Not to be outdone by Walden Entertainment’s recent bid to update Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, MGM has secured the film rights to another nostalgic pastime that helped kids develop basic skills by searching for a person in a distinctive hat. Where’s Waldo? will the get the big-screen treatment as a live-action movie, according to a studio press release, which also notes that the film will be a “worldwide adventure.” That’s as far as MGM goes in terms of plot, unfortunately, leaving you to imagine for yourself the circumstances under which the globe-trotting Waldo finds himself, again and again, standing adrift in a seething mass of foreign bodies and rituals, his only attempts at true connection a series of cheerily detached postcards to a mysterious group he’s convinced is always “watching” him, whom he then provides with a relentless cataloging of random people and things actually enjoying their own experiences, rather than merely observing. Perhaps this film will finally answer what he’s always hiding from, or reveal that “Where’s Waldo?” is not a question that we’re meant to be asking, but rather a question that he has been asking of himself. Or it will be 90 minutes of a guy in a striped sweater being chased through various crowd scenes.
And now, the obligatory “Werner Herzog Reads Where’s Waldo?”