I haven’t seen the Russell Brand-led remake of “Arthur,” which hits theaters Friday, but thanks to Netflix’s nifty streaming service I watched the 1981 original, a childhood favorite, last night. While I was slightly relieved to discover I no longer have the movie memorized (it turns out that one of the best lines was one I’m not sure even sank in on innumerable teenage viewings — “Everyone who drinks is not a poet. Some of us drink because we aren’t poets”), I was gobsmacked by how melancholy the picture is. It’s a P.G. Wodehouse piece filtered through Carter-era malaise.

Here we have a lonely near-billionaire who gets berated and slapped by his own butler (“You little s–t”), is being forced to marry someone he doesn’t love and, not improbably, takes refuge in alcoholism. He meets (and has sex with) a hooker who tells him, “My mom died when I was six. My father raped me when I was 12” and replies by saying, “So, you had six relatively good years then.” I’m guessing that line won’t be in the remake. Even the Christopher Cross title song is glum and wan and diffident, practically mumbled. The one-sheet for the original showed a silly, dire man in a tophat at sea in a gargantuan bathtub; the remake features the title character smiling and surrounded by people. The central importance of isolation seems to have been abandoned.

The lovers in the movie are (as the rich one) a doomed working-class half-pint with a clubfoot (Dudley Moore), and (as the poor one) a showbiz princess (Liza Minnelli) whose drug-stuffed mother died in her 40s. There’s a death scene. And the whole story is being told by a writer-director (Steve Gordon) who would die at 42 the same year he got his Oscar nomination for writing this near-perfect film. By the way, “Arthur” was a PG movie (PG-13 didn’t yet exist) that was marketed to, and hugely enjoyed by, millions of kids. Today, not only do kids not go to films like “Arthur” but adults go to kids’ films by the million.

Generation X became a popular term around 1999-91, when it was used to describe then-recent college graduates facing an economic recession. I think “Arthur” is a quintessential Gen X comedy whose lessons were fully absorbed by my notoriously cynical age group when we were teens: We learned that money couldn’t buy us love, that self-medicating was a necessity, that our loved ones were going to die on us and that making fun of the absurdity around us was the only possible response. I shudder to think what the remake will contain, but assuming it’s as bad as it looks in the trailers, perhaps we should blame today’s better-adjusted, more earnest and hopeful moviegoers, who fully expect to find love, money and happiness by the truckload.