Despite being easily the most "child accessible" board game there is, Candy Land was not a game that I played all that much. I remember playing it from time to time, but those memories are extremely vague and it certainly wasn't a board game that got played anywhere near as much as the others from my closet as I got older. But it's considered a child accessible game because there's simply not much strategy or difficulty to it whatsoever; players are never required to make any choices and instead just follow directions, and the winner is ultimately predetermined by the shuffle of the cards. But what if I were to tell you that Candy Land has undergone massive changes, thusly creating lore and almost having a feature film based off of it?
Remember a few years ago when we started to hear news about feature films being based off board games? There was talk of a Monopoly movie, and Battleship actually came to fruition to everyones disappointment. Well, the same can be said for Candy Land. In fact, in 2005, an animated feature was actually produced, titled "Candy Land: The Great Lollipop Adventure", the same year the game was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Talk about your synergy. But then in 2009, Universal announced their intentions to produce an actual feature film based on the game. And while it started out with some rather kid friendly talent involved, including the director of "Enchanted" and the writer of "Madagascar 2", by January 2012, Adam Sandler and his production team, Happy Madison, along with Columbia Pictures, were wrapping up their talks to produce the film, having Sandler not only star in it, but also co-write it with Robert Smigel.
And who is Robert Smigel?
Robert Smigel is a comedian, one half of SNL'S ambiguously gay duo and creator of TV's Funhouse, but likely most famous for his Triumph The Insult Comic Dog routines. Because if there's ever a more kid friendly duo to make a Candy Land movie for a young impressionable audience, I can't think of anyone more suited than the men behind Little Nicky and Triumph. Thankfully, this never happened. And while the argument could be made that the two have a long working career together, detailed by Smigel's wikipedia filmography, including the fact that Smigel wrote the Hotel Transylvania films, having Sandler star as Dracula, I still think this is a bizarre idea. And I say that as a huge Robert Smigel fan.
So where did Candy Land come from? Candy Land's origins are darker than you'd think. Having originated from a woman in 1948 named Eleanor Abbot while she recovered from Polio in San Diego, California, the game was made for and tested by the children in the same ward as her in the hospital. And despite Milton Bradley originally only buying the game as a temporary fill in for their main product, school supplies (no, I didn't know that's what they did either, you learn something new every day), it quickly became their best seller, thus launching into the same league as their main competitor, The Parker Brothers. In 1984, Hasbro, as they've done time and time again, purchased Milton Bradley, and with it all their subsidiary creations, including Candy Land. Because of this, they completely revamped the game, adding in new art, new characters and a whole ass storyline.
And, fun fact, it was one of the first things to be involved in a dispute over an internet domain, as in 1996, an adult web content provider registered candy land (dotcom) which Hasbro, being a family friendly company, objected to.
Abbot would die in 88, only 4 years after they butchered her original creation, but not much otherwise is known about the woman, sadly. From what I could dig up, she was a retired schoolteacher, and she gave much of her royalties from the game to childrens charities. Ultimately, she sounds like a rather upstanding lady. This is apparently also why the game is as simplistic as it is, because the children she recovered with were not used to having to cope with such boredom, and thus Candy Land was only meant to "pass the time". Being a schoolteacher, it only makes sense that she herself would know what a child would want to play. There's actually a phenomenal article written all about the games creation and how the board goes against the act of being stuck in an iron lung (why the road is all twisty and turny as it is) written by Alexander Joy over at The Atlantic, which I'll link to here. It goes into a lot more depth than I care to, since I'm just writing a stupid little blog for jokes, but it's definitely worth the read.
So that's Candy Land.
In a nutshell, it makes sense why it's a classic. I mean first of all it's from 1948, so that's a start, but more than that it's simple and it's accessible to anyone, making it a game the whole family can enjoy. It's bright and cute and a really neat concept, and in the end, despite its simplicity, it's not a wholly unenjoyable game to play. Sure it lacks any complexity or any real challenge, but sometimes that's nice. Sometimes you just wanna relax and have a good time.
Sometimes...you just wanna take a trip to the Gumdrop Mountains.
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