Announcing a project in which someone had better goddamn die of dysentery—allowing the survivors to leave a tombstone that your seventh grade history teacher will then get really mad about, because you named them “ASSCLOWN,” and they don’t know how to clear it off the disk—Apple has apparently put a film adaptation of computer gaming edutainment classic Oregon Trail into the works.
Yes, the game that taught you that there will always be more buffalo to shoot, even if you leave thousands of pounds of their meat out to rot in the prairie sun, is getting the movie treatment. We’ve actually written about this project before, more than two years ago, when it was first floated by directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck and their EGOT-winning songwriting partners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. (A.k.a., the team behind that Shawn Mendes Lyle, Lyle Crocodile movie that we all totally remembered existed, right?) Now, though, the project has landed at Amazon, where it’s being described as a comedy film positioning itself very much in the Barbie mold. (Complete with some original musical numbers from Pasek and Paul, who recently won an Emmy for getting the fucking “Pickwick Triplets” stuck in our heads for like six months after Only Murders In The Building‘s third season.)
Of course, we could argue that Oregon Trail already got a pretty good comedy adaptation in 2021, when TBS’s late, lamented Miracle Workers took satirical aim at westward expansion with its third season. Still, part of the joy of Oregon Trail—which has been updated about a million times since its original release in 1971, but which will always be synonymous with blocky Apple II graphics in our minds—is how much unintentional silliness there is in its depiction of frontier life. (Some day we’ll actually find out what a wagon tongue is, and why they break so often.) The most joyful thing about the original game, though, was how blithe it was about the fact that anyone embarking on the journey from Missouri to the West Coast had a pretty good chance of dropping dead from something, especially if you forded a river you shouldn’t have just so you could watch the wagon bloop down under the water. Hopefully the film will embrace the violent chaos—otherwise, how is ASSCLOWN going to get their fair due?
A script for Oregon Trail is reportedly in the works from The Lucas Brothers and Max Reisman.
[via THR]