Thoughts on a live action Penelope Pitstop movie

Many of you already know how much the reruns of the cartoon Perils of Penelope Pitstop warped my young brain. That, of course, and Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl, but that is a topic for another day. Anyway, a few years back it looked like they were thinking of doing a live action version of the cartoon. And why not? They’ve made two friggen movies about Transformers, a cartoon based on a toy. They’re making a movie about Hong Kong Phooey, for Jah’s sake. So why not a movie whose characters are human beings – what could be so difficult about that? The Pitstop movie was going to star Reese Witherspoon as Penelope and Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek: Next Gen) as the Hooded Claw.

I am not a huge Witherspoon fan, but at least she is a real Southerner and bankable. And Spiner, if you think all he can do is robot – well, the guy is a great character actor all around and (IMHO) is a brilliant casting idea for the Hooded Claw. He would have the perfect update of Paul Lynde’s maniacal laugh. It seems though that it all fell apart…

Too bad. Perhaps the suits got nervous about the idea of all those perils, and how it would play to the 20-somethings. I think they needn’t have worried; it’s only the 40-somethings who would take the role stereotypes seriously. C’mon, dammit – we need to get a whole new generation corrupted by melodramatic gender roles and of course some good old fashioned bondage and death traps! Otherwise the central task of civilization – to perpetuate bad ideas – will collapse!

Argggh. It is not to be. But perhaps that liberates me to think of ideal casting for today for a live action Perils of Penelope Pitstop movie:

Penelope

I tried to limit myself to young Southern blondes, a discipline which produced this short list:
Hillary Duff – very annoying to some, but I do think she’s pretty for all the fakery and Disneyfication. She doesn’t seem to be Southern, but she was born in Texas, so she qualifies.
Britney Spears – yeah, I know, would have been sexier pre-breakdown, but Penelope can’t be jailbait, you know? Spears can’t act? Who cares, she’s from Louisiana.

Dakota Fanning – born in Georgia, check. If you think she is the little kid from War of the Worlds, well look again. She’s turning into a real beauty. By the time I got my movie green lit, she’d make a great young heiress.

The Wild Card Pick: Katy Perry. I know, I know. Brunette. Californian. But talk about someone who knows how to be very girlie but also very outspoken and self-reliant! Plus she is really pretty, has curves in all the right places, and knows how to use them. Her instinct for melodrama overrides technical objections in my view…. OK, so I just want her tied up and in peril, sue me.

Hooded Claw

It’s really hard to beat Brent Spiner. I have only one very offbeat alternatives.

Bono – Admit it. Isn’t he annoying now? The glasses, the posturing, the sanctimonious hectoring of people who actually know what they are doing? Now imagine all that bad faith in a dark suit, the same zeal aimed at sweet young Penelope’s fortune. He can keep the stupid shades – that will help.

Bully Brothers

We need some comedy here….

Jon Heder (a/k/a Napoleon Dynamite) and his twin brother Dan. Who does slackjaw better?

If we wanted to depart from the cartoon’s identical twin dimwits, how about a pair of physically similar political opposites. I am thinking of Michael Moore and Glenn Beck for example, both pudgy and vaguely thuggish. Their bone-headed semi-theological wrangling over how many liberals/conservatives dance on the head of a pin could provide Penelope with her window of escape….

Anthill Mob

No casting. Utterly irrelevant to the drama. Or better still, if we used, say, the principal cast from some awful pseudo-ensemble movie like Armageddon, just have the Claw kill them off in the first scene, to show that, in this movie, Penelope really is in danger!

Anybody have suggestions?