Hey, Mr. Earp, you ready for a makeover?

I’ve been watching variations on the OK Corral story since I was a zygote. Here are just a few of the explorations that I’ve seen, representing roughly one each decade:

“My Darling Clementine” (1946): Henry Fonda stars as Wyatt Earp, while Victor Mature plays a more complicated kind of Doc Holliday.

“Gunfight at the OK Corral” (1957): Burt Lancaster takes over the Earp role, while Kirk Douglas coughs his lungs out as Holliday.

“Hour of the Gun” (1967): James Garner steps away from his “Maverick” character to play Earp, and Jason Robards stars as Holliday.

“Doc” (1971): Little-known Harris Yulin revises the character of Earp as a bad man, while Stacy Keach portrays Holliday.

“Tombstone” (1993): In one of the better pairings, Kurt Russell plays the mustachioed Earp while Val Kilmer reinvents the role of the Southern-born, gentleman-psychopath Holliday.

“Wyatt Earp” (1994): While Kevin Costner underwhelms as Earp, Dennis Quaid almost matches Kilmer in capturing the complexity of Holliday.

What all these movies have in common is a standard telling of the OK Corral standoff, which usually has the (mostly) good-guy Earps (plus Holliday) standing up against the dastardly Clanton Gang. Those tellings may just get a makeover, though, now that some new eye-witness documents have been found regarding the gunfight.

Wow. Think Jerry Bruckheimer is gonna jump on this?

Below : No matter what the new documents regarding the gunfight at the OK Corral have to say, nothing can match, much less improve on, what Val Kilmer does as Don Holliday in “Tombstone.”

But, then, Dennis quaid is no slouch as the drunken dentist either: