The eighties are pretty much universally decried as the worst decade in living memory, right? Mullets and Spandau Ballet? Yuk. Far worse than the atrocities of the thirties and forties.
So it's no surprise then that filmmakers are now plumbing the depths of that sorry time as heartily as they have excavated the wartime years.
It turns out that unimaginable human horror is pretty entertaining when made into a high-budget film that you can sit in the dark and half watch while you stuff your face with popcorn and attempt to feel up whatever member of the opposite sex that you've tricked into coming to see Shindler?s List or Sophie?s Choice. So what franchise is it this time that people will be moaning about for ?raping their childhoods?? Find out after the jump.
So far we've had remakes of Transformers, The A-Team, Wall Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Karate Kid, and so on, until going to your local cinema is pretty much the same as watching ITV on a Thursday night in 1988 (apart from the fact that the movies aren't interrupted by Trevor MacDonald half way through for the News at Ten). So which is the latest franchise that people are inexplicably funding?
Rock ?Em Sock ?Em Robots
Yep, the barely-remembered game where two poorly-made robots punch one another, over and over again until you get bored and wait for videogames to be invented. That's going to be a movie. That's going to be a movie despite having the absence of plot, characterisation, dialogue, coherence, or basically any other factor that you need to make a movie not starring Lindsay Lohan. The AV Club burps:
Mattel is currently developing a movie based on Rock ?Em Sock ?Em Robots?reportedly Wolfgang Petersen is already attached as a possible director
Wolfgang Peterson? That's a real-life, proper, big name director (I didn't say a good director).? That should mean at the very least we can hope for lots of blowey-up action and the end of the world caused, or possibly prevented by, the arrival of some giant plastic robots that stand stock-still and flail unrealistically at one another until one gets broken or the operator gets bored and wanders off to do something more exciting. Something like ingesting a selection of household chemicals you find under the sink.
Now this is usually the place where we?d traditionally scoff and say something like ?Rock ?em Sock ?em Robots? God, what other dreadful ideas could they lift from the 80s and make into a movie? And then run down a short list of humourous alternatives. Or, ?that?ll be the worst movie idea that comes along till X gets green-lit?. But I can't. We've suffered enough. Surely, this must be the very bottom of the nostalgia-driven, franchise-begetting, lazy-bet-horribly-gone-wrong, movie-going barrel. We have entered a new low, and I feel like have failed you all.
What's that? There's going to be a film based on the Facebook minigame Mafia Wars?
Christ, I'm off to try that new flavour of Domestos that we've just got in.
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Eugene says
Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots aren’t specifically from the eighties — One of my classmates had the game back around 1974 or so, and according to Wikipedia, the original game dates back to 1964 (!).
Nonetheless, if this really does become a movie, you have to wonder what Hollywood is coming to. I really fail to see how you can possibly stretch the concept of the game out far enough to become a feature — and if you did, it would have to contain so much extra material that it would bear little resemblance to its source material.
In Hollywood, the essence of selling a story is the ability to explain the concept of the proposed movie in the least complex way possible. That’s why you see so many sequels and adaptations in Hollywood. It’s not that they do any better than original material — it’s just that it’s easier to ‘pitch’ a story if the people you’re trying to sell it to are already familiar with the characters and/or universe of your concept. I would care to bet that this is how this idea has gotten as far as it has.
Fortunately, ideas in Hollywood have about a 95% mortality rate.