Ratner Finds Time to Destroy 'Hong Kong Phooey'

The film adaptation of Hong Kong Phooey is moving forward at Alcon Entertainment with the help of Brett Ratner in a producing capacity. There's no studio attached yet, but Variety announced that Alex Zamm has been called in to direct the combo live-action/animated update that was written by David Goodman. Goodman's a Family Guy producer, so that kind of softens the blow, but I think this one still falls in the "Better Left Untouched" category, and I say this as someone who's fairly liberal in his thinking about remakes. The cartoon was popular in the 1970s with some carryover into the mid-80s, meaning the youngest fans with a sense of the property's legacy are maybe 30, but more than likely a little older. That's not the crowd studios want to attract week in and week out. Another reason to leave it alone is Scatman Crothers was roughly...87% of the cartoon's appeal and he's been dead for almost 25 years. His voice was such a signature for the character, I think doing an impression is going to sound hollow and not doing an impression and going with a completely new voice is a step even further backward. Reason three to leave it alone is that the live-action/animated marriage is a rocky one at best. You could argue that the success of Alvin and the Chipmunks paves the way for something like this, but I don't really see it, at least in terms of the breadth of appeal. If Crothers were still kickin' and if they went completely animated - particularly the old school Hanna-Barbera style - then I'd be all over this if you had the proper writer(s) in place. But this just seems to be missing too many parts.

Comments

[Asana]

While Crothers' voice was signature to the show, most audiences this film would likely be aimed at will have no reference to him. I don't know about others in their mid-late 30's but I best remember Crothers as the voice of Jazz from the TV series and first film for the Transformers more than anything. I recall Hong Kong Phooey in the 70's but not so much that I even associated a link to Crothers while watching Transformers in the 80's.

Sadly, technology really hasn't gotten to where it needs to be to make live action/animated films work as seamlessly and believably as they should. Movies like Garfield and Scooby Doo are perfect examples of where it just didn't work. Perhaps something that uses a real dog whose actions are computer generated as was done in Underdog? If done that way I could see it working out better or they could just do it completely animated as you suggest. In whatever form it eventually takes it won't ever be the HKP that anyone remembers from the TV show, that's just a given. However that doesn't mean that a decent film can't be made of this property.

[Get The Big Picture]

I think a decent film can be made, too, but Phooey kind of has a looser quality about it, one that doesn't work well with the hybrid concept. If it's funny, great, but I think that's the only hope this one has.

[of course not]

Haven't these Hollywood pinheads learned ANYTHING from Speed Racer and Land of the Lost tanking?