We’re starting to hear some positive buzz about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Apparently it doesn’t rape or ruin your childhood; rather, it may make you feel like a kid again. This is what a toy/cartoon adaptation should do, we guess, but we still wish they’d made a Reagan-era-style war movie instead of a CG-heavy action blockbuster with too much comic relief. Because even when we were little we knew the property was a young person’s version of the conservative, Cold War-informed military pictures of the 1980s. And if Rambo could get his own Saturday morning animated series, why couldn’t we get a hard-R-rated G.I. Joe after all these years?
We know the answer to that question, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re disappointed. See, while others might feel GIJTROC has ruined their childhood by being too unfaithful to the action figures and show, we feel it’s ruined our childhood because it isn’t the movie we dreamed of. So that’s how the following list of films was selected. Instead of going for all the obvious remakes and video game adaptations (we’ve never cared about games), we’re focusing on movies that really turned our beloved films, comics and cartoons of our youth into something we’re now almost embarrassed to ever admit we enjoyed.
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According to The Hollywood Reporter, a third installment of the live-action Scooby-Doo movie franchise begins shooting in Vancouver today. Unfortunately (hey, I thought the second one was a pretty faithful adaptation), the movie will be a direct-to-video release and all our favorite characters have been recast with unknowns. At least the voice of Scooby will now be performed by veteran voice actor Frank Welker, who has voiced the cartoon dog in tons of series and films and even worked on the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, for which he actually played “Freddy”.
Because there are likely few people talking about Scooby-Doo 3 and there are plenty of people instead discussing the possibilities surrounding the third installment in the Batman Begins-The Dark Knight series (such as who will play Catwoman, if the character is involved), here’s a clip from the animated classic Scooby-Doo Meets Batman that combines the two properties. Man, I’d sure love to see a live-action version of this. If only Heath Ledger’s Joker wore a tree log as part of a disguise. It might have been even better than his nurse uniform scenes.
I don’t know what is the worse idea, an all-CGI 3-D Smurfs movie, as Paramount had planned, or a CGI/live-action mix, as Sony Animation is now planning for our beloved blue communists friends. I guess if we only think back to Alvin and the Chipmunks and Underdog, it’s easy to think Sony’s new plan for The Smurfs is a terrible idea. But I think the second Scooby-Doo movie worked pretty well as far as cartoon adaptations go, and there’s a chance Hollywood could do a good job again, despite the majority (including Garfield: The Movie, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the first Scooby-Doo) being on the bad side.
That said, I’m still no fan of the trend. However, if it must continue, I think it would be interesting to see any of the following 15 animated series, all of which feature the necessary mix of talking animals (or inanimate objects) and humans, turned into live-action movies with CGI characters:
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