Dreamworks Bidding On View-Master Movie Rights

Last week, the interwebs were all a-twitter over the announcement that Asteroids was going to be made into a movie. A few weeks earlier, it was Candyland. This week, the children's toy du jour to adapt is the Fisher-Price View-Master!

DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire movie rights to the toy from Mattel (which owns Fisher-Price) and has asked writer-producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to do some "Transformers"-style magic on it.

Brad Caleb Kane, who worked as a writer-producer on the duo's Fox series "Fringe," is on board to write the screenplay. Kurtzman and Orci would produce.

Story specifics are being kept under wraps, though Kane, who during the holiday weekend sent out a message on Twitter announcing his involvement, said, "It'll be like the old '80s Amblin movies: 'Goonies,' 'Young Sherlock' ... in that vein." (That post has since been taken down.)

I'm going to buck the trend here and not lament that Hollywood's idea bank has gone bankrupt. Nope, I personally think that taking something as innocuous as the View-Master and managing to wrap an entire movie around it is actually pretty damn imaginative, and if Dreamworks manages to grab the feel of Goonies and bring it to a modern day flcik, I'm all for it.