The problems of turning a toy into a movie (who knew?)…

Pooey on that. I want the Play Doh movie!!!

How about turning a game into a movie?

I read this in today’s Tribune (I know, I’m 1 of the few idiots to still subscribe to a newspaper), that the new Battleship movie starring “Friday Night Lights” star Taylor Kitsch(?) will have the Navy battle an alien armada(?!!). Oh Man! At least the military will be the good guys, but I bet the battleship(s) will have environmentally green engines instead of nuclear reactors.

Just a note – battleships didn’t have nuclear engines. They were only “nuclear” insofar as in the 1980s they were equipped with Tomahawk missiles (which have a nuclear capability).

And of course no one in the entire world has any battleships in service anymore. I suppose with a year or two of preparation, the USA could get our last two Iowa-class battleships into the sea. But I’d rather have a Russian Kirov-class cruiser, a USA Ohio-class submarine, or even a modern Japanese Kongo-class guide-missile destroyers. Any of those would be fantastically more effective (which is why we got rid of the old battleships).

Well, considering that Pixar has already successfully done toys as well as cars I don’t think that toy cars would be much of a problem for them. I’d actually see that one, though…

As far as this flick goes- I wonder what the over/under is going to be for how many time the term ‘Hot Wheels’ shows up in the script.

I think building a movie around something like Hot Wheels is just a stupid idea (will there be a rival Johnny Lightning movie? Micro Machines?), the kind you sort of throw out at a meeting as a joke. That said, I really don’t see why actually doing a movie called Hot Wheels would be very hard. For the more general approach: A racing team (The Hot Wheels) has taken the sporting world by storm with their radically modified cars, and must now defend their superiority against a new team of racers with equally impressive cars but unethical actions. Insert love triangle with the rival lead drivers fighting over the cute mechanic of the Hot Wheels team who will ultimatley choose the guy on her home team and soup up his car with even more edge, and you’re good to go.
For the even more Hollywood way to go: A mechanic and his extended family have been turning heads with their souped up cars, collectively known as the Hot Wheels. When aliens attack and disable all modes of transportation with computer crashing heat rays, only the Hot Wheels can be recovered and must drive into the loop laden mother ship to find the reactor and sabotage it. Insert epic end chase as the Hot Wheels must evacuate the ship before the reactor blows.
That only took a few seconds.

The real problem is that the idea behind doing movies based on stuff like Hot Wheels and Battleship is so stupid that we can’t even effectively make fun of it. How do we mock something which is already at the nadir of creativity?

Okay, this whole idea of turning a toy or game into a movie is idiotic, but Battleship would have a chance if done right. By that I mean a period piece, maybe detailing a skirmish between us and the reds during the Cold War. Something like a less brutal Bedford Incident. I could go for a flick about Naval warfare, and it seems like its been a long while since we’ve had anything like that, but I really doubt they’d do anything that logical.