Hollywood: Crushing the Dreams of 80’s Kids One (shitty) Movie at a Time

What is wrong with that picture?  Can you tell me?  If you grew up in the 80’s you probably know.  THAT is supposed to be Voltron.  A possible version of what Voltron might look like in movie form.  If that picture is any indication of what a Voltron movie will look like, I might just bomb the theater.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am getting sick and tired of Hollywood fucking up everything we hold dear.  How do they do this?  Well I’ll tell ya.  The one sentence that haunts my dreams.  The one sentence that if you hear it, it probably means the movie is going to suck – “Well we went back and looked at the source material and then we took it and molded it to fit a BROADER audience”.  There it is folks, another 80’s franchise has just died.

Look, I understand studios want to make money, ok A LOT of money.  I get it, but it is possible to make a lot of money and still satisfy the fan base of any property.  There have been movies that have made money without changing the source material at all and there have also been successful movies where the property was broadened and yet still managed to remain incredibly faithful to the source material.  Doesn’t seem that hard does it and yet time and time again we are forced to swallow this garbage that Hollywood shits out.  Guess what Hollywood?  If the average person doesn’t have an interest in giant robots then their probably not going to see the movie regardless of whatever crappy love story you want to tack onto it.

Let’s look at some of the more recent Hollywood atrocities committed on 80’s properties:

Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen – Ok I’ll be the first to admit I was never a big Transformers guy as a kid.  I didn’t really understand it, but hey were talking about a show that had big robots battling each other with guns and other kinds of cool technology, what’s not to like right?  That would make for a really sweet looking movie right?  Well…yes and no.  The first Transformers film was good.  It had good action, the robots looked cool, and there was even a smoking hot chick named Megan Fox who no one had ever heard of before.  It was a good first movie to get the ball rolling on what should have been a kick ass trilogy.  The biggest problem I and most others had with it was they spent too much time developing the love story between Fox’s Mikaela and Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky thus taking away time from robots fighting and blowing each other up.  It was ok though because we knew there would be a sequel to make up for it.  Well…in the second one we got more robots…who were black stereotypes…and another who was an old wizard type character…and we got more love story which mostly consisted of Megan Fox screaming “SAM!”.  Oh and the story was complete unbearable and inconsistent horseshit.  They could not have done worse if they tried.  They took all the good will from the first film and took a giant robotic dump on it.  Also, did I mention Optimus Prime (the face of the franchise) was only in maybe 20% of the movie?  Kind of an important thing wouldn’t ya say?  Imagine a Superman movie where Superman gets hurt twenty minutes into it and then doesn’t get revived until the last ten and you’ll basically get what they did in this movie.  Thank you Michael Bay.

Anyone else notice that Michael Bay is slowly becoming the Uwe Boll of 80’s franchises?  For those that don’t know who Uwe Boll is, he is a very poor German director who adopted many prominent video game franchises and turned them into some of the worst movies ever watched by human eyes.  I think Bay and Boll are secretly out to psychologically scar every nerd on the planet.  This can be further evidenced by the fact that Bay is set to produce the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action movie(s).  I am currently in therapy thinking about the horrors that await with this development.  Are we going to get a two and a half hour movie where the first two hours is about a love triangle between April, Vernon, and Irma and the last half hour is crammed with some mild turtle action?  Or how about a story where Shedder and Krang are gay inter-dimensional lovers who are raising Rocksteady and Bebop as their mutant love children?  Oh wait, I’m sorry we have to broaden everything.  Mutant Turtles are way to off base.  Let’s have a movie where four teenagers dress up like turtles and take back their school from the evil Principal Shedder using the ninja abilities they learned from their step mom.  I smell a hit!

G.I.. Joe: Rise of the Cobra – Although I did not see this one, from what I hear it’s just another consensus action flick with a very poorly told story and cheesy line after cheesy line.  Here’s the Rotten Tomatoes page if you want to see for yourself (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gi_joe/). Stephen Sommers is starting to become another nerd destroyer.  This would be his second crime against geek culture (the first being Van Helsing back in 2004).  Did you see that?  It was awful.  Frankenstein as a whiny and helpless monster?  The CGI Dr. Jekyll?

I know I sound like an angry nerd, but some of this stuff is so irritating.  Not only because it’s not accurate, but because it’s so fixable.  For those who don’t know I’ll give you the basic premise of Voltron.  Five space explorers escape capture by the evil King Zarkon.  They land on the planet Ares where they meet Princess Alura.  Alura told the explorers about the legend of Voltron and then they went in search of the five robot lions which when joined together form Voltron.  They find the lions, form Voltron, and fight off Zarkon’s invasion of Ares.  Not to hard to follow right?  Every episode was Voltron defending Ares or some other hapless planet. NOT ONCE did he ever come to Earth.  Now these Hollywood douche bags have him standing next to the Statue of Liberty.  Also the robot lions do not disengage from Voltron randomly.  They stay in place like I don’t know…AN ARM.  Again, I’m completely aware of my nerdy nitpicking but I’m begging Hollywood.   Can we please stick to the source material just once?  Why does everything have to be dumbed down to fit a broader audience?  When did Hollywood stop taking chances?  When did we as an audience refuse to think a little?   What about something different from the norm?