Sunday, January 16, 2011

Never Again

I was discussing with my sister, not for the first time, about what Disney properties remained for the Kingdom Hearts series to explore. In the recent wake of the release of yet another "fake" Kingdom Hearts game--it's so obvious which are the fake ones, and which are the real, that they might as well be upfront about it and explicitly label them as such--there was much groaning about how tiresome it was to have to revisit Aladdin world and Hercules world yet again. No doubt, they are saving any new worlds for the next real Kingdom Hearts game.

But, even supposing that, how much is there really left in the Disney vault for an action-oriented, heroes-versus-villains story such as Kingdom Hearts to mine? The idea seems necessarily finite, perhaps not even sufficient for more than one more major console release. And even supposing that next installment is composed mostly of new worlds, which is what we want, we'd kind of be scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.

For fantasy action game-appropriate worlds, I basically came up with The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, and The Princess and the Frog. Only those first two might make for exciting headliners (how many people even saw Treasure Planet?), and I don't personally imagine that I would enjoy a Jungle Book world very much. There are plenty more borderline cases, such as Pocahontas or Hunchback, that they maybe could make work, but neither are these very exciting. No, in all likelihood, we should expect to see Aladdin world and Hercules world many more times. And maybe they can do Tron world and Pirates of the Caribbean world again, and we will not yet find those stale.

Well, there is one more movie that could work. I just recently slept through most of The Black Cauldron, but what I saw of it seemed usable. But what I mainly recall is that there was this really annoying talking dog thing named Gurgi, who "spoke" in some Donald Duck-esque barely intelligible voice. And I considered how awesome it would be if Gurgi and Donald could actually meet and share a scene (or several). Really, is it not for possibilities like that that Kingdom Hearts as an idea exists?

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