Mike Myers is turning from Shrek movies and fat suit comedy to remaking Danny Kaye movies. The Hollywood Reporter says he is attached to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
If you don’t know who Danny Kaye is, then you’ve probably never watched movies with your parents. Lucky for me, the first thing my parents did when we rented our first VCR (and now I’ve dated myself), was to rent a few Danny Kaye movies right along with it. Danny Kaye was a song and dance, comedy sensation in the 40s and 50s, back before musicals and vaudevillian bits wore out their welcome on the American public. Even if you somehow missed the rest of his work, almost everyone has seen White Christmas. Danny Kaye was the funny one. That other guy was Bing Crosby, you unlettered Neanderthals.
What I’m getting at, is that Danny Kaye was great. Nobody worked a comedy routine better than he did, and when the guy was paired with Bing, magic happened. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the very funny Kaye played an oddly contemporary character. The film is the story of a daydreaming comic book writer who likes to imagine himself as one of his heroes off on an adventure. When he meets a woman who hands him a mysterious, black book, his dreams come true and he ends up off on an adventure.
A remake of Mitty has been in the works for quite a while now. With Mike on board, pushing it through the hallways of 20th Century Fox will no doubt be a bit easier. At one time or another, Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg were all interested in the project and all would have been completely wrong for it. Mike Myers is no Danny Kaye, but he’s a better fit than any of them.
