Infinite Worlds: Movies for your Alternate Earths!

[Rowan]

Found a great link, with movie posters shopped to include the original performers considered for the roles. Some of them are just wild. :)

Link is here: http://wildammo.com/2010/06/03/if-mo...ginal-casting/

Includes some interesting ones like:

Will Smith starring in the 'Matrix' as Neo.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in 'Brokeback Mountain.'

and Jim Carrey in 'Meet the Parents'.

[Apache]

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck weren't in Brokeback Mountain?

*checks the local time/space continuum*

Hmm.

[Phantasm]

Nicholas Cage as John Constantine. I must say, he would have been much better than Keanu Reeves (but then again, I still keep an ear out for Reeves to say "Dude!" in any movie he's done ... He'll never escape Bill & Ted).

[Rocket Man]

And of course, who can forget the now-legendary choices of Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in "Back to the Future?"

[robkelk]

We were kicking this idea around for Gernsback-2 a few weeks ago... Our list:

• Blazing Saddles, starring Richard Pryor and John Wayne
• His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers
• Driving Miss Daisy, starring Lucille Ball
• Titanic, starring Macaulay Culkin and Kate Winslet
• Charlie's Angels, starring Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Angelina Jolie
• Grease, with porn star Harry Reems as Couch Calhoun
• The Crow, starring Christian Slater

And one with the same cast but a different director: Francis Ford Coppola's The Empire Strikes Back

(Who do I have to bribe to get posters of these mocked up?)

[RobKamm]

And who can forget that awesome remake of the Sound of Music by George Romero with Robert Englund as Georg von Trapp?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by robkelk

We were kicking this idea around for Gernsback-2 a few weeks ago... Our list:[LIST]
[*]Driving Miss Daisy, starring Lucille Ball
[*]Charlie's Angels, starring Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Angelina Jolie

Lucille Ball would have been totally wrong for the Morgan Freeman part.

....and well, swapping out one Angel and still ending up with Drew Barrymore shows that there's a curse on the franchise.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Nicholas Cage as John Constantine. I must say, he would have been much better than Keanu Reeves (but then again, I still keep an ear out for Reeves to say "Dude!" in any movie he's done ... He'll never escape Bill & Ted).

Why not James Marsters? He is a beautiful blonde who can come across as both highly intellegent and a total bastard, like Constantine.

[maximara]

To Live Forever (1942) Much has been said of Ichirō Chinen but nearly all of it goes back to this movie rather than the actual man.

Told in the style of They Died With Their Boots On it portrays a man repeatedly trying to overcome the growing sentiment against Japanese-Americans due to the actions of his father's homeland in China culminating with his death manning an anti-aircraft gun aboard the USS Arizona as a Japanese bomb sends the ship to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

It is hard today to not laugh at the overdramatization in many scenes especially the one where Ichirō tells a seaman near him to leave only for the seaman to reveal a stain on his shirt saying that he is already a dead man and that the gun needs two people to effectively operate. Ichirō concedes yelling his supposed last words: "Those who die for Kings and Emperors are forgotten while those those die for Liberty live forever!"

And yet in 1942 this overdramatization worked and effectively killed the plans to send Japanese-Americans to interment camps. It has been argued without Ichirō or the movie about him Hitler's Battle of the Bulge would have been far more successful then it was and dragged the War in Europe on into mid-April rather then ending in February and allowing the USSR to gain even more of Germany then they did.

[maximara]

Gas is the most horrid thing developed for war destroying people and civilizations and yet in my case it saved my soul. - Adolf Hitler 1933

Darwin Kampf (1933) is the movie version of Hitler's 1919 book of the same name. Inspired by Hitler's gas induced fever dream near the end of the Great War the movie presents the tale of Corporal Az Gruber as he and his fellow soldiers storm the capital city of the Leader.

Gruber's Squad is a collection of racial stereotypes and yet these normally negative traits are presented as assets. Jude's moneylending skills provide the squad with the needed capital to buy from the people oppressed by the Leader rather than stealing from them. Zud's savagery (due to being the descendent of Zulu warriors) is key to discovering the one weak point that all the totally identical (and previously believed invincible) Supreme Soldiers of the Leader have and so on.

The horrors committed in the name of national, racial and culture purity Gruber and his men see are nothing to the final horror of who or rather what the Leader is really is.

Hitler's insistence in playing both the roles of Az Gruber and the Leader was viewed as a mistake but in the exchange between the two characters it can be seen as the right decision as it captures the surreal quality the novel originally had.


Some people take the exchange between Az Gruber and the Leader as evidence for Hitler's acceptance of racial equality but nothing could be further from the truth as both argue for the separation of the races and their inequality but for vastly different reasons.

Az Gruber argues racial mixing could destroy the unique evolved assets of each race while the Leader argues such mixing would degrade the super human quality of his pure race of Supreme Soldiers. It is in the treatment of other races that the true difference between Az Gruber and the Leader becomes clear--the later sees them them as fit only as slaves or extermination while the former sees them as an asset to be careful nurtured and utilitied for the betterment of all.