Apple is turning The Oregon Trail into a movie | Hacker News Reader

Apple is turning The Oregon Trail into a movie

arstechnica.com

34 pointsduxup27 comments

> In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too.

Barbie succeeded because it paired talented performers with a talented auteur director who had a lot of control over the production, not because they licensed a property and made it into a comedy with musical numbers in it. Just felt that needed to be said.

It's also worth noting that this was almost handed to Amy Schumer and not Margot Robbie (who actively spearheaded pitching the project alongside Greta Gerwig), which is probably the difference between making a mockery of the project and giving it the love it needs to survive despite being branded bilk.

What do you mean by bilk? Are you saying Gerwig cheated the Mattel somehow? Or Mattel cheated Gerwig?

No, nothing like that—I'm saying that people generally deserve better than recycled IP, and Mattel came very close to people realizing this (yet again) by not choosing Robbie/Gerwig (and if you look at the story of how this movie came to be, Robbie was at least as big a factor as Gerwig was).

And if you want to a satire/comedy/musical of the game as a show, it's been done. See The Trail to Oregon! by Team StarKid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxKCX-UvPrI

But surely Barbie does nowhere near as well if it doesn’t have the Barbie IP. The movie plays largely as a parody of Barbie anyway, so it’s very easy to imagine nearly the exact same movie with a find/replace on a few trademarks in the screenplay and logos on screen. And I think that movie would have had a niche audience that adores it, but wouldn’t have broken out into the phenomenon we saw.

We can be certain for one thing in the movie: Somebody is going to die from dysentery.

I think more precisely it will be a running joke like the early South Parks Kenny where somebody must die from dysentery every episode. The versatility of the joke will stem form the when and who.

Many years ago, someone made a pretty good PoC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHps2SecuDk

1883 was a great Oregon trail story.

Loved this series. I watched it before starting Yellowstone and it stands on its own very well.

That's exactly how I've described it to others. No interest in Yellowstone itself, but loved this show and really enjoy 1923 as well.

It’s just 90 minutes of hunting and then dying of dysentery.

Interesting approach making it a comedy, but I guess a serious movie would be more ... well less related to the game.

There's a good documentary (serious documentary) on making the original game available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpV7dCBB3o8

Bah! So close. I'd love a prestige TV version of Oregon Trail, watching a few families travel from Missouri westward. It would work great with multiple seasons, too—just jump forward in time 5-ish years each season, and see how the journey has changed in the interim.

Boy, this is sacrilegious, like having an actor play Mister Rogers in a biopic. We already have How The West Was Won if you want to see this story in the highest possible resolution.

It already exists. It's called Meek's Cutoff.

A comedy set on the Oregon Trail? Buscemi did it.

https://youtu.be/b-W5wEljcKY

Whoa - that's a real series! I thought it was like a College Humor trailer.

It's a comedy anthology (a rarity these days) that had four seasons.

It would be neat if they recorded multiple different "paths" and made it into a Chose-Your-Own-Adventure style semi-interactive movie, but I imagine that could easily become prohibitively expensive.

I'll be immensely disappointed if they don't include a gag about maximizing / prioritizing bullets over everything else.

I kinda like the idea of a film (but maybe a serious one), that picks a couple branches and films the results.

We get that with time travel films that explore how small changes might change someone's destiny, but usually those are a little more focused on the time travel aspect and such.

It wouldn't have to be every branch to be interesting ... you could have effectively 3 films that maybe branch at the midway point or something.

Netflix has a number of interactive movies (Minecraft, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch), and it was one of the promised things when DVDs came out, but it remains a niche market / novelty.

Clue actually did this in the theaters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clue_(film)

Though it's just an ending.

Someone should do this again, only more subtly. The internet would figure it out in a bit, but it'd be fun watching people argue about what actually happened in the movie before they figured it out. Half surprised someone hasn't had this idea to generate buzz.

That's one of the reasons Clue tanked in the theaters and then went viral before "viral" was a thing. They didn't do a good job specifying that there were three endings, and due to the lack of internet and social media, people got confused and put off by the idea. The VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray does the idea better, because it gives to all three with transitions like "here's what could have happened," etc.

Sounds like someone else has watched “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”

But which version? The one in which everyone died would be kind of a bummer.

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