There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
Also, as far as I can tell, Clue is the only board game to have a movie made out of it, as well as a video game. It’s hard to imagine Monopoly: The Movie or Trivial Pursit: A Brett Ratner Film as projects to come out of Hollywood… but that might actually happen. In fact it already did happen with the animated direct to video Candyland: The Great Lollipop Adventure. However, Clue lent itself rather well to filmed entertainment as a murder mystery story, and even featured three different endings in the theaters in a shameless marketing plot to try and get you to see it multiple times. It still has one of the lines that I can remember my friends laughing at so hard they cried in it, “I, am, your singing telegram.” BLAM! Either that one, or the scene below.
I watched this again recently, and it actually holds up fairly well. If you forget Martin Mull, there are some excellent performances in this film, including great turns by Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, and the excellent Tim Curry. Plus, as infuriating as it was to have to go to different theaters to see the different endings, as a teenager I thought that was pretty cool. Luckily the DVD generation has it easy, all you have to do is rent the thing.
Clue also appears in video game form as Clue: Murder at Boddy Mansion. It was first published in 1998 by Hasbro Interactive, and when Infogrames (now Atari) acquired that company in 2001, they kept on publishing it. In fact, you can still buy it right now. It features both online and offline play, and it’s a pretty faithful rendition of the board game. I’m sure there will be a console gaming version soon enough, since Hasbro signed a deal with Electronic Arts. You’ll probably be figuring out what Miss Scarlet did it with in the Conservatory on your Xbox 360 in less than a year.
Jumanji might have been the first book about a board game that was turned into a movie, a video and yes, an actual real board game, but Clue was the first one to do it in the other direction. Will we see more movies based on board games that eventually become video games? We’ll see. In the meantime, I need to check and make sure my prints aren’t on the lead pipe.
Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, io9, Cinematical, Film School Rejects and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. Please ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments. Game on.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog