Harold And The Purple Crayon Live Action Movie!

[gaastra]

Zachary levi is going to star no less!

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat- ... -exclusive

[Daniel]

Maybe he'll play the crayon?

[EricJ]

David Guion and Michael Handelman, whose credits include Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb and Dinner for Schmuck, are writing the screenplay for the project, which is in development.

It's impossible to consider how much they could mess up the original book source even more than "Dinner For Schmucks" messed up the entire central premise of "The Dinner Game", but I'm sure they'll find a way.

We've seen more heretical examples of studios calesthenically going all-out to sitcom-misinterpret kids' books just to sell them to parents at Christmas-vacation movie season.

[Ben]

Think you’ll find Dinner For Schmucks was a remake of Le Dîner de Cons, which doesn’t, um, translate too family friendly-like to English...

[EricJ]

In the US, the official dub/sub release I saw in theaters was "The Dinner Game", and--I'll put it in Hide to spare everyone--as for the "remake", O.G.F.L.:

Veber's premise of Le Diner de Cons was the French comedy principle of "the Unkillable Idiot"--Ie., no matter what trouble Harold Lloyd, Mr. Bean or the Road Runner get into, some cosmic karma of the universe will protect the Clueless Wanderer from all harm, and it's the people who made the mistake of going against them that will accidentally suffer the most bad luck and serious injury. (One thing that was lost in translation when the bumbling "The Tall Blond Man with One Shoe" became 80's hipster Tom Hanks.)
In Cons, we're meant to sympathize with the idiot, and his innocent love of toothpick sculptures; the doctor who invites him to the humiliation dinner is a thoroughly arrogant creep, and the comedy is in how Francois ends up killing him, or at least fracturing his leg and getting his taxes audited, with kindness before the doctor learns his much-needed lesson.

But US studios get nervous, you see: In "Schmucks", now Paul Rudd can't be a bad guy anymore, he's too marketable and A-list. We now have to have an inserted plot that he didn't want to participate in the Idiot-game dinner, but he HAD to, to get that promotion from his nasty office bosses!...It wasn't his fault!
And because we now have to sympathize with Rudd as the central identifiable everyman hero of the story, Steve Carell now has to spend the first two acts of the story being nails-on-chalkboard idiotic, so that we can laugh at how poor, trapped Rudd has to put up being trapped in a room with him. It's just like The Office, where we can vent about all those bizarre co-workers we loathe and despise!

...Sorry, had to vent.
But just gives some idea about how, for the Nth time, I'm not expecting an exact faithful big-studio homage to Barnes & Noble-marketable core children's-book titles either.

[Ben]

Oh, okay, gotcha. I did get what you meant, though, natch. .

I didn’t particularly like the original film, which I just didn’t think was very funny because I think I didn’t find the "idiot" to be anything such, and the remake was even worse!

[droosan]

I've never understood the trend of adapting a wafer-thin children's picture book into a 90-minute multimillion-dollar animated or live action feature.

There are six other 'Harold' books by Crockett Johnson, which could be combined to pad-out a feature .. but it still seems (to me) to be a concept better-suited to a short film.

Johnson's 1940s/50s newspaper comic strip Barnaby would seem to be a better candidate for a feature-film treatment; not only are there years' worth of fanciful 'imaginary friend' storylines .. but it's chock-full of fun and colorful characters.

[EricJ]

I've never understood the trend of adapting a wafer-thin children's picture book into a 90-minute multimillion-dollar animated or live action feature.

Oh, that's simple: Remember when the posters for 00's CGI-hybrid kids' movies consisted of nothing BUT a recognizable cartoon character like Alvin or Yogi Bear, a equally recognizable wisecracking in-joke tagline, and "Christmas" or "Easter" at the bottom?
There's a reason for that--Kids don't buy movie tickets or drive to shopping-mall theaters. Parents do.

And parents might not have heard of Detective Pikachu, but they've sure heard of Ferdinand, Clifford, Peter Rabbit, the Lorax or the Polar Express. Which can also be marketed at the same bookstores where those parents are buying the books for their kids, to improve their literacy.

[gaastra]

They did a cartoon also.

[Ben]

In all seriousness, because we don’t have it here, how is this even A Thing?

[Dacey]

Not sure if that even "airs" here? I could be wrong, but I wanna say it's simply a web cartoon?

Here's the Harold short I grew up on. This was on some VHS my father used to rent, which included a collection of such cartoons and live-action shorts...

[Daniel]

The late great Norman Rose!

[Randall]

Harold had a 2001 HBO Family cartoon, running 13 episodes.

[Ben]

Yeah, that’s the same one where that terrible theme comes from posted above.

Doesn’t look like something greatly missed, but that original 1959 short is adorable! Reminded me very much of Chick Jones' more avant-garde films, and things like The Dot And The Line, High Note, the Ralph Phillips shorts and Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Guess it’s no surprise that Gene Deitch got involved with that company in later years. This has really nice animation and clever playing with perspectives/layers — and that’s one talented kid!

In the sequel, his parents either send him to art school as a gifted child, or go nuts when they see all the scribbling on the nursery walls! There goes your college fund on the cleanup bill Harry!

[Daniel]

That has all the makings for a "Family Guy" cutaway.