Yay! It's Thanksgiving Break and I don't have to go to school for a whole week (though I still might end up going to Open Lab on Sunday...). But I still have a ton of stuff I need to do in the meantime. I have to paint a mini version of the Sofa Kandissi (google it, you'll have fun), carve 3 versions of my housewares project (meaning I'm dealing with my old nemesis, yellow foam) and do a boatload of photoshop renderings. Well, at least I don't have to leave the house...

Anyway, last Monday I was talking with a friend of mine in the ID department and apparently there are talks of making a Legend of Zelda movie. And to that I have to say: NO. Don't get me wrong, I love Legend of Zelda. It's easily the most consistently good series of games, not to mention constantly innovative and a gaming icon. Which is exactly why it should NOT be made into a movie. LoZ has been screwed over in the past, for anyone who thought that the CD games were Godawful there was a cartoon in the early nineties (a la Mario Brothers) that was waaay worse.

Follow up:

See here's the thing, video game movies suck. Always. They only vary in their level of suckiness. Some only suck some, like Silent Hill. They're watchable, but they aren't great. And then you have mother-of-them-all bad like Super Mario Brothers. But you don't really have anything that you see it and think 'OMG that was so worth the money and time, I have to see it again'. Well, there a movie like that, FFVII: Advent Children, but that's the exception that proves the rule, because let's remember these people also made the Spirits Within.

I think the biggest problem video game movies have is that they are usually based off of games with minimal plot. Most video games really don't have stories, they have concepts, and you don't really notice how bad or poor they are because if the gameplay is good and the bosses are satisfying it doesn't bug you. They are a series of cutscenes interrupted by heavy button mashing. So if there are Ninja Monkeys with AK47s in the game, you hardly notice, but if that happened in the movie you're brain will start hurting very badly. The other thing is that most are based off of fighter games, and those games don't have any plot whatsoever, and barely a premise. And while basing a movie off of something like that allows for a lot of freedom in storytelling, they usually don't got that route, usually the movie ends up like this:

Some God/Demon/Evil CEO has a fighting tournament that brings the best fighters from all over the world and several dimensions. The hero comes to the tournament to seek revenge against his/her (okay his) family member/girlfriend/trashed Buick Skylark. There is usually a really hot fighter chick, she sleeps with the hero and ends up dying and/or being an enemy. The ending includes some of the most beautifully choreographed fight scenes known to man, as well as some of the cheeseist SFX that someone could think up after a night of heavy narcotics use. Good guy wins, bad guy dies, world slightly damaged. Fin.

Legend of Zelda has several canons to it, heck Zelda's not even in half the titles, and there is a lot of potential for a great plot. Just remaking Ocarina of Time into a movie would work (started reading the Manga based of OoT. Brilliant.) But Hollywood generally doesn't do that. Instead, Link will be played by Zac Effron, Ganondorf will have a Russian accent, and there will be Ninja Monkeys with AK47s, because that's what Marketing said would sell...