All World News Catch: Finally Out of Ideas, Hollywood Has Decided to Make a ‘Creepy Crawlers’ Movie

Wednesday, 30 May 2018

Finally Out of Ideas, Hollywood Has Decided to Make a ‘Creepy Crawlers’ Movie

Remember Creepy Crawlers, a product that included a toy oven that enabled children to create Plastigoop bugs? Well, Hollywood remembered them, too. Now, Paramount will develop a Creepy Crawlers movie.

Let me set the scene for you: We’re somewhere at the Paramount Pictures offices. Random Paramount executives are sitting around a big conference table, lighting cigars with $100 dollar bills while the Hollywood sign loomed large in the background through a big floor-to-ceiling window.

“Bad news,” one of the execs suddenly says, forlorn. “We’re all out of ideas. There are no more movies left to make. We’re going to have to close Paramount. We had a good run, but it’s time to throw in the towel.”

Dejected murmurs fill the room. And then, a lone voice cries out: “Wait! What if we made a Creepy Crawlers movie?”

And now here we are!

Variety reports that Paramount has purchased the film rights Creepy Crawlers, the toy brand owned by JAKKS Pacific. Neal H. Moritz, Marc Gurvitz and Toby Ascher will produce. Stephen Berman, chairman and CEO of JAKKS, will executive produce. Here’s my favorite quote from the Variety story: “Plot details are unknown at this time, but the film will be based on the classic toy molds of all sorts of creepy and slimy bugs.” Yes, I’d imagine so!

Creepy Crawlers were created in the 1960s, but found a second-life in the 1990s. You might remember some of the commercials, featuring the famous theme-song in which someone screams “Creeeeeeepy Crawl-ers!” and thunder sound effects boom.

Toy movies are nothing new for Paramount. They produce Transformers and G.I. Joe, and there are currently plans for an entire Hasbro Cinematic Universe. Still, it’s hard to guess just what the hell a Creepy Crawlers movie would even be about. My guess is it’ll be something like Jumanji, where some kids get their hands on an old Creepy Crawlers oven, only for the oven to conjure up living, breathing monsters. Maybe Jack Black can star in the film as Creepy J. Crawlers, the inventor of Creepy Crawlers. I dunno, I’m just spit-balling here.

This actually won’t be the first narrative adaptation of Creepy Crawlers. There was a Creepy Crawlers TV show that ran from 1994 to 1996, and it had a particularly convoluted premise (per Wikipedia):

The show is about Chris Carter, a self-described “normal kid” who is interested in magic. While working at the Magic Shop of bitter discredited stage illusionist Professor Googengrime, Chris designed and built a device he called “The Magic Maker”, ostensibly for use in some unspecified magic trick. A particular once-every-thousand-years planetary alignment, the Magical Millennium Moment, rained down cosmic energies on the shop one fateful night, which somehow made the Magic Maker capable of creating strange, man-sized bug/magic trick composite mutant creatures. The three creatures formed that night, Hocus Locust, Volt Jolt and T-3 (dubbed “Goop-Mandos” by Googengrime), despite looking bizarre, turned out to be friendly, and joined forces with Chris, but Googengrime kept the Magic Maker when Chris and the Goop-Mandos escaped from the shop. Each episode thereafter concerned Googengrime’s latest attempt to gain power and conquer the world with a Magic Maker-created “Crime Grime” monster, and Chris and The Goop-Mandos’ efforts to stop him, and retrieve the Magic Maker from his evil clutches.

Here’s the Creepy Crawlers TV show intro, which is sung/rapped, because of course it is.