This Movie Needs a TOON Up?

Okay, this is a new one. Actually, it’s an old one. With a twist.

Isn’t that how it usually seems to go?

However, this time, it really is a “new” one.

It’s fascinatingly wrong... and therefore maybe a good idea.

Hollywood is producing yet another remake. But again, there’s a twist. Not in semantics this time, as in “reboot” or “reimagining” or “revisionist” or “retooled” or anything of the sort. The “rub” is who’s starring in it.

The movie being retackled is The Stooge. It starred Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Who on earth could re-do those two, right? Oh, probably in Hollywood-ese that likely works out to George Clooney and Jim Carrey, yes? No. Ready for the twist? Martin will be portrayed by Mickey Mouse and Lewis by Roger Rabbit in an animation & live-action hybrid film. Whoa.

With any luck it will be an entertainment classic. But regardless of how good a movie it turns out to be, it has earned a place as a truly original take on a hackneyed “genre.”

And despite all the rest of it I, for one, would love to see Roger frustrate Mickey. Could be fun.

Oh yes - there’s one other “twist” as it were. Also ‘starring’ are Walt Disney and the great Orson Welles. Ah, what CGI and the 21st Century can’t do, eh? I do find this idea unnerving. I just hope they creatively use their previous utterances to shape ‘new’ dialogue for them. In other words (ha!) there’d been talk MANY moons ago about being able to feed all of a person’s voice recordings into a computer and then have it interpolate and extract and configure it into an entirely new set of words, the result of which is [supposedly] how said person would have sounded when speaking it. For instance, in theory it’s possible to have John Lennon sing a NEW song. In my opinion, this is creepy and wrong. So, yeah, I hope they never perfected this practice...

But anyway, here's to it coming out well and we pray it doesn’t make stooges of them, the cartoons, Hollywood and us.