

Okay, so Starsky & Hutch the series was hardly great art, yet for half of its four-year run, before the emphasis changed from drama and action to knock-about comedy and buddy-buddy sentimentality, it was hugely entertaining and a good few notches above many other 1970s cop shows.

It’s earned the right to rest in peace. Instead, it’s set to be dragged out and stomped on all over again. A new Starsky & Hutch TV series is in the works — and this time the characters are women.

Now, before anyone goes off on one, I don’t have a blanket objection to gender-flipping characters. The problem with the all-female Ghostbusters — which was review-bombed by the usual horde of emotionally stunted, misogynistic halfwits — wasn’t the excellent cast, it was the mediocre script they were given to work with.

For the record, I never thought the original Ghostbusters was any great shakes either. It’s uneven and only intermittently funny. Its grossly overinflated reputation rests primarily on Bill Murray’s ad-libbing performance.

We’ve already seen successful gender-flipping on television. The rebooted The Equalizer turned Robert McCall into Robin McCall, played by Queen Latifah.

The character of Kono, a man in the original Hawaii Five-O, became a woman in the rebooted version. The new Magnum P.I. features a gender-flipped Higgins.

But Starsky & Hutch is different. It wasn’t that big, red monster of a car that made the original series successful. It wasn’t the often formulaic plots, many of them recycled from other US network series, a common practice in the 1970s.

The unrepeatable chemistry between Glaser and Soul was the key ingredient. It was the beating heart of the series. You can copy the car and the clothes, but never that. Take it away and what’s left?

Judging from a piece in The Hollywood Reporter recently, little more than the title.

If the new series gets the green light, it will apparently “centre on two female detectives, Sasha Starsky and Nicole Hutchinson. They solve crimes in the offbeat town of Desert City while staying true to their friendship, their awesomeness, and somehow also trying to unravel the mystery behind who sent their fathers to prison 15 years ago for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Given this sounds absolutely nothing like Starsky & Hutch, why call it Starsky & Hutch at all? Why not just make a completely new series featuring a pair of completely new female detectives — or would that require a little too much imagination?

Personally, I prefer David Soul’s idea. When he heard about the reboot, he tweeted: “Why not just reboot Paul and me — as a couple of old farts solving piddly-ass crimes at the assisted living facility?”

Bring on the tomato-red Zimmer frame!