So, as most of you probably already know, the movie Zathura is either coming out soon, or has already infested a theatre (ha, I used the pretentious spelling of that word again! Mwahahaha!) near you (for those of you who didn’t know, I’m sorry if I ganked your bliss like that). It’s okay if you’ve never heard of Zathura, it’s also known by its other name Space Jumanji (which, as you may recall, stoked the fires of controversy way back in 1995 for containing the word “Jew” meaning “Jew” and “Manji” meaning “Robin Williams has lost his freaking mind this time. No. Really. He has.”). In fact, the working title for Zathura was, in fact, Space Jumanji, except that after the harsh and inexorable vastness of space made all their giraffes explode, the people making it decided to draft Captain Video and throw it all together at the last possible moment and hope that nobody noticed.
Also, let me point out that both Zathura and Jumanji are nothing more than a clever move by powerful board game lobbyists to try to fool kids into thinking that board games are fun, “Why not put down that Playstion and try playing Jumanji, Little Billy; your house can get eaten by lions and/or asteroids, or maybe asterlions, or like, lions that are riding on asteroids?” The fact is though, that except for games like Scrabble, Monopoly, and Beat The Hobo, most board games are just way better when you can get rid of all the cards, dice, creative thinking, etc, and throw them on an Xbox. On top of all that, let me remind you of just one more thing, Mr. Milton Bradley Hasbro Shill Man Person, no kid’s mom is going to buy him a game that causes her house to be destroyed by Robin Willaims, meteors, and giraffes (exploded or otherwise). My mom never even let me play Full-Contact Battleship indoors, so you know she wouldn’t be keen on this whole “let’s alter the very pith of reality itself to teach a bunch of disaffected suburban yuppie spawn the value of imagination” thing.
But I digress from my real point here, which is that if you were in such a situation that you had to think of a game to make a movie out of like this, and your two best ideas are “Dude, There’s a Tiger in Your Dining Room!” and “Holy Crap, Buzz Lightyear Stole Our House!”, then it probably means that you’re retarded and you should have called in a team of those typewriter monkeys that are always figuring out the answers to stuff. Let’s take a look then, at a few other games that might have been better choices for this whole “making a movie out of a game” genre.
Operation: Just think about it, Toby and Vlad are two bored ten year olds, who come across an old copy of this beloved game. Suddenly, whilst trying to remove the spleen, Robin Williams crashes through the wall, riding a giant femur and spouting all sorts of gibberish. But wait, what happens when a horde of white blood cells (voiced by Chris Rock) swarm the house, threatening universal destruction? Can Vlad successfully remove the 3rd Anterior Scapula? Will Toby be devoured by a ravenous Hippocampus? Who names their kid Toby anymore anyway? Watch, and find out! (By the way, why did they call the game Operation, anyway? It’s not like you’re doing heart bypasses or knee replacements or anything; you’re just taking this poor guy apart. Really, it ought to be called Horrible Nazi Medical Science Experiment; that would be a lot more accurate.)
Monopoly: It all seemed like a quiet afternoon at home with Gorpdar the Skullrender and his brother, Fred. Until that is, they decided to try playing a game of Monopoly. All of a sudden, Gorpdar gets a racecar, while Fred inexplicably turns into a shoe and/or an iron. Things really get wild when Robin Williams crashes into the room, riding a giant Uncle Moneybags and spewing obscure references to Mork & Mindy. Will Gorpdar manage to save their house from being bulldozed to build a hotel? How will Fred deal with the “Get eaten by a lion” Community Chest card he draws? Who on Earth decided that anyone other than freaks would want to be a shoe, anyway? Find out at a theatre near you this holiday season!
Enormous Floor-Covering Unneccessarily Involved Total Nerd World War II Submarine Combat Simulator Game: It all seemed like a normal day for complete-and-total-never-had-a-girlfriend-in-their-lives dorks Zebulon and Myron. At least it was until they decided to play a game of that totally game with a totally long name I don’t feel like typing again. After spending a fortnight setting up all the boards, generating crew rosters, assigning special combat bonuses and establishing terrain parameters, Zebulon and Myron are amazed when Robin Williams arrives on the scene in a U-Boat! After computing three pages of meaningless dork numbers from five different rule books and rolling somewhere in the neighborhood of 173 different dice named after polyhedrons, they discover that Robin Williams has in fact scored a critical hit on their dorm room! Will Zebulon roll the 18 he needs to overcome Robin Williams’ elite stealth bonus? Will Myron correctly assign damage to the proper hull sections of his carrier group? Will this Robin Williams thing magically become funny if I repeat it enough times? No! Because it already took like, six hours just to get through the first round of combat and if the movie let them actually finish, it would be longer than the extended musical director’s cut version of Birth of a Nation (Now with hilarious bloopers outtakes!)
Doom: Okay, so this one’s already been done, but it sucked pretty thoroughly, so we’re going to see what we can do to make it better. It was just a regular day for brothers and WWF legends The Rock and That Panda on the WWF Logo. Until, that is, they decided to fire up the ol’ 486 and play a round of Doom. Suddenly Robin Williams crashes through the wall, mercifully being eaten mere seconds later by a passing Cyberdemon. Suddenly it all falls to The Rock to use his awesome lumberjacking abilities with a chainsaw to hew his way through the endless undead legions of Hell, because panda’s aren’t good for anything and the WWF one just goes off to look for some bamboo or a Chinese guy to eat or something. Will The Rock be able to find a BFG 9000 in time to fight the exploding zombie giraffes? Wouldn’t The Exploding Zombie Giraffes be a totally sweet name for a band? Why on Earth did the WWF ever put a dumb panda of their logo in the first place? You’ll never find out, unless they remake a good version of this movie instead of the sucky version that they actually made instead!
