View-Master Movie Not a Hoax, Sadly Real

Published by Jeff Leins on: July 7th, 2009

When those celebrity death rumors floated around the Internet last week following the real news of Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest, a few media outlets were fooled by the outrageous claims of losing Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford.  Luckily, those actors are still with us and they were just elaborate hoaxes.  Which is why I was skeptical when the oddities started spilling over into the movie world.  First Asteroids, then a Twitter announcement on an upcoming View-Master movie.

“Fringe” co-producer/writer Brad Caleb Kane will be writing a movie based on the stereoscopic Viewmaster toy for Dreamworks.  Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (screenwriters for Star Trek, Transformers) are producing.  The tweet has since been erased, but he mentioned the script would be in the vein of the “old Amblin movies: Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes…”

The trade paper confirmation says DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire the rights to the Fisher Price toy from Mattel (who owns FP).  The studio hopes to make a family-friendly movie out of the device that cycled through three-dimensional pictures.  Considering the purpose of the object, the growing trend, and DreamWorks’ love for all things 3-D, it’s likely the movie adaptation will have the extra dimensions too.  The script will be written from scratch, but the toy itself wasn’t all that exciting.  When you took away the plastic from your eyes, you could still magically see in three dimensions.