As we look back at him, Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners” looks more and more like a tragic figure. At least he was like King Lear or Othello or Oedipus in not knowing something about himself that the audience did know. In his case, what he didn’t know was that his self presentation was transparent to them – that everyone could see through his bluster to the weak, vain, greedy, petty self that he sought to keep hidden.

But where the essential information withheld from tragic heroes would lead to their irretrievable ruin, Jackie’s Ralph was like the Warner Bros.’ immortal Wile E. Coyote: Blown up, shot, or dismembered on every encounter with his nemesis, usually by a combination of bad luck and his own foolishness, he would be back next week for more.

Like the coyote, too, the other thing he didn’t know and that the audience did is that he would never win the contest of wits in which he was engaged.

What the Road Runner is to the coyote, of course, his wife, Alice (Audrey Meadows), was to Ralph. But the real genius of the original conception was the character of Ed Norton (Art Carney), the goofball sewer worker and friend to whom Ralph always felt effortlessly superior but who was in reality another Road Runner, always one step ahead of him. Ralph was the original lovable loser.

All this overlong preamble to a discussion of John Schultz’s movie version of “The Honeymooners” is necessary, I think, because we have to understand the immense cultural significance of the archetype that Mr. Schultz and company are taking on. From Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, American popular culture’s images of what feminists like to call “the Patriarchy” have owed an enormous, irreplaceable debt to Gleason’s Ralph Kramden.

It is also important to understand this because there is little evidence that Mr. Schultz’s movie does. Putting Cedric the Entertainer into the Jackie Gleason part looks like not a bad idea on the face of it, and Mike Epps as Norton is also promising. But neither of them proves to be quite up to the semi-mythic roles they have taken on. And Gabrielle Union’s Alice is pretty, pert, and priggish, but nothing like the Machiavellian genius of her prototype.

I couldn’t help wondering if their failure had anything to do with the racial translation. Maybe the filmmakers thought that a black Ralph who was very much like Gleason’s would be just too Amos ‘n’ Andy-ish to pass muster in our age of delicate racial sensitivities. Heaven forbid that Ralph should slip down the artistic ladder from archetype to stereotype.

Likewise, his marital relationship is affected by our knowledge of the matriarchal elements in black culture – here emphasized even more by the presence of Carol Woods as Ralph’s big and overbearing mother-in-law – which make Alice’s mastery of her man a less remarkable or individual achievement.

Cedric’s Ralph is still a New York City bus driver, still addicted to get-rich-quick schemes that always fail and still living in the same tenement – or something that can pass as a tenement in today’s New York – downstairs from Ed and Trixie (Regina Hall). Now, however, the four of them dream of buying a duplex together, and this ambition provides the excuse for a rather tedious plot involving a race against time to raise $20,000 before a wicked developer (Eric Stoltz) can snap the house up and turn it into condos.

Well, movies need to have bigger plots than television shows, but I still think it a mistake to make Ralph’s get-rich-quick schemes actually for something. Thus we lose sight of the essential fact about them, which is that their failures stand for Ralph’s larger failure to be what he thinks he already is: a man of consequence.

In other words, it is vital that we know in advance that the schemes will fail, since their failure confirms what we already know about Ralph. But the requirements of movie comedy also demand that, for all his failures, Cedric’s version of Ralph should ultimately succeed, and beat out the developer. And Ralph cannot be Ralph if he is a success.

That Mr. Schultz and his committee of screenwriters know this at some level is shown by their making Ralph fail even as he succeeds. Of course we know he must be successful in raising the $20,000, but even as he does so he misses out on a much larger fortune. This is the film’s apology for making him successful at all, but, like everything else here, it only obscures his essential Ralph-ness.

Though less sure about this, I am also inclined to think it a mistake to give Ralph a moment of self-awareness when he confesses to Norton that he only knows the answers to his riddles because he bought the same book. “You always thought I was the smart one,” he says, “and if you ever stopped thinking that, I wouldn’t know what I am anymore.” If Ralph were capable of that much insight into himself, he would also cease to be Ralph.

In some ways it’s not fair to compare the movie to an unforgettable classic of American popular culture, and if it were more successful on its own terms, there would be less point in making the comparison. But I found the jokes mostly unfunny and the characters at best only intermittently engaging. On its own terms, the movie is a bore. It is only by its mostly incidental connection with the original “Honeymooners” that it is worth discussing at all.