A Wish List

I am just as excited as the next person (okay, maybe a bit more excited than the next person) about the return of Star Wars.  In fact, the only thing that has stopped me from scouring the net daily for the latest rumors (writer finally announced: Michael Arndt; does anyone else find it strange that it took IMDb over a week to create a page for this movie?) is the incredibly imminent move.  And I love Star Wars.  But Disney acquired a heck of a lot more than Star Wars when it bought Lucasfilm and it's subsidiaries.  The first few days there was some passing mention of the money they'd save with the special-effects that come with the rest of the deal, and the apparent apathy towards Indiana Jones.  What I want to focus on today is Lucas Arts, or more specifically, Monkey Island.

The Secret of Monkey Island is the story of a wanna-be pirate with the unfortunate name of Guybrush Threepwood.  He falls in love with the beautiful governor and eventually rescues (?) her from the clutches of the cursed pirate LeChuck.  The series goes on as Guybrush and Elaine Marley travel around the Caribbean, fighting LeChuck, breaking curses and finding treasure.  I'm not much of a gamer at all, even less so a computer gamer, but I have played every Monkey Island game for at least a couple hours, and have seen even more as my younger brothers would spend hours beating each one.  These games are all fun, witty, entertaining and have something that actually resembles a plot underneath all the "find this, this and this" "solve this puzzle" quests.  And last night, my brother said the one line that basically ruined me: "I want Disney to make a Monkey Island movie."

Oh, yeah.  I think Monkey Island could potentially be the best video game-movie adaptation ever.  Shoot, some of the later games are almost at that level already.  It's not all that out there for a movie plot; in fact, it's not unlike Disney's successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but perhaps the family-comedy version.  And that'll probably by why it never happens, not by Disney at least.  Any Monkey Island movie would be very spoof-like and Disney's not going to make fun of a genre they've managed to bring back (the swashbuckling pirate adventure) with a comedy like Monkey Island.  Their loss.

I've also been a bit consumed with my final paper for my Film & Lit class.  I've managed to turn it into a discussion about superheroes by decided I want to prove Zorro is an early American superhero.  So, I've been thinking a lot about superheroes lately.  And watching them.  Well, watching old TV shows.  I've already bought two seasons of Smallville and have been working my way through a few other shows at various online sources for free.  I'm thinking this is going to be one of those things I don't tell people about, at least not people I know in the real world.  Like the fact that I've seen every episode of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.  My guilty little secret.