Let's Play Swamp Thing (NES) ...Badly

Hey gang, check this thing out. I'm experimenting with some new different kinds of content, specifically focusing on geeking out over old school video games. I did my first Let's Play, which in my case is more of a Let's Suck. It's for the classic NES shitfest Swamp Thing, based on the five episode long cartoon from the 90's you maybe had the toys from... 

Let's Play Swamp Thing ...Badly by f100003626804231

Videogame Movie Thing Wrap-Up!

In case you missed any of them, assuming you didn't do so on purpose, here's a handy compilation of the impromptu videogames into movies series I just finished (ish):

1: Article: The Movie - The Game

2: More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And Who I'd Pick To Make Them) 

3: Even More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

4: Yet More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

5: Still More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

6: Christ, There's More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

7: He's Seriously Still Doing Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)?

8: You're Almost Certainly Getting Sick Of These Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

9: Could This Be The Last Set Of Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)?

10: (BONUS) - From The Idea Hole: Action 52: The Series

From The Idea Hole: Action 52: The Series

Okay, fair warning: This is easily the single nerdiest thing I have ever written on this blog. It is far too long and thought out to justify its premise, and will be relatable to like five people, who will probably still think I'm an asshole after reading this. You Have Been Warned! 

So anyway, there's this really shitty old school game called Action 52. It originally came out unlicensed for the Nintendo, and was later ported to the Sega Genesis in a much different form, the name in both cases coming from the promise of 52 action packed games in one cartridge. When they worked at all, pretty much every single game in the set sucked massive balls, and it's now known mostly for being one of the most epically terrible video games of all time, so bad that it has developed a cult following and inspired an entire movement to re-make each individual game better.

The most insane thing about the whole mess, at least for me, was how the creators of Action 52 had such grand plans for this property, seeing its (supposedly) best game The Cheetah Men as a launching pad for a multimedia empire akin to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They even went so far as to make a sequel featuring the characters, though it went unreleased, sharing the same fate as the aborted toy line and Saturday morning cartoon show. A game as bad as Action 52 isn't necessarily remarkable on its own, as the video game industry has been and still is replete with cheap shovelware designed to take your money before you realize what shit you paid for, but in this case, it's as if they were so divorced from the reality of how bad this game was, and actually thought it was good enough to sustain a franchise.

So what would that franchise have been like? For a little more history on the game and a demonstration of how it is played, you can watch one of my favorite AVGN episodes HERE, but right now, I'm more interested in the notion that the world of Action 52 might have continued in some other form, the flimsiest of game stories and characters expanded and possibly amalgamated into a single storyline, an Action 52 canon if you will. I've talked before on this blog about my love for 90's action cartoons, most obviously tailor made with large casts of unique looking characters to inspire subsequent action figure sets, so for today's pitch, I thought I'd try to imagine the Action 52 Animated Series that might have been.

Could This Be The Last Set Of Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)?

I love my Wii. Yeah, okay, I did that on purpose, but the point is, of all the latest systems, not counting the Wii U which I've yet to play, the Nintendo Wii has always been my favorite. In a modern gaming landscape where everything else is either a God of War rip off, a Call of Duty rip off, or a Diablo rip off, the Wii is the only system that appeals to the old school gamer like me who just plays video games for some low intensity escapist entertainment. I don't want to play a game that I have to employ hours of complicated strategy just to beat, or a game where I have to team up with friends or random people on line and log in to a server that might not be around in ten years if I consider it a classic down the road. I just want to have fun, and that's where the Wii beats out the PS3 and the 360 every time, at least in my mind. I'll probably go back at some point and look at some older consoles that I've never personally owned, but for now, this will be the last entry in this series, and my love for the Wii, double entendre or not, is why I thought to order this series the way I did, to save the best for last. So here are my pitches -

1: Deadly Creatures

 One of the first games I ever played on the Wii, with a really strange and original set up, following a story inspired by the Treasure of the Sierra Madre about two men (voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper) in search of Civil War gold, as seen from the perspective of a spider and a scorpion fighting various predators and each other. The thematic parallels between the two stories and the size differential setting the two worlds apart bring to mind an adult version of movies like Osmosis Jones, where live action and animation are combined to show what happens just under our noses, only this time, with a serious and bloody tale of betrayal and revenge instead of a cutesy kids' story. Rather than traditional animation, I actually see this as a claymation or puppetry movie for the arachnid scenes, made almost like a nature documentary without the narrator, with no voices or other attempts to make the non-human characters anthropomorphic, just like the game. Obviously, you couldn't bring Dennis Hopper back, by I imagine Thornton would be game for this, and there are plenty of other hard bitten actors you could bring in to fill the other role. My pick would probably be William Forsythe.

You're Almost Certainly Getting Sick Of These Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

I've never really been much of a PC gamer, certainly not in the last ten or fifteen years anyway. It's not that I have anything against the games, except maybe that when I grew up so many of them seemed to be RTS war simulators which isn't really a genre that appeals to me, but mostly I just didn't have the time, money, patience, and know how to continually update my system to accommodate new and better games requiring new and better technology to play them. Give me a console and every game designed to play on it just plays, no advanced graphics card upgrade required. That being said, I have played a few PC games over the years, so I thought I'd take a brief detour from my consolography and talk about some of the classic old school computer games I'd like to see on the big screen.

1: The Tex Murphy Series

A noir detective series set in a post apocalyptic future divided between mutants and humans, with a wise cracking Philip Marlowe wannabe often inadvertently stumbling into cases with the fate of the world usually hanging in the balance. I came a bit late into these games, first playing the third installment Under A Killing Moon (which from what I gather is the case for a lot of people, as the first two games were a little more obscure). It came out in the heyday of FMV games, but somehow resisted the tendency of those games to suck massive balls, mostly with its humorous, lighthearted tone counterbalancing the darkness of the material. Maybe its cheating to have an FMV game series turned into a movie, especially one which boasts a few name actors in the later installments, as in many ways it technically already is one, even if its interactive. Still, if only because we need this series back in some form, and the adventure game genre is effectively dead, I say movie-ify that shit. Given the acerbic nature of the character, I think it would be a good Ryan Reynolds vehicle after he's done raping the corpse of Highlander.

He's Seriously Still Doing Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)?

I'm running out of clever titles for this series. Last time I talked about the first system I ever bought with my own money, the Sega Dreamcast. After that debacle, I went back to having my parents buy this shit for me, so I wouldn't feel so bad if they became obsolete within a year. I went straight from Dreamcast to the Playstation 2, which I found surprisingly difficult to find adaptable games for. I think as the stories in games become more involved, my level of excitement about imagining the possibilities of them as movies dwindles, because most of the work is already done for me. What can you talk about with a potential God of War movie beyond the amount of boobs and blood?

1: Psychonauts

I always like to take a second pass at these lists to make sure I'm picking games that would make good movies, and not just games I really like that I want to talk about on my blog. I was concerned that this was one of the latter cases, thinking that I'd just say give it to Pixar or Dreamworks, but as I thought about how to make it live action, the idea appeals to me more and more. As bad as it sounds, I think Robert Rodriguez in Spy Kids mode might be good for this. Though the writing got progressively worse, the Spy Kids movies always looked really good, as did Shark Boy and Lava Girl, and having a plucky young kid (or kids if you want to expand it into an ensemble with the other campers) traveling through fractured inner worlds inside the minds of insane people seems like the perfect follow-up for Rodrigez if he wants another family friendly franchise.

Christ, There's More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

You know the drill, parts One, Two, and Three are here. This time we're taking a look at movie adaptations inspired by games from the first video game system I ever purchased with my own money, which in less than a year also became my first real lesson concerning both the value of a dollar and the evils of Capitalism - The Sega Dreamcast! Ordinarily, I pick a few of my favorites from each system's catalog, and I have to make some tough choices about which ones I want to include. This time, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here, as there was not really a lot to choose from. I try to stick to games I've actually played, but here, I had to take a few liberties on that rule as well.

1: Power Stone

Perhaps the best game for the system that I ever played, or if not, second only to House of the Dead 2, which I couldn't include on this list because it's already been made (shittily, from what I hear, as I've never actually seen it). Power Stone was a fighting game that had a few unique hooks for its time, including an almost completely destructible environment and characters that could take on alternate, more powerful forms by grabbing the titular stones (no double entendre intended) before their opponent. Use the typical fighting game movie format, with an ensemble cast of as many of the characters from the game as you can fit, now in an It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World style race to the finish line to find and claim a set of three magical artifacts separated and hidden around the world that grant ultimate power to whoever can bring them all together. Have the various characters join up into factions, each ready to back stab the others and each other, as only one can reach the goal.

Still More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

Welcome back to another edition of me not wanting to risk watching another movie today as bad as The Odd Life Of Timothy Green, otherwise known as Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them). Last time, we talked about classic Sega Genesis/Master System games and the movie ideas they inspired, and since I've arbitrarily decided to go through this series in order of the consoles I owned as a kid, next up is a leap ahead to the original Playstation.

1: Tecmo's Deceptions: Invitation To Darkness

The story of a man who sells his soul to Satan to escape death and becomes the unseen master of a demonically powered mansion filled with traps and assorted horrors. I never got too far into this game, but played it enough to want to see it played out in a feature film. The cool part about the game from what I remember is that it was the first game I ever played that had what we now think of as morality systems. Before Bioshock and Infamous, this was a game where the victims who entered the house may be criminals or murderers themselves, or just as easily could be innocent people, and you had the choice whether to kill them or let them go. I never got far enough into it to know this, but evidently you could also turn the corpses of your victims into Frankenmonsters to do your bidding. I'd see it as a standard haunted house movie, but with the murderous caretaker as the protagonist, a sympathetic villain who we explore psychologically as he struggles with the decision of whether to take the souls of those who come to his door, each death chipping away at his humanity even as he tries to shed the yoke of the Devil's hold on him. The main guests would be your typical horror movie backpacking teenagers just looking for a place to stay for the night, who invariably must avoid deadly traps and an army of monsters created from the previous guests.

2: Thrill Kill

A game supposedly so controversial that it was never officially released, only playable via bootlegged disc. A fighting game taking the anything goes mentality of Mortal Kombat and taking it to its furthest extreme, going out of their way to offend as much as possible. The basic plot is that a group of dead sinners, the souls of murderers and maniacs given new monstrous forms that reflect their depravity in life, fight a tournament in Hell for the chance to be reincarnated on Earth. I'd switch it up a bit and have the tournament take place on Earth, with the participants in human form but manifesting demonic powers as they fight to the death, the last man standing getting to stay alive and out of Hell. We'd follow the two least villainous characters as our protagonists, Oddball, a serial killer profiler struggling with his own psychopathy, and Violet Boregard, a contortionist and rape victim turned revenge killer. The villains would eventually unite under the dominance of the most visible bad guy from the game, the dominatrix Belladonna. Do it as gritty and stylish as possible, a cross between Mortal Kombat and Se7en. Maybe even get David Fincher to direct. Incedently, now that I see the word, I'm surprised Mortal Kombat never used Mentality along with Fatality and Babality. They could have been really witty or subtle death scenes that you'd have to think about for a while.

Yet More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

Welcome back to part two, or possibly part four depending on how you count, of my impromptu series of blog posts that are slightly easier to write because I don't have to watch any movies or think hard about shit, otherwise known as Video games I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them). This time I'll be taking games from the Sega Genesis, otherwise known as the Mega Drive if you don't live in America. A brief note, given the era of these games and when I initially played them, keep in mind that unless otherwise stated, I'm envisioning these as cheapo 90's movies ala the heyday of video game adaptations, designed to fit in with the likes of Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Double Dragon, and Super Mario Bros.

1: Altered Beast

A simple classic story of two shape shifting and I'm pretty sure undead brothers (?) trying to save their girlfriend (?) from an evil wizard. The ancient Greek setting allows for a lot of weird magicy shit to blend together, not to mention Werewolves/bears/tigers/dragons/etc vs. zombies. Still, I'd go epic with this, something in the vein of the recent Clash of the Titans remake or Immortals, except, you know, not as shitty as the recent Clash of the Titans remake or Immortals. If I remember correctly, all the bosses in this game were just different forms of the one bad guy, which removes the need most video game movies have of either ignoring the multiple villains in favor of one, or trying to cram them all in, and sets up an ending that could rise to a bad ass bloody tribute to the Merlin vs. Mad Madame Mim fight from The Sword In The Stone. Though if they were gonna do this, I'd say invert the order of them so the freaky head throwing boss from level one is the last thing they fight, instead of that bitch Rhino.

2: The Streets Of Rage Trilogy

When I say trilogy, of course I mean one movie that encompasses the story of all three games, because its not like the storyline for each game was so in depth as to require three whole movies to re-tell it. Maybe two movies, just to save some of the weirder characters from the third game like the cyborg doctor and the kangaroo. Still, its a story right out of 90's straight to video action awesome, with the last honest cops in a city owned by the criminal syndicate of Mr. X quitting the corrupt police force to take the law into their own hands and punch electric dominatrices in the face, with their roller skating little brother. And their kangaroo. You even have a couple of characters you can start out as villains and have turn to the side of good in the Bruce Lee-esque Shiva and the horribly offensive flaming homosexual stereotype Ash, two bad guys that become secret playable characters in the game. Because of course you have to include the character so controversial they left him out of the U.S. release. Next thing, you're gonna tell me we can't have kangaroos and children punching dominatrices in the face.

Even More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And How I'd Make Them)

I've talked about this topic before, and its also a recurring theme on my podcast, the Dirty Sons of Pitches, and every time I think of a few video game to movie adaptations, I always realizes that I have way more than can or should fit into any one article, so I figured, why not make it a running series. I think I'll go console by console at first, throwing out five to ten ideas for each one, and then go back as needed whenever I come up with a few more good ones I've missed. First up, the first video game console I ever owned - the NES:

1: Base Wars 

I'm not typically a fan of sports movies, mostly because I'm not a big fan of sports, mostly because I sit around and play video games all day (and watch Vamps). The one sports game I did always enjoy was a baseball game for the original Nintendo called Base Wars, because unlike every other baseball game ever made, it did away with all that stupid shit like famous players and humans running around bases, and replaced them with kick ass robots beating the shit out of each other. I would envision the Base Wars movie as the hard R baseball equivalent of Real Steel, following a human talent scout who looks for new robots for a down and out team of misfit droids. You can throw in all the normal tropes of a baseball movie, the hotshot prodigy pitcher/hitter, the crabby coach, the sappy nostalgia and bullshit reverence for the honor and history of the game, but do it all with robots that kill each other to get on base as a parody of the genre as insane as the original game was.

2: Excite Bike

Another NES favorite of mine, with a simple gimmick of motorbike racing and no real plot to speak of. So how would I adapt it? Well, you'd have to make a lot of shit up for one thing, but still stay true to the spirit of the game, and so I'd take inspiration from the best aspect of the original game, the create your own track system, where the player could add their own hills and ramps and so forth for custom levels. I'd set it in the future and give it a sort of Hunger Games twist, where riders are forced to participate in a game that continues until only one racer has survived. The trick, the audience at home designs the track in real time, constantly causing it to shift as the riders traverse it, adding and replacing various hazards and death traps along the way specifically to kill them.

More Videogames I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And Who I'd Pick To Make Them)

A little while ago I posted an essay about my general thoughts on video game movies, and ended with the top five videogames I'd like to see made into movie, and the way in which I see them working best in film. Reading over the list again and re-listening to the podcast that inspired it, I couldn't help wanting to come up with a few more. So here's a new batch of videogame movie pitches, in no particular order.

1: Okami

One of my favorite games of the modern era, a beautiful distillation of Japanese myths and legends and an interesting play mechanic with the use of painting to fight enemies and literally change the world. Probably a hard thing to adapt, with a lot of potential to screw up and turn into an Ice Age style farce, what with the protagonist being a wolf (or wolf shaped God thing). My thinking, go the Pixar route (or at least Pixar before the last two shitty ones), and make it a love letter to ancient Japan in the same way Brave was a love letter to Ancient Ireland. You'd have to resist the urge to make the little bug sidekick too wacky, try to avoid John Lequizamo or Eddie Murphy, and probably simplify the story a great deal, but I think it could work, even with the game's environmental message thrown in (minus the Ferngully-esque pretentiousness).

Article: The Movie - The Game

 

On the inaugural episode of my awesomely amazing podcast The Dirty Sons of Pitches, my good friend Nathan put forward an argument that due to the nature of their respective mediums, there would never be a truly great video game movie that was both faithful to the original source material, and entertaining in its own right. This argument was made in the context of defending the merits of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie and presumably was more of a thinly veiled articulation of his homosexual, Single White Female-esque obsession with Bob Hoskins, but it got me thinking about the relationship between video games and movies, and whether our experiences with them are really supposed to be so different.

Roger Ebert famously groused (if one can grouse without a functioning lower jaw) that video games could never be considered great art. Without spending pages upon pages uselessly sputtering out nerd rage over his reductive definitions of art, great art, video games, and film, I'll just say that I found his position to be somewhat frustratingly dismissive. To his credit, Ebert would eventually concede that, while he still holds the same opinion, his personal unwillingness to actually play any video game that might prove him wrong may have left him somewhat ill-equipped to deal with the subject fairly. Oh well, live and let live.

The thing is, my good friend Mr. Zoebl essentially went even further by arguing that the interactive nature of video games themselves, so apparently alien to how we appreciate movies and how they are designed to be appreciated, makes them, as a genre, almost impossible to adapt into film. Films can be great art, as can novels and even comic books, which can be adapted into films which can then be considered great art, but somehow video games are different. And it's not just the presence of rules, a system of scoring, or a clear objective "win" as in Ebert's example, but the fact that our immersion into video games involves active physical participation, as opposed to passive watching or reading, that renders them into something else opposed to translation into another medium.

But is this actually the case? Going back to the Mario example, is it really the interactivity, or really any aspect of Mario specifically as a video game that makes it difficult to translate? At first blush it does seem so, what with all the crazy imagery and non sequitur elements thrown together into a hodgepodge of colorful nonsense that is intrinsic to the Mario universe, but while I can't say it would be easy to take all of those elements and make them into a coherent story, I would argue that this has more to do with the surrealist nature of the material than the fact that it's a game and not a novel. It's difficult to translate William S. Burroughs into film too, but that doesn't mean that we should stop making books into movies. Certainly there are more linear and even cinematic games, and more surreal and non-linear movies for that matter (David Lynch, I'm talking to you, and I know your reading this!). I just think that the rush to blame video games as an art form (fuck you, Ebert) for the terrible works they inspire is misplaced, as it would be to condemn all novels for the narrative complexity of a few.

No doubt there is an element of literature that is fundamentally different from cinema such that the complete scope of any novel is never going to be absolutely filmable, and the same is true for cinema and video games. The primary difference is that translating novels to film is typically a problem of condensing the material to fit the structure of a movie, while adapting a video game typically involves expanding on the story to fit that same structure. Either way, the process is essentially taking one thing as the inspiration to make a completely different thing, such that there will always be some degree of pain for those who enjoyed the original, but ultimately, the goal is to come as close as possible and to at least maintain the spirit of the source material being used. Obviously this is a very subjective standard, but still, I don't see how video games are inherently different in this regard.

A much simpler explanation would seem to be that the difference has less to do with the medium as those working within it, or to put it another way, the desire and pressure to maintain the spirit of the source material is greater with a book, because literature is a more respected art form. Movie people are not always and I would guess very rarely game people. The people who love, appreciate, and respect films enough to want to make them are not typically going to be the kind of people who love, appreciate, and respect video games as a narrative art form, otherwise they would be making them. Instead, most video game movies are done by committee and helmed by hacks like Uwe Boll who don't care about fans of the original or anything other than German tax loop holes and straight to video boobs. This is also why video games based on movies almost always suck, because the people who made the movie are usually in charge of the game, and have no understanding of how to make it good or inclination to do so. By contrast, the cross section of literature and film fans is much larger, at least in terms of that one book a writer or director might fall in love with and want to put on the big screen with the respect that he feels it deserves.

And to the other point, since when is a movie going experience passive anyway? Obviously I'm not directing John McClane through the building as he die hards his way through Die Hard, but I am no less invested in the story as I am in Mega Man's solemn quest to destroy his robotic brethren for the sake of the world. I don't want to meet the guy who watches a movie passively, slack-jawed and eyes wide as the story thoughtlessly washes over him with no analysis or anticipation. When I watch a movie for the first time, assuming it does its job, I'm investing in the main characters, identifying with them, empathizing with them, and trying to guess where they will end up. The only difference between that and video games is that it is easier to do with the latter, as you are directly in control of the main character's actions. The end will always be the same in movies save for the occasional DVD alternate ending, but the same is true for most games as well. Mario will always save the princess, we're just waiting to see how. The only choice a gamer has that a moviegoer doesn't is whether they decide to try hard enough to make it to that predetermined end. If anything, the interactivity makes the narrative experience ultimately more fulfilling. Yeah, that's right, fuck movies. Fuck 'em all right in the mouth.

And now, because no article on the Internet is complete without a pointless, arbitrary, and subjective top whatever list, here are the
Top Five Video Games I'd Like To See Made Into Movies (And Who I'd Pick To Make Them).

Number 5: Tim Burton's Chakan The Forever Man

The Story: The world's greatest swordsman wins a duel with Death and finds himself cursed to walk the Earth as a freakish immortal zombie until all supernatural evil in the world is vanquished. A somewhat ironic concept, being highly skilled in combat and immortal, considering how punishingly difficult and easy to die it was in this game. Perfect for what would be Burton's first real foray into full on, balls out action. The temptation would be to put Johnny Depp in the lead role given the director, but I'd give it to Hugo Weaving.




Number 4: Robert Rodriguez' Contra

The Story: Two commandos travel deep into the jungle to fight hordes of alien monsters for no other reason than a love of blowing shit up, aided only by their aerial support and its huge cache of special weapon balloons. Seems like the perfect vehicle for Michael Bay, but I'm giving it to Rodriguez for his nearly pitch-perfect treatment of Predators. Stars Jason Statham and another actor just like Statham, only in red pants instead of blue, and like me in the game, they can only beat the movie with the Konami code. At first, this was a tie between Contra and Ninja Gaiden, but fuck it, let's throw him in there too. Contra Gaiden. I just came in my pants at that sentence.


Number 3: Takashi Miike's Killer 7

The Story: When a demonic terrorist group threatens to de-stablize international politics, an elite team of supernatural assassins is called in to take them down, all of whom turn out to be psychic projections of the wheelchair-bound sniper Harmon Smith as your mind is fucked into oblivion. This list was originally going to be old school cartridge games only, but I couldn't help putting this one on here. I'd go with Miike to direct with Clint Eastwood or Gary Oldman cast as Harmon, or maybe an insane collaboration between the Ichi director and David Lynch with Kyle MacLachlan in old man makeup, though that might result in the movie equivalent of the brown noise, its weirdness so profound that it induces uncontrollable loss of bowel control at every viewing.

Number 2: Kenneth Branagh's Legacy of Kain

The Story: Time traveling vampires duel across the centuries of a fantasy landscape, unlocking the conspiracies of a conniving Chronomancer and his master, a giant Lovecraftian beast living at the fulcrum of life and death, as they curse each other with Shakespearean gravitas. Again, not quite an old school game, and a bit repetitive and boring to play at that, especially in the later installments, but that's how fucking good the story and the dialogue was that kept you playing just to see the next cut scene. I don't know enough British actors to cast it, and it would probably have to be Andy Serkis-style motion capture anyway considering one of the characters speaks with no lower jaw (Unless Ebert is available). Kenneth Branagh to direct, because so much of the movie would play out like the cool parts of Thor in Asgard, before the shitty Earth parts.

Number 1: Paul Verhoven's Mega Man

The Story: A robotic teenager is refitted into a killing machine, forced to wage a one man war against his own robot brothers to stop a mad man from destroying the world.I eluded to this in the article above, and yes, I know how silly it seems but just imagine it. A serious action sci-fi movie, played completely straight, with the director of Robocop turning the bright, sunny future world of Mega Man on its head the way only he can, doing for cyberpunk what Super Mario Bros. the Movie should have done for live action fantasy before it decided to do whatever it did to cyberpunk. You would almost have to go with an unknown for the Blue Bomber, but I'm thinking John Rhys Davis for Dr. Light and John Malkovich as Dr. Wily.

Alright Hollywood, you have your marching orders. Go make these movies! But only the exact ways described here, otherwise, you know, don't. Because left to your own devices you evidently suck at it. Which was kind of the point of the whole article. See above. That thing.