Thoughts to Ponder on a Pop Culture Fourth -- Jetsons? Yes. Asteroids, View-Master? No

Happy Fourth of July. I won't ask why you're here instead of outside playing lawn darts and eating Li'l Smokies wrapped in bacon (Mmmmm ...) and getting your beer on as it's only 1 pm in the east and you should at least wait a couple hours until you start throwing back the alcohol and nitrates.

(Me? It's just after 10 here, I'm still waking up.)

So, here's something to throw out into the conversational ether once everyone's had enough to drink. Recent announcements about movies in the pipeline ... it looks as if a live-action version of The Jetsons will finally get off the ground, so many years after I had cast Molly Ringwald as Judy in my own mind.

(Interesting, Molly's age appropriate for Jane now and sadly I'm old enough to be playing  Henry their friendly building super.)

Good fit with the intended producer/director, Robert Rodriguez, who worked his CGI magic down in San Antonio at Troublemaker Studios on all those Spy Kids movies and stuff like Sin City and his "Grindhouse" film Planet Terror.

However, gang, there are a couple of projects announced in the last two days connected to stuff from my (and maybe your) childhood that ... well, just see for yourself.

Entertainment Weekly Popwatch (Marc Bernardin):

Apparently, there was some kind of insane Hollywood bidding war to get the rights to make a movie based on the classic Asteroids videogame. You remember, the one barely rendered in straight lines that had the player trying to survive an onslaught by stellar debris?

Yes, Hollywood bidding war. For the game with the little triangle in the center of the screen that you move either clockwise or counter-clockwise so that it can shoot laser beams at the rocks and break them up. Here's my pass at the concept:

Deep space, and the international crew of the S.S. Atari is almost out of fuel, surviving only on their wits and their positional thrusters as they circle, circle, always circle in a fight for salvation against the an unexpected asteroid shower in mid-space.

Meanwhile, back home the global corporate forces that enslave the population experiment secretly with excelerated formation of anti-matter and set off an unexpected chain reaction of sub-atomic changes that threatens to burrow a hole in the space-time continuum so large that time will collapse inside itself.

The shower of the Rock of Ages will trigger either a new beginning ... or the end of life as we know it.

Asteroids, starring Hilary Swank, Michael Clarke Duncan, Josh Lucas, with Lena Headey as Earth emperor Daine, Jet Li as Professor Chang and Ian McKellen as The Leader.

Okay, I get that they can gin up some sort of story around this. Hell, I did in a few minutes on a Saturday morning. Might not be the best idea but I've seen worse shooting scripts than this.

Today, however, I saw this and I could help but think that someone who has the power to greenlight a motion picture had gone completely off the rails (Screencrave.com):

Stop the madness people! If you thought film adaptations based on inanimate objects were a fluke, there’s another one coming your way. According to ComingSoon, Brad Caleb Kane who currently writes/produces the Fox series Fringe is working on a screenplay centering on the View Master. It’s the toy we’ve all played with at some point in our childhoods that allows you to view slides by pushing down a lever.

Kane says that once he’s completed the script for the Wolfgang Petersen film Uprising, he will be completely focused on the View Master project. He’s also being backed by two people who a know a little something about toy adaptations, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci who’ve previously worked on Transformers Revenge of the Fallen.View Master is being developed over at DreamWorks, and is said to be an homage to some old school Spielberg films. According to Kane, “it’ll be like the old 80’s Amblin movies: Goonies, Young Sherlock… In that vein.”

This is a goof. Right? Well, you'd like to think so, but ... (SlashFilm):

I would like to believe that the studio execs are much smarter than these type of films make them out to be. In fact, I know that, for the most part, they are much smarter than that. But every night a new new story hits my screen. Another news story that seems dumber than the one from the previous week, previous month. Stretch Armstrong, Candyland, Monopoly, Battleship, Asteroids, and now a movie based on the Viewmaster?

I can attest to the fact that it's not a goof. I personally saw the last original idea get on a train at Union Station in Los Angeles and head out of town.

It looked lonely and disturbed that it's been overlooked so often. Sitting there with its one little carry-on bag with the wheels and the handle rifling through the pages of what's left of the LA Times wondering what's become of this world.

Hey, there's another movie right there. The last original idea leaves Hollywood and no one notices.