More like the battle of huge foreheads and receding hairlines
Quite recently it’s been announced that American McGee is working on a sequel to his SMASH HIT game “Alice” – I’m sorry, “American McGee’s Alice” (because he is important even though nobody knows who the hell he is!). Normally this sort of news wouldn’t really warrant mention because nobody really remembers it all that well anyway, however the news broke while promotions have been going on for Tim Burton’s completely zany new movie “Alice in Wonderland.”
So what’s the fuss?
It’s simple: how the fuck is is Hot Topic going to manage all of these? This is going to incur riots – we’re talking LA in terms of magnitude. Mall goth kids and “emos” everywhere will be confused. Lines will be drawn and teams will be formed.
Naturally, Tim Burton has the advantage. In his corner he has Johnny “I’m always Jack fucking Sparrow” Depp and Danny “I really love xylophones, guys” Elfman and some other people like his wife and shit. On the other hand, American McGee has an army of small chinese children coding his game as well as the fact that his vision of Alice is actually somewhat dark compared to Burton who well… just hams it up for the slit your wrist demographic.
While Tim Burton’s vision hasn’t been interesting since Big Fish, he still has all of Hollywood behind him. Like most mainstream products these days he doesn’t really need to push hard to get noticed with this – American McGee has his work cut out for him. Hopefully McGee comes up with an interesting plot because that is one thing that will work to his advantage. The plot lines of both Burton’s upcoming film and McGee’s first Alice Game are nothing new. The main idea of both reminds me a great deal of “Return To Oz” which had the right idea years ago.
The only thing Burton could really do to impress me is to have Alice flying on the Jabberwock attacking a giant Cheshire Cat played by Gary Busey. You want that cat to scare the shit out of kids? Put Busey’s goddamn face on it. That will sell tickets, guaranteed.
We told you it was horrifying.
Maybe make Tommy Chong the caterpillar and Eddie Izzard the Queen of Hearts (or, if we’re going with the original Disney verison, then Roseanne Barr) and you’ve got yourself a winner. Ditch Danny Elfman too, get John Williams up in this. Burton is well past his prime it looks like.
Oh yeah, I forgot American McGee. I don’t know, make something playable maybe?
In the end, I don’t care who wins because in the end, nobody does. Well, except for Hot Topic who is going to make a killing on all of this “dark fairy tale” bullshit. The only thing that could make any of this worse is if Burton started making dark Will Ferrel movies.
