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adventures are is irrelevant. Whatever fun set pieces our hero encounters must be shaded to deliver milestones of growth for our kid lead. We always come back to that Golden Fleece truism that can be found in The Odyssey, Gulliver's Travels, and any number of successful road stories through the ages: It's not the incidents, it's what the hero learns about himself from those incidents that makes the story work.
    This genre is also where all heist movies are found. Any quest, mission, or "treasure locked in a castle" that is to be approached by an individual or a group falls into the Golden Fleece category and has the same rules. Very often the mission becomes secondary to other, more personal, discoveries; the twists and turns of the plot are suddenly less important than the meaning derived from the heist, as Ocean's Eleven, The Dirt y Dozen, and The Magnificent Seven prove.
    OUT OF THE BOTTLE
    "I wish I had my own money!" This is what our character Preston Waters states in the movie Colby Carr and I wrote and sold to Disney that became a kid's mini-hit called Blank Check. And
    Preston will, in fact, soon get his own money — a million dollars to be exact — with which he will happily run amok. This type of wish-fulfillment is so common because it's a big part of the human psyche. "I wish I had a_" is probably the single most frequently spoken prayer since Adam. And stories that tell a good "what if' tale that exploits these wish fulfillment fantasies are good, primal, easy-for-a-caveman-to-understand stories — which is why they're so many of them. And why they're so successful.
    The comedy hit Bruce Almighty is an example of this genre. In fact, the flexible Jim Carrey has also been the star of another "Out of the Bottle" classic, The Mask. It doesn't have to be God who bestows the magic. It can be a thing — like The Mask or a magic VW named "Herbie" in Disney's The Love Bug, or a formula that you invent to make the opposite sex fall in love with you as in Love Potion starring Sandra Bullock, or magic silly-putty that can save your teaching career as in Flubber starring Robin Williams.
    The name Out of the Bottle should evoke the image of a genie who is summoned out of the bottle to grant his master's wish, but it doesn't have to be magic to be part of this wish-fulfillment genre. In Blank Check, there is no magic that gets Preston his million bucks — sure it's a long shot, and Colby and I went out of our way to make it seem reality-based. But it doesn't matter. Whether it's by divine intervention or luck or a magic being who enters the scene, it's the same device. For some reason or other, usually because we like the guy or gal and think they deserve it, their wish is granted and their lives begin to change.
    On the flip side of Out of the Bottle, but very much the same category, is the curse aspect of wishing. These are comeuppance tales. Another Jim Carrey movie, Liar, Liar, is a good example (hmmm, are we seeing a pattern here about what stars consistently fit best into what Jungian archetypes?). Same set-up, same device a kid wishes his lying lawyer father would start telling nothing
    but the truth — and lo! It happens. Suddenly Jim Carrey can't tell a lie — on the day of a big case in which lying is, and has been, his best weapon. Jim's going to have to change his ways and grow if he is to survive, and by doing so, he gets what he really wants in the first place: the respect of his wife and son. Another comeuppance tale is Freak y Friday, both the Jodie Foster version and the updated Lindsay Lohan take. But there are many of these, such as All Of Me with Steve Martin and Groundhog Da y starring another famous wise guy, Bill Murray.
    The rules of Out of the Bottle then are this: If it's a wish-fulfillment tale, the hero must be a put-upon Cinderella who is so under the thumb of those around him that we are really rooting for anyone, or anything, to get him a little happiness. And yet, so the rules tell us and