In an age of Battleship movies and Carmen Sandiego features, it's no surprise that another kid-friendly nostalgia icon, the bespectacled title traveler of Where's Waldo, is purportedly getting his own movie. MGM bought the rights to Waldo, and that could mean a feature adaptation of the smiley boulevardier's exploits is in our near future. I don't know how a man in a striped shirt who gets lost in crowds can sustain an audience's attention for a full movie, but here are five possible storylines I'd tolerate.
1. Waldo must track down his brother Odlaw, a tacky schemer whose black-and-yellow ensemble is aesthetically inferior to Waldo's classic red-and-whites. Odlaw has run off to Europe with Waldo's life savings, and Waldo must find him in unbelievably crowded cityscapes before he spends it all on black-and-yellow real estate.
2. Waldo ditches his soulmate Wilma for a flashy adventurer named Carmen Sandiego. They have a lot in common: They both love globetrotting, being hard to find, and well-fitted red garments. The only problem? She's a notorious con artist and thief, and he's just a sexless cipher in straight-cut blue jeans. Can Waldo, who just wants to blend in at the Louvre, sustain a relationship with a woman who wants to steal the whole Louvre?
3. It's a sad Christmas for Waldo as his family loses sight of him inside the local candy cane factory. Is that him behind some red and white storage bins? Are those his glasses peeking out from under an American flag? In the end, the holiday is saved as Waldo and his family fly to North Pole, discover the real meaning of Christmas, and get lost in a Santa hat factory.
4. Waldo, an underpaid lackey at an accounting firm (of endlessly repetitive cubicles and characters), is greeted in a dreamy haze by Wizard Whitebeard, who promises to show Waldo the world and save him from his humdrum existence. He takes the young troubadour to the Great Wall of China, crowded beaches, and the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. So many people to meet! So much adventure! But Waldo realizes that he's just too feeble for glamorous travel, so he clutches his walking stick and asks to be taken home to his sweatered dog Woof.
5. No plot. Just moviegoers staring at a grim red and white-striped screen, searching for an original idea somewhere in each frame.
MGM finds rights to 'Where's Waldo' [Variety]